With the changes Google made to how Blogspot links are handled, it was a reasonable concern that they were able to do the same with WordPress.com websites. The original intent of this test was to check actual WordPress.com subdomain websites, however, it was set up the site on the domain and hosted on the same IP range. This will tell us two things about how Google is “filtering” links, by IP range or by domain the link is coming from.
In this test, we check if a nofollow exact match anchor link from a free WordPress.com site can help or hurt rank.
Transcription below:
This is the exact match in the body of the content, same setup body. Nofollow on the link. Start pointing the tests.
There's the test website is at number one and test pages at number three. And then the linking, the actual link dropped one position, I think is one, right? Yeah, one position. Didn't hurt it, it didn't kill it, it just didn't help it. And I would call this one position dropped, like within the boundary of just moving. And then when I checked it the other day, I was at number one. And then I checked to here where the filter is at number one. So the exact match in the body worked.
In this case, just completely opposite of what the the other one was. The only difference is, there's time, right? So the other one sat and it never went up and never promoted and never did it. And this one sat the same period of time. And then finally, the page, they got the backlink from the wordpress.com hit number one.
Which kind of supports that theory brand new page. In this case, it's a brand new subdomain on an old domain, brand new website, brand new page, exact match anchor, it didn't meet the criteria. So we're going to pass the G's. The other one is brand new domain, brand new page, brand new link brand new website, that does not pass the master of common goodness.
So, we're going to demote it, which is actually pretty telling if you think about it, whereas blogspot they can pretty much do that willy nilly with all of their sites blindly. In the case of wordpress.com, they couldn't just say all sites on wordpress.com all links are bad like they did with blogspot they just can they can accomplish that.