Please help me find unnatural links
-
My URL is: http://bit.ly/hBJAG4
Just been hit with an unnatural imbound links penalty and don't know what to do. I haven't done any link building work for the last 3 years other then creating an infographic at Christmas that was incredibly popular: http://bit.ly/14lao4G
I have 0 paid links and I have never spammed a blog or forum.
The only thing I can think of is back in 2006/2007 I was directory crazy - I got listed in all of the (what I thought at the time) were good quality paid directories - could this have come back to haunt me?
Why do you think I have just been penalized now when these directory links have been there for years?
Should I start getting rid of the directory links? - they did cost me a lot of cash.
Can any of you spot any other links that could be seen as unnatural?
Thanks to anyone who can help in advance
-
and thanks for the good advice, I never looked at it that way
-
NP
-
"Unnatural" does not always have to mean "paid". The problem that I see is not with the infographic, but with the embed code. You are asking people to embed the infographic and include your desired anchor text. Now, the debatable thing here is that the anchor text is your brand...but it could also be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate the search engine results for "SEO Company".
Unnatural links warnings are all about breaking the quality guidelines. Under link schemes there are a few things that could apply to infographics. They say "Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme."
Matt Cutts put out a webmaster video a few months ago about infographics and the gist of it was that they are ok, but you should not be trying to do it with the intention of manipulating search results. If people choose to imbed your infographic and decide to link to you then that's great. But, when you start dictating what anchor text then it gets iffy.
I'd likely start off with the directory listings first though and you can always go after the infographic links as a last resort.
BTW...if you pass your reconsideration without removing your infographic links, can you let me know? It will help me in knowing how to advise others in this situation.
-
Hi Marie, I hear most of what you are saying and will try removing some of the worst directory links, but I don't understand what you mean when you say the infographic links could be penalized - none of those links were paid for, I submitted to a few free infographic blogs and the rest are 100% natural
-
If you got a manual warning like this it's often because a competitor has filed a spam report on you. At that point, it doesn't matter when links were acquired...What Google wants to see is that you get rid of (or make attempts to get rid of) the vast majority of the links that were not naturally earned.
In working with sites with unnatural links penalties I have seen a couple that were penalized (I believe) because of widespread directory links. I see on your ahrefs profile that you've got 90 backlinks using the anchor text "search engine optimization". That type of pattern doesn't happen naturally.
What's going to be difficult is deciding whether all of your links have to be addressed or whether you can save some. You could take the tactic of addressing one type of link at a time and reconsidering. But my guess is that the infographic links as well as the directory links are going to have to go. I see that you have some guest blogs too...these are debatable. If you've got lots of them and they are using anchor text Google may want to see them gone as well before they lift the penalty.
-
Did you pull your link profile from webmaster tools, opensiteexplorer, majestic, or ahrefs? I would start with pulling your profile from as many of these as you can. Are you sure a competitor didn't hit you with some negative SEO?
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
-
Disvowing Links?
I ran a report through SEM rush and it came back with 174 toxic links ( score 100-60). I have been reading mixed reviews about what to do. Most of the websites are not relevant and appear to be linking to the images. Should I disavow these links? Would it help SEO? Or should I leave it be?
Link Building | | higherimages0 -
Should I disavow these links?
Hi all, I have a site that is a year old, we have been building backlinks organically - probably around 50 or so - then almost overnight we had100s of spammy links. Screenshot here: https://ibb.co/cijiub My questions: Should I disavow these? What happens if I don't disavow these? Can I work out where they came from? If I disavow a few of them, is this a token offering to the Google Gods that will lower my risk of being penalised? Thank you. cijiub
Link Building | | Bee1591 -
Do links from between common sites you run count as "bad" links?
Hi everyone,
Link Building | | AMA-DataSet
Iv recently been asked to review a group of sites. There are 3 sites, each of these sites has a link to the other two sites within the footer or the navigation.
These site are about a similar topic each provides a different perceptive or aims at a specific section of the industry so its not like the links are to irreverent sites. However because the links are in a global section they are repeated thousands of times on each site and count for a large proportion of the link profile to each site, I don't think this is good practise and I want to remove them or at least add a no-follow but my client insists they are relevant to each other and doesn't not want the links removing. What would be best in this situation? remove them? no-follow them? or leave them? Thank you in advance,
Liam0 -
Wierd link
We have recently receive linek from one website. The site is quite very powerful for the word we try to rank, however the link is kind of wired. This is how it looks like: http://villasdiani.com/?db The webmaster of the site said that he ads (?db) on the end so as we would see on our analytics the traffic from his site.. Also the link is from footer...is this good or it does not have value
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
OSE shows links on sites but can't find links
Hi mozzers, I'm cleaning up our backlink profile and looking up anchortexts in OSE. I downloaded and selected one anchortext. However when I go to the sites OSE found, I can't find the links. I look in the source code and onpage keywords. Is it because of my lack of skills that I can't find the links 🙂 or isn't OSE working properly.
Link Building | | StephWeigert0 -
High quality links but where do you find them?
Hi, A lot of the answers on here point to building high quality links, which makes sense but where do you find these links? Lets say the website sells Football Boots, the current keyword you are trying to rank for is say 'Indoor Football Boots'. How do you now go about looking for those links? Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
How do I find a reliable company to do back links?
Can you tell me what questions to ask in order to find a reputable company to do back links? Do you have any companies that you can recommend? What should a service like this cost?
Link Building | | 4RealLocal0 -
Find a specific link
Is there a tool that allows me to find a specific link. We just had a strong link type show up, but I can't find it anywhere in my backlink profile.
Link Building | | trafficlinker0