Negative and Link Based SEO Seems to be Still Working in Site Links

Cyrus Shepard led a weekend thread that has SEOs re-examining how much Google really discounts bogus backlinks. The discussion started after about 3000 intentional backlinks were pointed at Disney.com and the anchor text ended up showing up in Disney’s sitelinks.

Turns out, it ranked beautifully. Not only that, it has lasted for several weeks (even after Google was called out about about it).

Screen shot:

I tried about 30 different variations on that search, and was unable to produce more than the original query of "disney account".

Google has long spewed nonsense that it ignored non-topically appropriate links since its algorithms supposedly discount them automatically. Yet the Disney example clearly shows otherwise (common knowledge in seo circles). While rankings didn’t appear to change elsewhere, the anchor text from domains surfaced directly in sitelink titles, meaning at least one internal system still processed those signals and boosted the link up to the vaulted site links position on a top 50 site.

As Shepard pointed out,

“Google has different systems for different functions. So the system that generates sitelinks isn't the same that determines rankings.”

...but their overlap exposes gaps in Googles link filtering logic. Other SEOs chimed in, noting similar cases where spammy inbound links to internal search pages caused “indexed but blocked by robots.txt” errors or triggered weird link-based behavior.

Many agreed that Google was pretty deep in the weeds on this one. Backlink guy wrote:

Completely insane for Google to be using INBOUND anchor text to decide sitelink titles, considering you can programmatically send an avalanche of .xyz spam onto any website for nearly $0 at scale.

The only take away here is to watch your backlinks and monitor your site links.