Google Is Fixing Its Own Outbound Links

Google has been suggesting a lot regarding links in its link scheme page or through Twitter or other resources. Interestingly, Google has started fixing its own outbound links now.

We have seen that Wikipedia has got lots of links from various Google’s Webmasters resource pages. Wherever Google wanted to add one example URL, they used to add Wikipedia page URLs as links. But recently we found that Google has started removing such wikipedia links from its resource pages, which is replaced by example.com URLs. You can see it from these screenshots.

Why Google Is Removing Such Wikipedia Links

• Page rank still matters (Link as a ranking factor) and here Wikipedia is getting a Followed link from this Google page (A high quality page).So, with a dofollow link from Google, with absolute authority, ranking of this Wikipedia page is definitely getting a good boost and might be intervening Google’s core algorithm update.
• In terms of context (relevancy), the link looks very unnatural & Google algorithm may be detecting it as spam link (low quality link). Google is suggesting everyone not to follow such methods for links whereas it’s doing the same thing in its own pages. So it’s time for them to follow their own quality guidelines.
• One more issue is, your external links should give better user experience meaning when users will follow the links with clicks, they should get relevant additional information from the destination source (here wikipedia page). But which is not true at all here.
• To better understand the relevancy, here Google uses that link for users so that they can check how the tag can be used while linking to a URL. The URL itself doesn’t add any value to the context of the post.
• Or was there a link removal request from Wikipedia or they disavowed all such links. Sounds funny, but it could be a reason.

Will It Impact Wikipedia’s Search Ranking?

• Very little I think as Google has been taking several signals related to links & Google algorithm might be devaluing such links. So, most probably, it may not be impacting any way to Wikipedia’s search ranking.
• Indirectly, the trust score of Wikipedia might be impacted and which may impact its ranking.

What About Google’s Own Resources Search Ranking?

Yes, it may give a positive signal to Google algorithm for removing non-relevant links which may impact its ranking in its own search engine results pages.

What’s Next About Unlinked Mentions?

Even if Google has removed many such wikipedia links in recent times from its resource pages but still there are many wikipedia links exist as text in lots of such resource pages. And still we believe that unmentioned links do matter as they have their own share in overall ranking.

So I believe that Google will have to take additional steps in future to fix such issues from its resource pages.

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Diptimayee Mohanty

She is the founder & director of SUVAANCE Internet Marketing Services Pvt. Ltd. From mere interest to full time career, she delved into the world of digital marketing in later part of last decade and has been contributing excellent articles on Google algorithm changes, patents, SEO strategies, tools & software for marketing and analysis.

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