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LinkedIn launched a new solution for enhanced audience insights, making it easier to predict and improve potential campaign performance.

With the platform’s new Media Planning API, you can use real-time data signals to assess the expected reach and frequency of campaigns before allocating any budget.

Why we care. A clearer understanding of a campaign’s potential performance enables more informed, data-driven decisions on the optimal media mix, timing, and frequency for achieving the best ROI.

Audience insights: LinkedIn’s Media Planning API provides detailed data on user demographics, job roles, industries, and online behaviors for more precise ad targeting.

Budget allocation: Media Planning API can also be used to identify your most effective advertising strategies so that you can allocate budgets appropriately and maximize ROI.

Planning capabilities: Agencies can integrate LinkedIn’s data with their own tools and analytics for more strategic and informed media planning decisions.

Accessibility. If you’re interested in accessing LinkedIn’s Media Planning API, you will need to contact your agency development lead or LinkedIn sales representative. 

What LinkedIn is saying. Lynn Bader, Senior Director, Agency Development & Global Marketer Education, said in a statement:

• “With media planning on LinkedIn, agencies can not only optimize their advertising strategies but also demonstrate the value of these strategies.”
• “This ability to showcase tangible results is often the key to securing increased investment in specific platforms.”
• “By providing concrete forecasted data on how different scenarios and strategies perform, our API empowers agencies to make a compelling case for their media choices.”

Deep dive. Read LinkedIn’s announcement in full for more information.

In this article, I’ll share how to remove backlinks and consider the different approaches for cleaning up your link profile—depending on your circumstances.

Google says if you have a manual action for unnatural links, you should first try to remove the links from the other site and then disavow any that you can’t get removed:

 

“If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links to your site, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site.”

Google Search Console Help

Here’s an overview of what you need to do to remove backlinks if you have a manual action for unnatural links, according to Google:

If you’ve got a manual action (also known as a manual penalty), you’ll see it by logging into Google Search Console (GSC). Expand the Security & Manual Actions tab and click on Manual actions.

If there’s an issue, you’ll see a screen like this:

Assuming you have a manual action, the first step is to list all the domains you want to remove.

Start by heading to Google Search Console, exporting all the links, and adding them to a spreadsheet. These are the links that Google sees, so there’s no need to use a third-party tool at this point.

Once you’ve got your domain list in your spreadsheet, you’ll need to start a backlink audit to identify the unnatural links. In your backlink audit, you don’t have to remove every spammy link, but it’s a good idea to look for common patterns to identify what caused the penalty.

What constitutes an unnatural link, according to Google? In short, it’s any link that is intended to manipulate rankings in Google’s search results.

Such as:

• Paid links
• Excessive link exchanges
• Automated linking
• Requiring links as part of your ToS
• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links
• Keyword rich low-quality links embedded in widgets
• Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of sites
• Forum comments with optimized links

For a current list, check Google’s spam policies.

You can use a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to help find spammy or unnatural-looking links.

Here are a few checks you can make:

Are there any spammy-looking or over-optimized anchors?

In Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you can check the Anchors report in the sidebar. If there’s an issue—it can be fairly obvious from this report. Here’s an extreme example of easy-to-spot spammy-looking anchors in a digital marketing website’s link profile that looks unnatural within the link profile’s context.

Assess the overall quality of the domains

Does it look like a site that Google would approve of based on their quality guidelines?

Google has a whole section dedicated to defining link spam, but one of the core considerations is whether you’ve paid for links to manipulate Google’s rankings.

Once you’ve identified the unnatural links, you’ll need to collect the email addresses for these domains. Usually, there’s a contact form or an email on the contact page, or you could try the [email protected] approach. You can also use a tool like Hunter, or simply run a quick search on social media.

You should then request that they remove the links from their site.

Here’s an example of the type of email you can use to request removal – keep it short and to the point, and remember to send it from an email address that has your domain name in the email.

Hi {site_owner’s name},

I’m currently reviewing links on my website, and I need your help to remove this link:

{Their_URL}

It links to my website here:

{Your_URL}

When you have removed the link, I would be grateful if you could respond to this email.

Thank you,

{Your name}

{[email protected]}

Once you’ve removed a few links, you can start updating your list. Some site owners will not reply to your email. Others will agree to remove the link but charge a fee for the link removal.

In this situation, John Mueller has said:

“If there are some links that you can’t remove yourself, or some that require payment to be removed, then having those in the disavow file is fine as well.”

If you’ve tried to get the backlinks removed, but they can’t be removed, then you should disavow the links.

Google says:

 

“We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.”

Google Search Console Help

In a now-deleted tweet, John Mueller confirmed this by saying if you paid for links and can’t remove them, disavow them.

If you choose the disavow route, please heed these words of caution from Gary Illyes:

“We said multiple times that the disavow tool is a very heavy gun. And if you don’t know what you are doing, you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.”

There’s a risk with a disavow that you can tank your site’s rankings by disavowing the wrong links. So it’s important to be sure that the links you’re adding to the disavow file are causing issues for your site.

Google also provides detailed guidelines for preparing your disavow .txt file, which you should follow.

Once you’ve got a list of domains that you think are unnatural, you should format your disavow file in this style:

# Two pages to disavow
http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html

# One domain to disavow
Domain:shadyseo.com

Then it’s just a matter of uploading your .txt file to this page in GSC.

Once you’ve tried removing as many unnatural links as possible and uploaded your disavow file to GSC, you can request a review. You can do this by clicking the button Request review.

If Google decides you’ve done a good enough job, they’ll remove the manual action. If not, you may have to repeat the process until the manual action is removed.

If you don’t have a link-based manual action but you have links you want to remove, this is where it can become a gray area—and different SEOs will have different opinions on whether or not to remove backlinks.

Here’s an example of a blogger who says he had lots of “spammy” links but did nothing—and saw no negative impact:

Here’s another example where Patrick Stox showed the impact of disavowing links on Ahrefs’ blog.

This shows that disavowing links without a manual action can potentially reduce your site’s organic traffic and that links still play a significant role in rankings.

When I asked SEOs on LinkedIn how they deal with low-quality links, most said they either do nothing or disavow them.

The poll showed that only 8% of SEOs remove low-quality backlinks from the source. Most preferred to either do nothing or disavow them. This is not surprising because, as we’ve already seen, removing backlinks is not easy and takes time.

The approach of “I do nothing” may surprise some, but with Fabrice Canel of Bing announcing in 2023 that they’re retiring Bing’s disavow links feature, it seems likely Google will follow suit soon.

Fabrice said:

“We can now differentiate between natural and unnatural links, and we can ignore or discount the latter without affecting the former.”

So the question really is—how much do you trust search engines to make the right decision?

Let’s consider the following scenarios:

1. No manual action, but have seen a serious drop in traffic

• Start with a backlink audit to see if there is any issue with the links if you believe you are at risk
• A drop in traffic could be caused by many things, not just links—check your technical SEO for any issues or any Google algorithm updates
• If there is a serious issue with links that you believe may violate Google’s quality guidelines, then you can remove or disavow them. Run a Site Audit crawl to eliminate any technical SEO issues.

2. A third-party tool says you have “toxic” links

• John Mueller said the concept of “toxic” links is made up, and his advice was to move on to more serious SEO tools:

• If you have used a third-party tool to categorize links in this way, it doesn’t mean that the links are necessarily bad for your website
• If there is a serious issue with links that you believe may violate Google’s quality guidelines, then you can remove or disavow them

3. You have many low DR links on your site you don’t recognize

• If you have a lot of low Domain Rating (DR) links that you don’t recognize, it’s usually nothing to be worried about
• Low-authority websites can and do naturally link to your website—just because they are low DR, it doesn’t mean that they should be removed or are “bad”
• If you are determined to remove or disavow, always manually review the sites in question before pulling the trigger
• In most cases, no action is required. Google and other search engines will deal with these types of links.

4. You paid for links and don’t have a manual penalty but have seen a drop in traffic

• If you’ve paid for links but haven’t got a link-based manual penalty, the best thing at this stage is probably to do nothing
• If you can’t sleep at night due to the guilt of your paid links, then you can disavow or remove them, but in most cases, consider what else could be the issue first.
• Run a Site Audit crawl to check for technical SEO issues before you take any action with links. Do a backlink audit to work out if there is a link-based issue.

5. You’re the victim of a link-based negative SEO attack

• If you believe there are many spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and you believe they are causing issues.
• In basic attacks, Google should be able to understand what is and isn’t a natural link. For more advanced attacks, you may need to remove or disavow.
• If you are at all unsure, always seek advice from an SEO professional before removing or disavowing any links.

Final thoughts

Removing backlinks isn’t most people’s idea of fun—it often involves the same amount of blood, sweat, tears, and toil as building links, but minus the dopamine hit of getting a high DR link.

By contrast, a disavow can be updated quickly, so if you know what you’re doing, it’s not hard to see why some SEOs opt for this option.

And, of course, the simplest option is to kick back, relax, and do nothing—but to do so, you have to have faith in Google’s algorithms to figure it all out—but do you?

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

Google has a new review algorithm that the search company says it better anf faster at taking down fake reviews from local listings in Google Search and Google Maps. “In 2023, this new algorithm helped us take down 45% more fake reviews than the year before,” Google announced.

Google receives a lot of contributions to its Google Maps and local listings, this includes reviews, photos, updates to listings and more. In fact, Google said it receives “around 20 million contributions per day on Maps and Search.”

New reviews spam algorithm

Google said it launched a new algorithm last year to better to detect and remove fake reviews. Google explained that this is a “machine learning algorithm that detects questionable review paerns even faster.” It looks at “longer-term signals on a daily basis,” for example “if a reviewer leaves the same review on multiple businesses or if a business receives a sudden spike in 1 or 5-star reviews.”

The algorithm works to catch both “one-off cases and broader attack patterns,” Google wrote. For example, a network of scammers falsely claimed that for a low fee they would connect people to high-paying online tasks, like writing fake reviews or clicking ads across the internet.

Google said its algorithm was able to “quickly identied this surge in suspicious reviews thanks to its ability to continuously analyze patterns, like whether an account had previously posted reviews.” Then that was used by human investigators to analyzed reports from merchants who recently saw a spike in fake 5-star reviews. Google was then able ot use those patterns to refine the algorithm to remove more of these fake reviews.

This led to Google removing 5 million fake review attempts related to this scam alone in just a few weeks.

Review spam fighting metrics

Google, like every year, released some metrics on how it fought fake reviews and contributions to the local results in Google Search and Maps. Here are some of those metrics:

• Google blocked or removed over 170 million policy violating reviews in 2023 (up from 45% from 2022)
• More than 12 million fake business profiles were removed or blocked
• 14 million policy viloating videos in 2023 (7 million more than last year)
• Blocked over 2 million attempts to claim Business Profiles that did not belong to them (1 million more than last year)

Last year, Google shared the number of policy violating photos but omitted it this year. Google told me the number was higher, Google only wanted to share the wanted to highlight the video piece this year. Also, Google changed how what they look at for fake business profiles from creating fake profiles to claiming fake profiles.

Why we care. Spam and fake information in search is a hassle we all see and have to deal with as marketers. None of us like to be hit with spam, and none of us like to have fake reviews left on our businesses or clients’ business listings. Google is trying to reduce spam efforts but as you can imagine, it is a cat-and-mouse game.

As Google comes up with more ways and techniques to prevent and/or reduce spam, spammers find other ways around those efforts. You can see Google’s efforts last year, over here.

Automation and AI have given us tools to reduce (often drastically) the time we spend on more tedious PPC tasks.

That means as agency partners, we need to shift toward acting more as consultants for our clients. We must use our expertise to provide strategy and guidance that leads to business growth rather than hands-on-keys busywork.

A key area where we can leverage our expertise by identifying how clients can use data effectively while ensuring compliance with evolving privacy and security regulations.

1. Confirm where your clients (and your agency) stand with marketing analytics maturity

Over the last decade, the marketing analytics space has grown exponentially. Where do your clients stand? Factors often include:

• Budget
• Age of the company
• Leadership’s willingness to invest the right resources into the right tools

A one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. As a result, it’s important to figure out the scope of clients’ resources right out of the gate. Use these questions to guide you:

• Do they have a dedicated marketing operations team with whom you can communicate freely? Or are they still learning how to configure Salesforce objects?
• On average, how much time do they generally need to process data or analytics requests?
• Are they doing any media mix modeling, single or multi-touch attribution? Or are they still trying to figure out attribution altogether?
• Do they use Google Analytics 4 or another reliable web analytics platform?

