The race to monetize AI visibility services, claiming new acronyms and extending existing fields of practice as whole new trenches of engineering, is something we’ve witnessed a lot over the past couple of years.
We’re seeing new entrants to the market because they see a gap, but no one is really stopping to ask the question: Why does a gap exist in the first place?
The truth is simple. The gap has, more often not been left open by accident, but rather created deliberately off the back of Google changing its tack and introducing penalties for the exact same manipulation practices that people try to repackage today as solutions for AI visibility.
In the early days of SEO, it was very different from how it is now, regardless of AI and Google’s overall search features. How Google indexed and how Google weighted weak factors that led to ranking order, have changed significantly over the years. The two main mechanisms of manipulation have always been content and links.
The rise and fall of AI-generated content, and how there is a misunderstanding between content production and Google’s crawl economics, I’ve already covered in another article. What we’re now starting to see is a very confident entry into the market of services playing on the link side of how visibility is generated, based on a market gap where people are trying to exploit without actually understanding where and why those bad habits were driven underground.
A Short History Of Backlink Manipulation
Google’s Penguin algorithm, which is now a part of the core algorithm, was a series of standalone updates that focused on penalizing link manipulation practices. Not only in the volume of backlinks, but also the over-optimization of anchor text, unnatural patterns of gaining links, random and sudden spikes with little justification as to why the spike existed, and also patterns of websites linking out to random websites and non-sequential content themes.
Google does this now algorithmically at scale. If we can quickly and easily see the link manipulation going on, just by using exports from third-party tools or even in the user interface of third-party tools, we can guarantee that Google and Bing are also able to see this manipulation at scale.
Backlink Manipulation Penalties Still Exist
A common misconception about Penguin becoming a part of the core algorithm is that Google simply ignores spammy links – that you could almost run free and buy backlinks and manipulate your profile to your heart’s content, and you won’t receive a penalty because Google would have to ignore the bad efforts. Anyone believing this is gravely misinformed.
Over the past year, I’ve seen more link-based penalties occurring than in the five years before it. That’s because people have bought into buying backlinks for AI purposes without understanding, and potentially ignoring, the underlying consequences of how they appear within Google and Bing’s indexes. Being present for various
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