Google’s John Mueller responded to a Reddit complaint that SEOs or site owners were upset that a month-old site wasn’t performing well in Google search. The SEO said his site just doesn’t show up even though he “has a high DA and low spam score and he’s created a backlink to his website.”
John responded to this story. I wanted to put his reaction on top of this story, so you can read it before reading the rest below:
To be fair, I don’t think these sites are spam (although I haven’t seen them). The links may be spam in some ways, but my guess is the content is legal. Over the years, the bar for “legal” content has also increased.”It’s unique” isn’t enough.
— 🐐 John 🐐 (@JohnMu) March 10, 2022
Here is his post: “I created backlinks to top websites with high DA and low spam scores, but it’s been a month and I can’t see my backlinks getting indexed on Google Search. Find them on Semrush Is there a solution or do I have to wait longer?”
John Mueller’s reaction was like a one-on-one teacher who is tough on a kid who causes trouble in class. John replies:
(1) You are wasting your time:
I don’t feel like giving a snarky reply, but to help you out a little more, I’m afraid you’re not spending your time doing something as effective as you’d like for your SEO to be effective. Dropping links on random sites is no longer his SEO, it’s just spam. All search engines have had to deal with and ignore these kinds of things for years.
(2) Focusing too much on tools:
This goes without saying that SEO tools cannot tell if a “link is indexed”. Everyone crawling the web does it in different ways, at different speeds, and with different assumptions. Even if you see a link in Google cache, you have no idea if that link is used in searches.
(3) Ditch the strategy and focus on a long-term, true effort strategy:
If you’re looking to improve your SEO, I highly recommend abandoning all of these thoughts. You’re wasting your time right now, and if something happens to get stuck for a bit, you’ll quickly run out.
So the response from the SEO was that his site had “no technical issues” and that “the content is high quality and unique.” Then list that you have “follow links” from sites like HotFrog, Yelp, Foursquare, Chamber of Commerce, and more. He then demands that “backlinks cannot be ignored.”
So John Mueller replies again in a tougher but more caring way.
I don’t know your site (and don’t have time to dig into anything at the moment), but honestly everything you said there was a low effort/low quality site. It might be enough to scrape it at some point, but at that level you’ll find things come and go randomly as updates happen across search engines.
You may not care about long-term success, or you may just get a little traffic and walk away. If you care about your long-term success in searching on this site, or if you want to learn how to work on legitimate long-term sites, don’t spend too much time trying to hack links like this. We recommend that you do not.
I would have saved time by using Snark from the beginning.
Here is another post on Twitter this morning. Perhaps John was in the mood for a lesson.
Out of 26,000 pages, what is unique, compelling, and valuable?
— 🐐 John 🐐 (@JohnMu) March 9, 2022
These web pages display tabular data from stock exchanges that are dynamically updated daily.
About 90% of the page is dedicated to tabular data and 10% is boilerplate text content for internal links within the page.
— Ashish Deepak Thakur (@ayethakur) March 10, 2022
To be honest, this sounds like just about any stock-themed website, but it’s auto-generated, so our system doesn’t see the value in spending that much energy there. is not difficult to imagine. I want to focus on building very high value over the long term.
— 🐐 John 🐐 (@JohnMu) March 10, 2022
None of this will make your website better.
— 🐐 John 🐐 (@JohnMu) March 10, 2022
Forum discussion on Reddit & twitter.
