Why does site with more toxic links rank better?

[onlinesource]

I know nobody here works for Google and only Google can make sense of Google, but I am scratching my head trying to figure this out.

So, I have a shopping cart which uses multiple websites or store fronts such as a .com site that I want to rank in Google.com, a co.uk that I want to rank in Google.ca, a .ca site for Google Canada, etc. So all sites share the same shopping cart, which means they share the same products, same categories, same pages, etc. I do use hreflang tag to point Googlebot to each store when they land on a particular url, but this is what is odd.

So I've run toxic link reports on both my .com and .co.uk sites. The co.uk site consistently ranks very well *knock on wood* in Google.co.uk for top keywords but the .com site is a big mess, as our SERPs bounce between page 5 to 7 on a daily basis. So in the latest toxic reports, the co.uk site has way less links but actually a higher percentage of toxic links. I mean, 19% of the links on the co.uk site are toxic but on .com, it's just 2% after all the disavows i've done. Also .com has 83% of it's links (542 in total) marked as healthy/GOOD whereas co.uk is 46% and just 22 in total. Then I thought, "well, maybe co.uk has LESS links but the good links it has are better!?!" So, the average power trust levels of the 1 compared to 4 for .com. I don't get it.

Is there any correlation between the # of bad links and healthy links or is the problem likely something else? I don't understand this because I was told, lower your toxic links, raise your healthy and you'll get rewarded so that being the case, shouldn't the .com site dominate?

[martinibuster]

To your point I have seen lots of crap links flow in with no penalties.

And... time has proven me correct.
The information I gave you here was ahead of any announcements from Google. So if you followed my post in this discussion from April 2016, then you would have been ahead of the curve, ahead of the SEO herd.

Gary Illyes and Mueller have recently stated that it's not necessary to disavow for Penguin and that Google is discounting crap links automatically. It's not a new development. It has been this way for a long time already.

I'm using what I've read in scientific research and patents to understand what Penguin is and, working with that theory of what I think Penguin is (since January 2016, at which time I shared my science based hypotheses privately), I already understood that Penguin discounted crap links.

Everything coming out of Google totally aligns with my theories of what Penguin is, including the recent announcement that it is not machine learning. So I'm pretty confident I cracked what Penguin is and have the general outlines of how it functions.

Question: Why does site with more toxic links rank better?
Answer: Because your backlink data only shows 30% to 50% of backlink data. The data is incomplete.
Is a bad idea to come to a 100% conclusion when the data is incomplete

The Backlink Data Does Not Tell Complete Story
Now, as far as believing what your backlink checker tells you, three years ago Eric Enge did an experiment to find if there was any truth to Rand Fishkin's unfounded idea* that Facebook & Google+ shares affected Google's algorithm. Matt Cutts looked at Eric Enge's data and told him the study was flawed and that there were a lot of links powering the rankings that Eric Enge was unaware of. Eric Enge smartly realized that all the backlink checkers were only showing about 30-50% of actual backlink data. Thank goodness for people like Eric Enge, who put ideas to the test. I really appreciate Eric's efforts at digging down to get at the truth. :) Link to SEL article here. [searchengineland.com]

While I appreciate that backlink checkers have come a long way over the past three years, I'm fairly certain that threads like this one are indicators that backlink checkers still have a long way to go and are not showing you all the links that are powering a SERP ranking. And I will go further and hope this doesn't pop a blood vessel from the strain of figuring this out: not every SERP ranking is powered by links alone.

Toxic links are an SEO Myth. Do you believe me now?

;)

Roger

*There were no scientific studies or patents to hint that Google or Bing had developed such a Facebook/Google+ ranking factor. Rand basically used personal SERP observations to base his theories on, a poor way to develop a theory. The lack of a patent or published scientific research by Google, Bing or a university should be a red flag on anyone's theory.

[Awarn]

You know for a few years we have had this bad link disavow, don't disavow discussion. It never seems to get anywhere. The one thing I saw in the beginning was what seemed like a slow deindexing of the site. I see comments often of people saying the same think. The deindexing start and the traffic fades. Then you get into is it bad links, duplicate content etc.

Have we looked at the indexing. I know I have reviewed and done about everything. What I see is Google just not indexing the whole site. Normally about 20% is not indexed. Now I can isolate that 20% and I can fetch some of the pages. But here is the interesting part. Those pages may get indexed but then others are dropped so I remain at basically the same percent indexed. I stay right at about position 11-13. I would be happy if they indexed 95%. Now think about this. Google could use the indexing as a way to penalize. No more -10 penalties etc. We just don't index everything.

Why do some sites have all the domain crowding - because they get fully indexed and the juice flows as intended. The issue is Google not russians or sape links or any of the other garbage.

[Root13]

I'm afraid, even Google doesn't know everything about Google:)