Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links ...
-
Hi,
We recently got "the message" from Google about unnatural links for two of our 50 sites. Ranking has dropped significantly since, we did not take any action to remove the links.
All our 50 sites were managed by the same SEO company but only two got this message.
We are in the process of understanding the best ways to deal with this situation, but currently there are two main approaches we can detect:
- Remove the links, resubmit for reconsideration
- Ignore the message and do not do anything, if you do something it is actually like admitting you did something wrong, and Google can not prove that you did...
Any insights on what approach we should adopt?
Thanks in advance.
-
David -
Thank you for explaining more clearly, it's really appreciated!
If all major keywords have dropped 5-10 spots, it seems that your traffic must be down quite a bit, not to mention brand exposure.
I would submit a reinclusion request. I would be totally transparent, tell them what you have done to try to get the links removed, but also tell them that you did not build these links. Show them what links you are responsible for.
Unfortunately there is no way to know how long it will take for your client to recover. It's possible that they will be sandboxed for a while. What I would recommend doing is moving forward to building really good links for them, trying to get good press coverage, and try to get in contact with someone on the spam team to review your case.
John
-
Hey John -
I'm really not convinced there was any negative seo in the sense that the term is being meant of late. I believe our past seo company built blog network links without consulting us. The foreign porn site links are more of a mystery. I'm reluctant to submit a reinclusion request in case they manually make rankings worse, what do you think about that idea? Our site has not tanked, but all major KWs have dropped 5-10 spots. A couple havent budged since getting the letter.
-
Hey David -
It all depends on how long it takes for the reinclusion request to process, if your rankings have indeed tanked. If you didn't build the links, be sure to talk about this prominently in your reinclusion request. Other than that, honestly, make a stink and get on Google's radar. If it's a case of negative SEO, then we need to make Google aware of it.
-
Any comments/suggestions? How long will this stupid penalty last? We never even created the bad links and cant get them removed.
-
Hi John,
Well naturally, my definition of a 'good website' will be biased. However there are no GWT reported onsite issues, no coding/browser issues, 100% original content, low bounce rate and a high % or returning visitors. We only received the GWT notice of unnatural links and 3 weeks later found quite a large drop in most but not all, rankings. Does this mean it's an algorithmic penalty and if so, how long will it last? We didnt publish any unnatural links on blog networks ourselves, but an seo company we paid money to did, and they have not responded to any of our requests for removal of those links. Ive been able to email some blogs and get a positive removal but the majority have not responded, and there are hundreds.
-
David -
What's your definition of a "good website"? If traffic has dropped 75%, Google has lost faith in your site and something has gone horribly wrong, thus your site is no longer considered "good" in their eyes. If you've done any unnatural linkbuilding (any comment spam or bought links), you need to get as many of these removed, or at least let Google know about it so that you can get back in the index.
There is no way, beyond being notified in GWT of unnatural links being detected and seeing a drop in traffic/rankings, to know for certain that a manual penalty has been applied. Usually you will receive a notice in GWT when this happens, though. Otherwise it's algorithmic.
-
Is there some certain way to know if youve got a penalty when rankings drop after getting this letter? Is it worth sending for reconsideration if youve got a good website?
-
Tried that waqid. Was expensive and still our rankings are terrible since 3 weeks after getting the letter. Maybe cause yahoo and botw for instance saw fit to place us on some regional pr0 page that gets cached once a decade. Seems awfully unfair to penalize a site for things they might not have caused, or be able to control.
-
Here is a suggestion. I had the same issue with one of my clients. We added the client to some human edited directories and after about 30 days we were back on our rankings. You are going to need to browse this site for a list of Human Edited Directories and sort through them. These sites are not cheap, you will spend anywhere from 20-300 per submission. Most being permanent listings.A few annual and very few monthly.
-
I was all prepared to shout down your answer as i just could not see how going on like nothing has happened will help.
But you make some very very valid points and as such we have decided to "try" get rid of 20-30 of the definitely crappy links that offer no value, tidy up the blog posts - delete the really rubbish blog posts and start building some better content and better links. But crucially we will not do a resubmit request.
