Link Quality Safety
Link Quality Safety: a case study from our own site
This case study comes from therankingstore.com, our own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory. It is not a client project. From Aug 15, 2026, The Ranking Factory asked AI engines the questions people ask about the site’s subjects — rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, backlink and link building services, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines — and listed each subject it found missing from the site as a gap to close.
What we did and why
We ran The Ranking Factory, our own software, on therankingstore.com. Between Aug 28 and Oct 21, 2026 it wrote and published 112 pages on the site, one subject per page, and submitted every one of them to IndexNow. The pages covered rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines — the subjects the engines had shown to be missing. On Oct 9 we added our crawler log to the site through our WordPress plugin, to see which crawlers fetched each page. Roughly once a week from Aug 15 to Oct 21 the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and each answer’s sources were checked for the site’s pages.
How it turned out
By Oct 23, 2026, 75 of the 112 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer; the first was cited on Sep 4. By Oct 21, 34 of the pages had been cited in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store. Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 13, and Google AI Overviews were the first to cite 5. Between Oct 9 and Oct 21 the crawler log recorded a fetch of every one of the 112 pages, 104 of them by a crawler whose identity was verified.
Where link quality questions fit
Link building was one of the subjects the published pages covered, and the questions around it are usually about which links count and which cause harm. Google’s Spam Policies for Google Web Search describes link spam as “the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” Google’s Disavow links to your site guidance says that where a site has a manual action for unnatural links, the links should be removed from the other site first, and disavowed where removal is not possible; it adds that Google “works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website.” At scale, the Google Cloud Blog account of Bitly’s use of Web Risk describes checking the safety of millions of generated links in real time, and names confidence-scoring calibration to avoid false positives as one of the trickiest parts.
References
Google for Developers — Spam Policies for Google Web Search. Search Console Help — Disavow links to your site. Google Cloud Blog — Bitly: Ensuring real-time link safety with Web Risk to protect people.
References
- Bitly: Ensuring real-time link safety with Web Risk to protect people | Google Cloud Blog — Google Cloud Blog
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Case study: Link Building Tactics
- Case study: Link Building Tactics
- Reference: Top link building agencies SEO services
- Reference: Top authority building service providers link building digital PR agency
- Reference: Link Quality Metrics
- Reference: Link Building Basics
- Reference: Link Building Methods
