Google’s John Mueller answers a question about how to deal with spam. The links and subsequent “penalties” coincide with the date of one of Google’s 2021 spam updates.
Mueller provided guidance for this specific situation.
Spam Links and Relevance
The person asking the question has something to do with the spam site linking to a page that doesn’t exist and triggering a 404 response.
Google Search Console may alert publishers to 404 error responses, but this is not an issue in itself.
call them “mistake” implies that there is something to fix. But the word “error” simply means that the browser’s request for a web page caused the server to respond with an error from the browser request because the requested page was not found.
Using the word error in the context of a 404 Page Not Found response means that the error occurred on the browser side.
The W3C, the non-profit HTML standards body, states that a client requesting a web page (that is, a browser or web crawler) made an error because the page could not be found.
W3C Documentation state:
“A 4xx type of status code is for situations where the customer appears to have made a mistake.”
The 404 response code, 404 Not Found, is called in the W3C documentation:
“10.4.5 404 Not Found
“The server did not find anything matching the request URI.”
So the fact that a spam site triggers a 404 page not found response doesn’t mean it’s harmful.
Mueller shows in his answer why the link that leads to the 404 is neutral.
Here is the problem:
“What do we do if we have thousands of spam links consistently placed on malicious domains as backlinks?
They contain spammy keywords and cause 404s on our domain.
We found a strong correlation between these spammy links and the penalties we get after the 2021 spam update.
We reject all spam links and report domains listed as sources of spam.
What else can we do? “
John Mueller answered in three parts, the first addressing the importance of 404 responses and the second addressing denials.
Finally, he suggests what the person asking the question should do.
Links to missing pages are removed
The first part of the answer points out how Google handles links to pages that don’t exist.
Mueller responded:
“As a website owner, I think it’s always very frustrating.
When you see it, you think, other people are ruining my chances in search results.
But I think two things are important in this particular case.
On the one hand, if those links point to…pages on your site that return 404s, so they’re actually linking to pages that don’t exist, then we don’t consider those links because there’s nothing associated with them on your site.
Essentially, people are linking to a lost location, and then we’re like, ok, what can we do with this link, we can’t connect it to anything, so we’re going to drop it.
So this is the first part, like a lot of it may have been discarded. “
This aspect of spammy links, they point to pages that don’t exist, which means Google doesn’t count those links at all. These links have zero variance and can’t possibly be the reason for a spam-related ranking drop.
Deny further removal of the link from the system
Mueller continued:
“The second part is that you mentioned that you disavowed those spam backlinks, especially if you mentioned that these were links from a small number of domains, then you can do that using the domain entry in the disavow backlinks tool .
This basically takes them out of our system as well.
So we’ll still list them in the search console, and you’ll probably still find them there, a little confused about that, but basically they don’t do anything at all.
If they are rejected, then we tell our system that these should not be considered, either positively or negatively. “
Google’s John Mueller discusses spam links
What really caused the rankings to drop
This is the part that many publishers and SEOs struggle to see clearly. It’s clear that the spammy links are completely related to the date of a given Google update. But this is a false correlation.
But if you think your site is perfect and you see those spammy links, then the spammy links are to blame. But as Mueller showed, in this particular case, that was not the case.
The reason for the drop in rankings is something else.
Mueller explained:
“So from a practical standpoint, those links probably won’t have any negative impact on your site, either from the 404 side or from the rejection side.
If you see significant changes related to your site in your search, I won’t focus on those links, but will look further, which may be within your own site.
Kind of a better understanding of what the actual value you’re offering out there, about the awesome value you’re offering your users, what can you do to really stand above all the other sites, how can you get the search engines as much as possible is that clear?
This is the direction I’m going there.
So, don’t waste too much time on those spammy backlinks. You can deny the entire domain they came from and move on.
There you absolutely don’t need to do anything.
Especially if they’ve…linked to 404 pages, they’ve kind of been ignored. “
takeout
There are multiple points in Mueller’s answer.
- Links to 404 pages are removed by Google with no effect, no harm or benefit.
- If rejecting spam links after a few months doesn’t help, then maybe the original problem wasn’t the link, but something else.
- Keep an open mind, problem sites are not perfect and there are problems that must be diagnosed.
Citation
Read Google’s 404 response interpreter
How to deal with spam links
Watch Google’s John Mueller at 20:54:
