Are We Repeating History & Risking Backlink Penalties Again? via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW
Rundown Which AI Platform Wins in Your Clients' Verticals? ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Conversion leadership splits by industry. 20M data points, 20 GBP tactics. Guide 6 Ways To Prepare Your Business For AI In 2026 A practical checklist for using AI where it produces measurable pipeline and revenue impact in 2026. Rundown Why AI volume alone can't deliver personalization Your content architecture may be the real bottleneck. Get the Rundown on what needs to change in your content ops. Guide Local Google Visibility Guide + Cheat Sheet Track how your business appears across Google Search, Maps, and Gemini. Listings, reviews, and competitor signals all in one view. Webinar New AI Search & SEO KPIs: 4 Real Signals AI mentions and citations are benchmarks, not decisions. Get 4 traffic-predictive signals drawn from real bot data across hundreds of sites. Google never stopped penalizing link manipulation. The AI visibility gold rush is about to relearn every lesson Penguin taught SEO. VIP CONTRIBUTOR Dan Taylor July 23, 2026 ⋅ 5 min read VIP CONTRIBUTOR Dan Taylor Agency Partner, Head of Innovation & Consultancy Founder at 10 Spurs Bio Follow 722 READS The race to monetize AI visibility services, claiming new acronyms and extending existing fields of practice as whole new trenches of engineering, is something we’ve witnessed a lot over the past couple of years. We’re seeing new entrants to the market because they see a gap, but no one is really stopping to ask the question: Why does a gap exist in the first place? The truth is simple. The gap has, more often not been left open by accident, but rather created deliberately off the back of Google changing its tack and introducing penalties for the exact same manipulation practices that people try to repackage today as solutions for AI visibility. In the early days of SEO, it was very different from how it is now, regardless of AI and Google’s overall search features. How Google indexed and how Google weighted weak factors that led to ranking order, have changed significantly over the years. The two main mechanisms of manipulation have always been content and links. The rise and fall of AI-generated content, and how there is a misunderstanding between content production and Google’s crawl economics, I’ve already covered in another article. What we’re now starting to see is a very confident entry into the market of services playing on the link side of how visibility is generated, based on a market gap where people are trying to exploit without actually understanding where and why those bad habits were driven underground. Google’s Penguin algorithm, which is now a part of the core algorithm, was a series of standalone updates that focused on penalizing link manipulation practices. Not only in the volume of backlinks, but also the over-optimization of anchor text, unnatural patterns of gaining links, random and sudden spikes with little justification as to why the spike existed, and also patterns of websites linking out to random websites and non-sequential content themes. Google does this now algorithmically at scale. If we can quickly and easily see the link manipulation going on, just by using exports from third-party tools or even in the user interface of third-party tools, we can guarantee that Google and Bing are also able to see this manipulation at scale. A common misconception about Penguin becoming a part of the core algorithm is that Google simply ignores spammy links – that you could almost run free and buy backlinks and manipulate your profile to your heart’s content, and you won’t receive a penalty because Google would have to ignore the bad efforts. Anyone believing this is gravely misinformed. Over the past year, I’ve seen more link-based penalties occurring than in the five years before it. That’s because people have bought into buying backlinks for AI purposes without understanding, and potentially ignoring, the underlying consequences of how they appear within Google and Bing’s indexes. Being present for various fan-out, grounding, and stacked queries also plays a role in AI visibility, let alone the fact that you need to be strong and visible when it comes to being included in training data. Buying backlinks from a marketplace has been a risky practice ever since Penguin was introduced. Failing to acknowledge and understand that doing something for AI doesn’t make it an agnostic SEO practice, and you could very easily damage one while having a minimal impact on the other. There is a certain irony to new entrants to the organic visibility market pushing these practices. What we’ve learned from them, they also are very likely aligned with the commentary that SEO is dead and a dead-end channel for investment, but what they’re actually doing is securing the future of SEO for the rest of us. By repackaging tactics we regard as short-termist or spammy, what they’re actually doing is creating a large pile of clutter and signal noise that Google will inevitably sweep through and ignore or penalize, just as it has done during every previous cycle since Penguin was introduced. When the signal noise is gone and cleared, only those who have not been penalized and not engaged in these tactics will remain. SEO has always been about understanding human search intent, providing accurate answers, and building genuine authority over periods of time. Technology may be evolving from standard lists of links to conversational answer engines, but the fundamental economics of how Google crawls and understands websites, and the fundamental economics of how Bing does the same, are relatively the same, albeit with an added layer of AI in terms of processing layered on top. Far from killing the industry, the current wave of spam will only make high-quality SEO work more valuable than ever before. Read Full Bio VIP CONTRIBUTOR Dan Taylor Agency Partner, Head of Innovation & Consultancy Founder at 10 Spurs I’m an experienced SEO with more than 12 years of experience in-house and within an agency. Within the agency, I’ve ... Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Bad & Toxic Backlinks You Should Avoid Ask An SEO: How To Handle Duplicate Content Across Multiple Domains David Vs. Goliath [Part 2]: Algorithm Updates Have Become The Biggest Risk In SEO Join 75,000+ Digital Leaders. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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