Jagger rolled out over three months, from September to November 2005; with the more substantial changes occurring in October. The update continued Google’s fight against low-quality or unnatural links such as link exchanges or reciprocal links, paid links, and those from link farms.
With this update and previous ones such as Austin which also cracked down on link farms, Google ensures that the pages are ranking honestly while sites that practice questionable tactics are either devalued or out of the index entirely. This initiative continues the search engine’s emphasis on relevance.
Here are the black hat methods of acquiring low-quality links:
Webmasters flocked to forums to discuss what happened to their sites after each of the Jagger updates. A lot of websites lost their top positions in the SERPs especially if their link building strategies resulted in low-quality links. Some got confused over what elements Google wants them to tweak in their websites. Meanwhile, others were even kicked out of the index for no apparent reason.
Google Webmaster Guidelines continue to discourage link schemes, which are tactics to produce links that aim to manipulate a site’s ranking on the SERPs. Examples of link schemes are buying or selling links that pass PageRank, excessive link exchanges, massive article marketing or guest posting campaigns, and using software to automate the creation of links to your site.
There are two main types of link penalty:
Here are ways to get high-quality links and avoid Google’s penalty: