I am getting an error message from Google Webmaster Tools and I don't know what to do to correct the problem
-
The message is:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.whitegyr.com/,We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
I have always tried to follow Google's guidelines and don't know what I am doing wrong, I have eight different websites all getting this warning and I don't know what is wrong, is there anyone you know that will look at my sites and advise me what I need to do to correct the problem?
Website with this warning:
artistalaska.com
cosmeticshandbook.com
homewindpower.ws
montanalandsale.com
outdoorpizzaoven.net
shoes-place.com
silverstatepost.com
www.whitegyr.com -
Great advice!
-
I'd take a step back and stop building links, and start cleaning up the links that have already been built that are a bit fishy.
There's an article directory on a site with a domain about best pet insurance that links to the shoe store (http://bestpetinsurance.org/myarticledirectory/). A UK SEO directory has a link to the same shoe site, under the category of flowers (http://www.seoukdirectory.com/index.php?search=Internet).
If these links were built with your knowledge and you have access to the list of links that were built, go and remove the ones that were bought to just be links and serve no purpose to a reader. Also go through Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, and Open Site Explorer to look at incoming links and remove those bad links.
Look at the content in those websites. Clean out the junk and make the content good enough that someone would link there without prompting.
In short, think about if you were sitting down with someone from Google and explaining why these sites should be included in the index and have a high ranking. Make sure that everything under your control can be explained and is not embarrassing or going against their guidelines. Clean things up, then ask for a reinclusion request.
-
So now we should look for links back to our site using the site's URL as anchor text?
-
Here is some reading that may help explain what changes Google is making as of late to combat unnatural linking practices:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-survive-googles-unnatural-links-warnings-avoid-overoptimisation
-
The site: operator would be going to Google and typing in
site:artistalaska.com
for your search. It's telling google "My search is for everything you will show me on this one particular site"
-
People who do that are often ones who don't know about SEO or wanting to optimize anchor text and the ones who haven't been asked for specific information for a link. They're the ones who help contribute to a natural-looking link profile. If all of your links have anchor text that looks like someone coached them about what to write, it looks a bit suspicious to the engines and less like someone linked there on their own and more like they were prompted to do so.
-
"Web Page Design" is the keyword phrase we have targeted for our online web business and when you search for that phrase on Google our site is in #6 on the first page a place we have held for years. And yes we have asked for that anchor text and have never heard of using our site's URL as anchor text. Who does that anyway?
-
I would agree that this really is an unnatural links warning even if that is not stated in the actual message. I took a look at a couple of sites to see whether your backlink profile looked natural.
The first one I looked at was shoes-place.com. If you look at it in OSE and select "Anchor text", you will see that your most common anchor texts are your keywords. A natural link profile would have predominantly the URL as anchor text. It looks like you have placed a lot of directory links using keyword anchor text.
Next, I looked at whitegyr.com. You've got a whackload of links using the anchor text "web page design" and the next popular ones are all keyword anchor texted links like "good web content", "web design prices", etc. Your URL is not even on the first page (EDIT - I don't mean on the first page of Google, but rather, on the first page of what anchor texts your links have) when it comes to anchor text. This is definitely not natural.
I think you have an uphill battle and I don't envy you.
-
Thanks Keri:
Thanks for the look and will clean up those items this AM. And look after your other
suggestions ASAP, one question though, what is a “a site:” ? -
I took a quick look at the first site. I don't know about triggering any type of warning, but are you aware that there are multiple pages with lorem ipsum text still? http://artistalaska.com/about.htm You might want to clean that up for a better user experience. Also, some pages are indexed that you probably don't want viewable, such as http://www.artistalaska.com/$_alternate1.htm.
Just those eight sites got targeted, and not the others that you also did (via http://spyonweb.com). Look and see if you can find something in common with those that the others don't have? I noticed this page http://www.whitegyr.com/using_free_link_exchange_directo.htm and while the Google notice doesn't mention linking, I'd maybe clean that up as a preventative tool.
Right now I'm on limited bandwidth and time, but if this were me I'd go through and do a site: on each of the sites and see what google has indexed and see if anything jumps out (like the default text, see if there's evidence of anything being hacked, etc). I'd go into open site explorer and look and inlinks and look to see anything fishy is there. I'd look at the source code to see if something looks off there (like a bunch of hidden text). I'd look to see if I was using unique content on the site.
-
There was no "Unnatural Link Warning" >>> rather it was a "Quality Issues on" warning but no explicit explanation and I do not know what is needed to remove the problem.
-
Read this article about Unnatural Link warning. It provides a good explanation and how to access the problem. I hope it helps.
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
-
Google didn't show my correct language-version homepage.
I have a website which serves two languages - English and Chinese. My English homepage can be indexed by Google. But when I search the brand term in English, Google returns my Chinese homepage. I already added the hreflang attributes. And I'm working on building the XML sitemap for three languages. What other things I can work on to fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsteimle0 -
Bulk URL Removal in Webmaster Tools
One of Wordpress sites was hacked (for about 10 hours), and Google picked up 4000+ urls in the index. The site is fixed, but I'm stuck with all those urls in the index. All the urls of of the form: walkerorthodontics.com/index.php?online-payday-cash-loan.htmloncewe The only bulk removal option I could find was to remove an entire folder, but I can't do that, as it would only leave the homepage and kill off everything else. For some crazy reason, the removal tools doesn't support wildcards, so that obvious solution is right out. So, how do it get rid of 4000 results? And no, waiting around for them to 404 out of the index isn't an option.
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?
I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
Redirect url that don't end with slash
Hi! I need to add in my .htaccess a way to redirect URL that don't end with / to the one thats end wth /.For example, I need http://example.com to redirect to http://www.example.com/. And, of course, this redirection should be only for URLs that don't end with /, so I don't get double // at the end. I already have the code to redirect the non-www to the www, but can't find a way to do the slash thing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | arielbortz0 -
Why won't the Moz plug in "Analyze Page" tool read data on a Big Commerce site?
We love our new Big Commerce site, just curious as to what the hang up is.
Technical SEO | | spalmer0 -
All of my incoming links to my site are gone in Webmaster Tools!?
I just checked webmaster tools and noticed that all of the links I have acquired over the last few months are gone except for 1 website. Did something change just recently? Is this a glitch? http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Thanks in advance for your help! Brant
Technical SEO | | PMC-3120870