Confirming your clients’ marketing analytics maturity phase is just the first step in the process. You should also know where your agency stands with its marketing analytics maturity. What scope of services are you capable of offering to your clients?

Suppose your agency is still in the “informative” or “real-time” phase (see chart). In that case, it’s unlikely you can successfully assist a client who aims to incorporate more predictive technology into their marketing practice. Yet this situation can become a great opportunity to seek out resources (including third-party) to do so.

If you’re encountering similar analytics-related challenges across many clients, consider investing in an in-house resource to help solve them. For instance:

• Train members of your data and analytics teams on the Salesforce reporting platform.
• Hire a marketing operations specialist to help clients with tagging and tracking.
• Create a task force to scope out the best predictive tools and methods to use agency-wide, given your own resource constraints.
• Build a roadmap to get your agency to a place where you can confidently say you’ve reached the “prescriptive phase.”

Ultimately, as agency partners, our goal is to ensure leadership has confidence that marketing activities are translating into business success. Positioning your agency as a strategic partner with an effective analytics scope can inspire confidence in your clients’ leadership teams. 

Dig deeper: 3 steps for effective PPC reporting and analysis

2. Future-proof by preparing for third-party cookie deprecation with server-to-server tracking

By now, you’ve heard ad nauseam that third-party cookies will soon be a thing of the past, with Google expected to phase them out completely by Q3 of 2024. If they aren’t already, your clients will be asking about the implications for their media strategies.

Today, nearly every major advertising platform offers an offline conversion tracking solution. By default, this conversion tracking method is cookie-less. As a result, your first step should be enabling this option for your clients across platforms.

In addition, take steps to audit the quality of the data passed into these systems. With routine audits, your agency team can continue optimizing toward ideal conversion rates. 

The best practice for seamless tracking, however, is implementing server-to-server tracking. On a surface level, server-to-server tracking creates and stores a unique identifier on the client’s private server when a user clicks a tracking link or generates an ad impression. This ID replaces pixel-based (or client-side) tracking, which stores the customer’s data in their web browser.

It’s important to note that server-to-server tracking is not a way to get around privacy restrictions and compliance. Rather, it bypasses browser-based privacy restrictions and ad blockers.

If your agency isn’t already doing so, now is the time to create a company-wide initiative for everyone to become familiar with server-to-server tracking. Then, you can start helping your clients understand the importance of configuring their technology stacks to enable this method.

Implementation can take a lot of time, particularly when databases require reconfiguring to generate and store these unique IDs. While your agency may not oversee the technical execution, it’s essential to be a good consultant to your clients and set expectations for what it will take. It’s also helpful to have good recommendations for resources if you or your clients don’t have them available internally.

3. Don’t over-engineer your analytics strategy

Ad platforms have seemingly been rolling out a new AI or forecasting tool every other month. When you consider the countless other third-party analytics SaaS on the market, it can feel overwhelming to keep up.

Remember, just because a tool is new doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good – or even the right tool for your goals. As you consider new tools and workflows to incorporate into your analytics strategy, ask the following questions:

• Will it help me collect accurate and timely data better than my current solution does?
• Can it help me analyze trends deeper and better than my existing tech stack does?
• Will it provide more actionable insights than I currently receive?
• Will it help me comply with any regulatory requirements better than I already do?
• Can it do what I already do, but cheaper?

These elements are some of the most basic pillars of any marketing analytics strategy. If any new and flashy tools or strategies aren’t satisfying one of the above, they probably aren’t worth the resource allocation.

It’s also critical to consider where your agency has landed on the marketing analytics maturity path. If you’re operating in the “informative” phase, adopting more advanced media mix modeling or an incrementality testing tool might not be your top priority.

The path to becoming a great data steward

Between the rapid rollout of automation and AI tools and the deprecation of third-party cookies, many agencies’ roles continue to shift toward the consultant end of the spectrum.

For agency partners, becoming a great data steward starts with knowing how, why, and when to incorporate analytics into paid media planning – and ultimately guiding clients toward future-proofing their businesses.

Dig deeper: 6 tips to track and analyze PPC results