Christy ^✍️ » Ammon Johns
How can create a backlink, is only way writing articles to editor?
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Christy
That's still not 'safe'. Faking, bribing, buying, or in any other way 'cheating' the backlinks you actually get because people liked it and decided on their own to cite it is called 'link manipulation' by Google in the webmaster's Guide of things NOT to do.
You wouldn't be the first person to cheat and risk it, but you need to understand that it is not 'safe'. ANY form of link manipulation can get a penalty, and the vast majority do.

Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Joseph
I'm guessing you're fairly new if you didn't hear about MyBlogGuest, but I knew several of those involved, and they were some experienced folk who felt they were pretty safe.
https://www.matthewbarby.com/myblogguest-penalty/
MyBlogGuest: Another One Bites the Dust
Joseph » Ammon Johns
Thanks for the insight. You're right, I am a new in this.
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Joseph
The case of MyBlogGuest was interesting, in that even many experienced SEO users did not expect the penalty they got. There was no money exchanging hands, no outright manipulation stated. It was simply a system that let those who wanted free content (guest posts) get in touch with people who'd give them that content so long as a crediting link was allowed. It all seemed pretty reasonable…
The problem, for Google, was that the sites wanting guest posts were specifically listed alongside the PageRank (at the outset), but any other link weighting metric such as Domain Authority or similar would have caused the same issue. That was the detail that showed the purpose of the links was to manipulate ranking factors, and thus made it a no-no.
Think about it, if I were after a link for traffic, I'd be wanting to know how many regular visitors and subscribers the site where I'd be published has. If I were looking to reach people with the message in my content, the same thing. But the ONLY purpose to mentioning link weighting values to search engines is that you want to get those links specifically for manipulating those factors, and THAT is what crosses the line.

Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Chaz
It is not at all rare. If you talk to any professional SEO who works in the highly competitive areas they've probably had personal experience, either of getting penalties, or most certainly of having to fix them. One top UK agency I worked for managed to get penalties twice, a few years apart. They were not dumb, they just played hard for some of the more competitive keywords, knowing and accepting the risks.
Very rare would be if, say, I knew one person who'd ever gotten caught out of a thousand who'd taken a risk. Somewhat rare would be if it was one person in a hundred. At one in ten it becomes 'common'. And I'm telling you that of SEO users who play in the most competitive spaces it's more like 50:50 who've either gotten a penalty, or had to clean one up. We just don't normally let it happen to an actual client's site – we use churn and burn disposables for anything at all risky.
People who got burned in the MyBlogGuest penalties involved a good dozen or so SEO users that I knew. That's not 'rare' by any stretch.
Chaz » Ammon Johns
It is very rare. If it was easy to give a site a manual link penalty that would become one of the top SEO tactics in play but it isn't for a reason. Most spam links Google discounts completely and will never result in any penalty filter or anything else. There are 100's of billions of web pages indexed by Google and I can guarantee you that manual link penalties affect a tiny weeny fraction of that. AKA very rare 🙂
Martinez ^🎓 » Chaz
Manual link penalties are in fact still common but there are so many people building links you have to look at Google's Web spam transparency reports to see the sheer volume.
Most links that violate search engine guidelines are ignored once the search engine identifies them – so people won't receive any penalties.
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Martinez
I think part of the issue is changes in terminology and perception over time. Back in the day, having your link power taken away was called a penalty (albeit a mild one in many ways). But years of Google PR and talk of 'filtering' now makes people think of this rather differently. Apparently people are a lot happier if the word 'filtered' is used rather than penalized, even when both are the exact same end result.
I agree with you too that most links that Google disapprove of are ignored, or at least, algorithmically down-valued to much the same effect. I've never had the resources to do a wide enough scientific test, with control data and reliability. However, my unscientific observations and anecdotal evidence have led me to say several times that I fully believe that about 90-95% of all 'built' links are devalued to the point of worthlessness.
Moreover, every single day another hundred or so link networks and Private Blog Network (PBN) sites are added to Google's own version of a disavow list.
One friend of mine who is VERY well versed in link building, having trained and employed an army of 'link ninjas' in the past was telling me recently about some of the internal tools and data they use – one of which will not just detect toxic links, it will look up what network they belong to, and which large-scale link builders own it.
Chaz » Martinez
They are not common and anyone that says otherwise probably just never actually thought about the math involved.
In 2019 there were 4.3 million manual actions ( many of these were not link related!) 4.3 million is an infinitesimally small fraction of the billions and billions of sites in Google's index! Its very rare.
And specifically to answer ops questions using link software most likely will not result in a manual penalty. (Not saying its a good or bad thing…just that realistically probably won't result in a penalty)
I build a lot of links, used and tested most link software on the market for the last decade and the chance of catching a penalty is slim, even triggering an algorithm filter is more difficult than it used to be since real time penguin.
Martinez ^🎓 » Chaz
"Of all messages, about 4.3 million were related to manual actions, resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines."
The math is pretty simple.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/06/how-we-fought-search-spam-on-google
How we fought Search spam on Google – Webspam Report 2019
Ammon Johns ^🎓 » Martinez
The most interesting figure to me was "More than 90% of link spam was caught by our systems, and techniques such as paid links or link exchange have been made less effective."
I guess I noticed it especially as it so closely aligns with my own estimated figures in the >90% range.
Chaz, one of Google's long-term approaches has always been to do as little manual action as possible. They much prefer to make all penalties automated and scalable. Always. Manual actions are reserved for the most extreme or urgent of cases.
Google engineers are all about making the perfect system. Anytime manual intervention is required is, to them, accepting and admitting a complete failure of the system. Manual actions are a last resort, and one they really hate to do.
I also draw your attention specifically to the change in scales. When talking about the issues, they talk about how many pages or incidences were detected. But manual actions are almost NEVER applied at a page by page level. Most manual actions are site-wide, entire domains and all pages on them. Those are completely different scales of measure, and a single manual action may affect thousands, tens or hundreds of thousands, or in some cases even millions of pages. And they did 4.3 million manual actions.
Chaz » Ammon Johns
And basic math skills still elude you. Let me know if you want to schedule a zoom call so I can explain the #'s 🙂
Ammon Johns ^🎓
For the second time within 24 hours a purely personal comment that had nothing to do with the topic or evidence for it was posted by
Chaz and had to be removed. This time Chaz went with it.