-
Hello IM Rubbish,
You are in a unique situation (assuming that you are not an affiliate marketer). A large majority of people getting the message are seeing only minor changes in their rankings (Even after the 2-4 week lag time). Getting the notification does not mean that your are going to lose rankings or get a penalty. There are a lot of cases where webmasters (or their SEO's) never built a single link and are still getting the message. The majority of people who are loosing rankings are only loosing rankings on a few over-optimized keywords, and on a limited number of pages.
In the case where someone has lost a ton of their rankings because of massive low quality link building and over optimization (and in many cases low quality websites), I still do not suggest submitting a re-consideration request. Most of the rankings that were lost were because of devalued links not because of a penalty. And most trust penalties/filters are short lived. If your site has lost that many rankings, inviting Google to do a full manual review of your site is a very bold move, and you must be prepared to do a ton of work to get a positive answer (most people are not getting positive answers even after spending weeks and hundreds of man hours to "clean up" their links). And here is the kicker, getting a positive answer is not going to cause Google to revalue the unnatural links, so your rankings are not going to rebound as much as you might hope. They may shorten the length of the trust penalty, but the trust penalty is short lived anyways (It must be short lived else competitors could easily wack eachother). You don't need Google's written forgiveness to rebuilt trust, you can do that by building better content, being socially engaged etc.
Here are 2 scenarios to illustrate my point
-
Scenario 1 - You contact Google, they tell you that you have "Unnatural Links". You go about removing whatever links you can that you believe to be unnatural. You reply to Google and they respond telling you that you still have unnatural links.. Repeat multiple times and still not get a positive answer from Google. This is what is happening to most people.
- Result - You have removed a ton of links, some of which were likely still helping you, and Google still ignores your plea. But now you are marked as a admitted offender and have been manually reviewed, which only makes it tougher to recover. On top of that you have spent time that could have been spent improving your site, which would ultimately have a much longer term impact on your trust/rankings, and also reduce chances of future dips in rankings due to unnatural links.
-
Scenario 2 - You do the above steps, but instead you do finally get a positive response from Google. Your rankings are still not going to bounce back to where they were prior to the devaluation happening. Google is not going to revalue links its automated algorithms have devalued.
- Google may remove/shorten the trust penalty which will help slightly with your rankings, but it will not get you back you original rankings. and again, most trust penalties are 1-3 months long. And even that time can be reduced if positive trust signals are introduced.
-
-
I dont see how doing nothing will do any good at all, we have dropped massively for 75% of our keywords and Google is telling us they have detected unnatural links, i dont believe doing nothing will help.
Google is telling us to get our links in order and show them we have got it sorted by resubmitting, surely ignoring will just ensure you get penalized?
-
It is better to do nothing in almost all cases.
Submitting for reconsideration is not going to undue any devaluation that is done on links they found as unnatural. In extreme cases where all/most of your links appear to be unnatural, you may receive an additional trust penalty, but that only lasts a couple of months at the most.
Google has been devaluing links that appear unnatural for a long time, the only thing new is that they are now sending notifications.
Build quality content and links, expand your social reach etc.. you will rebound from any ranking losses over time. Use the notification as a wake up call that quality is better than quantity.
-
Just got this message on one of my sites as well. I thought we had been doing everything by the book but am finding a lot of directory submission websites the farther down I go. Most of our links are from solid sites with solid page ranks, but there are some directories like this: http://www.56resolutions.info/Business/Equipment/?s=H that I think may be giving us some problems.
I guess our next step is talking to everyone here to find out who submitted the site to these directories and then attempt to get them removed.
-
Have you questioned the SEO Company About their practices and how they gain your links?
This could REALLY help us here give you the best possible answer (even though right off the bat, #2 seems like a bad idea, just for the fact you need to see what is going on, so it can be stopped if necessary before other sites are penalized)
The Best Answer is #1 in my opinion
Since the most probable cause for your penalty is content farms and overuse of anchor texts, here is a nice post about a person who went through that
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice
This is a little old, but it is a WBF on this issue
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-penalty
Here is also a post from Dr. Pete on cutting the bad links strategies
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-recover-from-bad-links
IMHO
I would personally (since you know it is a penalty cause you were warned) use Dr. Pete's article to help you track down the bad links, attempt to remove them, fix any other issues you may have on your site that are "questionable" and submit a reconsideration letting them know you worked with an SEO firm, and you took matters into your own hands, cleaned them up, and it won't happen again.
