HELP - got the following message - Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links
-
Hi All,
While trying to grow we used several freelancers and small companies for guest blogging, article submissions etc.
We lost about 90% of traffic from our peek at December.
We don't know if it is related but we got the following message last week:
"Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to www.domain.com"Is it related (getting this message after two months of losing traffic)?
What to do????
(P.S
We fired most of the companies we used months ago since we noticed they used bad methods. We didn't believe it can hurt us - just thought it would be useless...)Please Help...
-
Hi there,
A lot of people have been receiving these warnings for blog network use and other low-quality/paid links. I wrote about it on the blog recently. My advice is to do your best to remove the links that are clearly low-quality - Google is telling you directly to clean things up, and may hit you with a penalty if things don't get better.
-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2008/07/requesting-reconsideration-using-google.html
I did see a interview with a google staffer, who said thet they have never come accross a case when a compeditor had did such a thing, but most claim it so.
I would assume it ws one of the people you hired.
-
The thing is that we didn't hire "professionals" until we were very highly ranked and were "busy" of work and had to outsource it. We tried several companies and freelancers and within a couple of months stayed only with the best one but it seems that the damage was done.
I always thought that what they did can't hurt me but rather won't do any good.
Otherwise, what prevents me from hire these guys to "promote" my competitors?
Who knows, maybe someone did it to me?Do you know what is the proper way to ask for reconsideration?
Thanks
-
I have seen this particular warning on a website with over 9,000 inbound links and 2,000 inbound linking domains. When going through various link reports what I noticed were a lot of SPAM sites pointing to the website that the owner had no control over.
Here's my take - I think this is just a warning and certainly nothing to lose a ton of sleep over. Google must certainly know that there's no way you or I can be in complete control of inbound links. If Google worked that way it would be all too easy to crush your competition. If a competitor gets pissed that you just took them over on Page1, Rank 1 what's to stop them from loading up black hat SEO tools and going to town on your domain?
My advice is to continue building ethical links that conform to Google's guidelines. If you are already doing this, there's no way you can control the other links in most cases so ignore the warning. I think Google just wants you to be aware of it so that if you ARE building the bad links yourself you stop doing it and wasting time/money on it.
-
Bingo!!
I think it certainly is, but sorry i have no idea how to go about fixing this as you cant just remove them.
To be honest, it is a good thing for those that had to compete with you honestly.
I cant be too harsh on you, as they temptation to get easy links is great, but so are the risks.
You could try asking for reconsideration, if you are flagged, but there is no way Goolge is going to give you your link juice back.
-
Hi!
It may very well be a direct correlation of your previously mentioned link building methods. You mentioned guest blogging - this is one of the best ways to build links if done to reputable sites, so that might not be the cause..
Could you go into more detail on some of the other techniques they used? How many links, how long of a period they were build, and perhaps a live example of something they did? We should be able to tell based off of that info.
Thanks,
Casey
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
-
Footer no follow links
Just interested to know when putting links at the foot of the site some people use no-follow tags. I'm thinking about internal pages and social networks. Is this still necessary or is it an old-fashioned idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Is there a tool to find out if a URL has been deemed "SPAM" by GOOGLE
I am currently doing a link audit on one of my sites and I am coming across some links that appear to be spam. Is there a tool that I can plug their URL into to see if they have been deemed spam by GOOGLE?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mozd0 -
Google webmaster tool (GWT) owner removal issue
Hi! I have a new client, the former agency added the client property with the agency account so we had to create a new GA account (as you can’t transfer ownership at the account level) but we also kept access to the former account to keep historical data. We were granted owner access to the GWT (which is more flexible, you can remove owners and creators) and we now want to remove former agency users. We have 3 adresses. One was verified with delegation method (no pb for removal), one with meta tag (no pb) and one with Google Analytics. Here it becomes tricky as Google says regarding GA verif method “If this account was verified using a Google Analytics tracking code, you should make sure that the user you want to unverify is no longer an administrator on the Analytics account. Otherwise, removal may not be permanent”. The thing is that this user has the same email address as the one used to create the agency GA account (no ownership transfer) so I basically can’t remove admin rights. The other possibility, as Google mentions when I try to unlink this user, is “remove the administrator status in Google Analytics or delete the Google Analytics tracking code on the website”. But we don’t want to remove the code as we still want to track data with the former account for historical analysis purposes. Has anyone ever faced this situation? Do you know how to handle this? Do you think that unlinking the GWT and the GA accounts will unverify the GA method? Many thanks in advance ! Ennick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennick0 -
Do 410 show in the 404 not found section in Google Webmaster Tools?
Question: Do 410 show in the 404 not found section in Google Webmaster Tools? Specific situation: We got rid of an entire subdomain except for a few pages that we 301'd to relevant content on our main domain. The rest return a 404 not found. These show up in our google webmaster tools as crawl errors. I was wondering since 410 is a content gone error and we intentionally want this content gone, if we switch it to 410, does Google still report it as a 404 error? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Google lost 9,000 inbound links
I logged into GWT today. It typically reports that our page has about 9,000 inbound links, but today it said we have 225. There are no warnings or messages about any manual action. In fact, this site has never received any penalties or warnings. Since November I have used the disavow tool to remove porn links that a competitor has pointed at my site. Typically I go through Google's "new" links list and add any of the obviously bad links to the disavow list. That effort seemed to be going ok, and my site does not seem to be penalized for this negative seo. The 225 links that remain are scattered back through 2010. This site has been online since 2005 and has accumulated lots of links over the years. Some great, some not so great. Queries are down about 1500 per day since last week, about a 15% drop. There is a slight drop in some keyword rankings, but nothing huge, and most of the SERPS I track do not seem to be impacted. The PR is steady at 4, where it's been for years. So... what do you think I should do? Just watch it for a week and see if they come back? Try removing the "disavow" list just in case it some how messed things up (looks ok on the surface to me). Has this ever happened to anyone else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
Is Google Webmaster tools Accurate?
Is Google webmaster Tools data completely inaccurate, or am I just missing something? I noticed a recent surge in 404 errors detected 3 days ago (3/6/11) from pages that have not existed since November 2011. They are links to tag and author archives from pages initially indexed in August 2011. We switched to a new site in December 2011 and created 301 redirects from categories that no longer exist, to new categories. I am a little perplexed since the Google sitemap test shows no 404 errors, neither does SEO MOZ Crawl test, yet under GWT site diagnostics, these errors, all 125 of them, just showed up. Any thought/insights? We've worked hard to ensure a smooth site migration and now we are concerned. -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyjohnson0 -
Asking for a link in return for doing a webmaster a favor.
I had this idea that I would reach out to webmasters in my niche and offer to teach them something - for example, how to set up a killer Facebook landing page. In return I would ask them for a link from their site. I have a few quesitons: 1. Would this be considered "white hat"? 2. How would you word the email to the webmasters? I was thinking of something like this: "Hi [webmaster name]. I was checking out your website and your Facebook page. I was wondering if you would like me to show you how to create a great Facebook landing page that will gain you more fans. (As an example, you can see my Facebook page here: [insert link].) In return, all I ask for is a mention, in the form of a link, from your site. What do you think?" What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Link to Google Places, or Google Maps?
On our contact page, we offer a link to view Google Maps for directions. I'm wondering should we be linking to our Google Places page instead, or just stick with the Google Map link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateMCC0