Anglo Rank, a link network that many people were using to improve their search engine rankings, has officially been busted by Google. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search engine spam, sent out a tweet which said, ““There are absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together.”Oh, Anglo Rank.” This is a jab at Anglo Rank, where their marketing material specifically states that there are absolutely no footprints linking the websites in their network together.
When websites are linked together, it can allow Google and other search engines to identify the sites involved, and either deindex them all together, or at least dramatically reduce their impact for link building. Using link networks for SEO has been widely condemned by Google, and Anglo Rank is just the latest in a long list of these networks that have been targeted by Google.
In the last year they have gone after Ghost Rank, SAPE Links, BuildMyRank and many others. BuildMyRank was one of the highest profile link networks out there, and when they were busted down by Google, it had a large effect on thousands of websites.
Any sites that used the Anglo Rank system will almost certainly see a dramatic loss in their search engine rankings, and could possibly even see a post in their Webmaster Tools system from Google, telling them why they lost their rankings.
One unfortunate fact of today is that many of the sites that will suffer from this weren’t directly involved with using the Anglo Rank system. They were victims of so called SEO experts, or companies that offered SEO services. These people would sell their services to website owners and small businesses, and then use the Anglo Rank system to help drive results. While this can work extremely well, it also exposes the business to this type of risk, oftentimes without their knowing.
For those who use link networks knowingly, however, this should serve as just one more warning that this is not a safe way to build your rankings. This is black hat SEO, and even if you didn’t get the Google slap this time, you should not consider yourself safe. No matter what the marketing material of the link network tells you.