And then you wait....
Hope this helps
Shane
-
I have posted the same question this morning regarding one of my sites, so il keep updated with comments here as well
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it a good practice to get link for your original page by shorter URL links
Hello Moz Community, I have a question regarding getting links on bitly, tiny, or an other url shortner, Is it a good practice to get link for your page by shorter url I mean lets suppose i am getting natural guest post link from content for my blog home page
Link Building | | JoeySolicitor
https://coupontoaster.com/blog/ ; and shorten it with bitly and then hyper link so is it a good practice am I getting the same power and SEO consideration as if i would have done this without url shortener. And what anchor texts shall i be using like rich anchor text or any other like click here, visit here, bitly or etc Please kindly help me with this thanks1 -
Why are my total links to site going down but my average position keeps getting better on Webmaster?
Google Search Console says I have 141 Total Links. 2 months ago, I had 160 links. My average position went from 60.1 to 58.9.
Link Building | | guerratheron010 -
Backlinks vs External Links vs Referral Links vs Outbound links
Hello all, I was just wondering if you could explain the difference between all the links above? I'm confused as they all seem to be the same or similar and I would just like to clearly know what distinguishes them from eachother. Thanks for your help, Jayne
Link Building | | NCOREGSEO0 -
Outgoing links
Hi Guy's, We have a website with no outgoing links (only Facebook). Is this a good way to score better in the SERPS? Or is it better to have some outgoing "relevant" links for a natural linkjuice? Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
Free tool which includes a link back to my site
On one of my sites I provide a free tool to other webmasters to use that allows them to copy some code to use the free tool on their website and under the tool on it says "Powered by: mysite.co.uk" with a link to "mysite.co.uk". Now I have no real control over which sites can come and use this free tool (a tool to test how fast an internet connection is), on the whole though it is aimed at a specific niche but a range of sites do use it which means good or crap sites can pick up the free code to place into their sites. The link to mysite.co.uk is now always mysite.co.uk as the anchor text, I used to use the websites name (which is the actual name of the URL - link to site at end of post) so the links were keyword rich but only to my sites genuine name, however I now just leave it as the URL to my site. I am not aiming to do anything untowards with the linking other than to get the acknowledgement that it was provided for free by my site, however I'm wondering if google etc will be able to tell they are natural and not dodgy? My site is: http://bit.ly/MsNQwS (n.b. a new improved test is being created before anyone says it's not accurate). 🙂
Link Building | | Wardy0 -
Do links from the second page of an article pass link juice?
I have been writing for some sites with a high overall page rank and the articles are being viewed as quality by search engines as well. However, they usually put a link to my site at the very end of the article and then break the article down into two pages to increase ad revenue. It seems that I'm not getting much credit for that link even if the page has a high SEOmoz/PR score. I want to know if I am getting the benefit from these links. If not, how do I make sure I get the most bang, even if my link is on a second page of the article? Here is an example of what I mean: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/
Link Building | | LawrenceWatkins0 -
Do No follow links from social media platforms transfer authority or value when they link to third party websites?
With social media playing a bigger role in SEO (since the Panda, Penguin updates etc) and how search engines rank sites now, does anybody know why Twitter for instance has 'no follow' when I check my client's websites under 'inbound links' on Open Site Explorer?
Link Building | | caroline19770 -
There is a New link to my Site but I can see it on link report ?why ?
Hi I found out using link campaign and Open site explorer that my competitors where getting links from this page http://www.visitgreece.gr/en/activities/land_sports/golf So I conatc the admins and added our golf courses too Is the dunes and the bay course in the middle of the page But this happened 3 weeks ago and still this linking domain is not appaering in my campaign why is that any ideas ? does it take so much time to appera to SEOmoz ? Or the problem is because they are linking 2 diffrent sites ? my site is www.costanavarinogolf.com Thanks a lot in advance for your help
Link Building | | grzontan0