Unnatural Link Warning - What to Do??
-
I just want to ask your advice or suggestions, my new client site received a link warning from Google regarding unnatural link, as I've checked his site backlinks using Seomoz site explorer there are almost 4000+ backlinks and almost 3/4 of the total links are from forum profile spam and blog comment spam. I know it is impossible to remove all those links totally. I would like to ask your advice if what's the best thing to do? Setting up a brand new site and domain or doing a cleanup. Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for the additional advice.
-
Wait! Before you go "creating new quality links", make sure you are not making things worse!
If you've got a manual penalty, and that coincided with a traffic drop then this means that you are not going to recover until someone at Google manually looks at a reconsideration request and determines that you have done your best to clean up the link spam.
What I have found, however, is that many website owners cannot be objective when it comes to cleaning up their link profile. They look at a link and say, "Well, that's a good link - it's from a related directory." Or, it's in the blogroll of a niche website - it can't be considered spam.
The quality guidelines say this:
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."
So, when you are thinking of "creating new quality links", whatever you do, don't go doing more of the same but simply replace anchor text with your domain url!!! This is something that may work for sites that have been affected by Penguin. We think that if the algorithm looks at your backlinks and sees that the vast majority are url links as opposed to anchor texted keyword links then you will be ok. But, it's a different story for manual unnatural links warnings.
As mentioned by others, you've got to address every single link that was self created with the purpose of improving your website's SERPS. You've got to make a good attempt to get the link removed or nofollowed. (Document that you contacted the email on site, used a contact form on site, and/or used the email in the whois info.) In your reinclusion request send copies of all of the emails you have sent and received. Tell Google that you realize you went against the quality guidelines and that you are committed to following them from this point out. Do this and you should get the penalty removed.
-
Thanks Donnie, I really appreciate your response
-
Yes new links will help out. However if you follow the article I mentioned it has a great 6 month plan to regaining trust.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website
I would highly recommend using this article as your 6 month plan it has everything you need in it and in detail.
-
Okay thanks for the response
-
Massive drop..you really need to remove those links then.
Create the spreadsheet of all the links that are spam (this is most time consuming), then use one of the tools I mentioned or Donnie mentioned or others. And just maintain those campaigns by sending notices every week or two. This would help you take down as many as you can but of course you have to make the list of all of the spam links.
Make sure to keep these documents on a spreadsheet and then show Google, Google will take into good faith because they understand some webmasters aren't available or will not respond.
-
Yeah, massive drop-down of traffic. By the way thanks for the suggestion, really appreciate it
-
Yes, that would help. But to be reconsidered, you should try your best to remove as many as you can.
So keep building links but on make sure to send notices to these sites to have these links taken down. 4000+ is A LOT of links and hopefully you can take at least 50% off with notices.
As Donnie mentioned, you should make sure that you are negatively effected by these links. Did traffic drop when or around the time you got the notice?
-
Thanks for the response. How about just continue building good quality links and forget the bad links, do you think it will help?
-
Do you think creating some new link (quality links) will help out?
-
I've heard many opinions on this matter, to start off Google sent these warnings to many people and also mentioned to not worry: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-unnatural-links-warnings.
Some people say to just start building good links and forget the bad links.
However, some people say to clean them up using:
Since you are working on an existing site I recommend reading this article:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website
-
Depends how was the site ranking before hand.
I was recently suggested by others to use LinkDelete.com and other sites like Rmoov.com can help remove some of these links. However, it can be almost futile with so many links. You have to look at how the site was ranking before and if removing the links will help you and the amount of resources that need to be used.
Best ways is to extract the links from OSE and GWT, and then use some tools like the above links and send out mass takedown notices. But 4000 is a lot!
Weigh out your options and resources and come to what would best benefit the site and company. If your online presences is vital, it might not be a good idea to start a new domain etc.
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
-
Disavow links from legit sites but have spammy link profiles?
I'm currently doing a backlink audit for our site with a LOT of backlinks. Some of the linking sites are legitimate business websites in our industry who have linked to us for a totally legitimate reason (we have good content!). However, these businesses themselves have a spammy backlink profile—that is, the only sites linking to that site are obvious link farm sites. Here is an illustration: spammyseolinks.com; payforseo.xyz; blackhat.ru ==all link to==> legitbusiness.com ==links to==> mysite.com Should I disavow this backlink? I guess it's not really giving me much SEO worth since it surely been branded a spammy junk domain, but then again, it's a real website that we've earned a link from because we're doing stuff the right way. Is it hurting or helping me?
Link Building | | THandorf0 -
Reciprocol Links
Am I correct in stating that linking to every article about your company is a bad idea. I see a lot of sites with followed links to the articles that link to them. Is this not devaluing the link? I've been recommending removing the links or no indexing the page and no following the links. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Link Building | | brandonschultz0 -
Unnatural inbound link warning
Hey guys, One of our clients has just reported that they've received an email from WMT stating they may have "Unnatural Inbound Links". I've done some research and found this link which certainly seemed applicable; http://searchengineland.com/how-to-remove-your-unnatural-inbound-links-130073 As you can imagine, going through all of the client's backlinks may be a time consuming process so I was just wondering what the time frame for these Google warnings is like? Because we've got the email now, does it mean that a bad link was built fairly recently? Or could it have been a number of months ago? Also, what are people's experiences dealing with these type of emails? Is it just a case of sifting through links and then re-submitting to WMT? Thanks
Link Building | | Webrevolve0 -
Do external links hurt ?
Hi there... My company develops policy management software for SharePoint (called DocRead). Obviously, our main SEO push is purely for the product as that's what pays the bills. However, we also issue a weekly SharePoint Community newsletter in HTML as we run a large community group for SharePoint. Each newsletter has lots of outbound links (all coming from the same domain as our product is hosted on). These links won't really have anything to do with 'Policy Management' as they are purely to do with SharePoint. I was wondering if these will harm our ranking in anyway? FYI : The newsletters are here : http://www.collaboris.com/sharepoint-newsletters/all-newsletters and the product is here : http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software Thanks in advance Mark
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
Advetorial links
How do you scientifically value advertorial links. I have a site who is willing to buy advertorial in large online sites which will contain links. (I would prefer they invested in content on their own site). The DA on these sites is universally extremely strong. the PA of the examples I've seen is pretty low. The site has strong DA matching it's main competition and is performing pretty well in terms of ranking. Question: how do you value this kind of link in terms of the amount of £ the publications want to charge. Anybody have a formula or a logical process which would provide solid advice rather than don't infringe Google's T&C's which I've already mentioned to them. Any thoughts appreciated.
Link Building | | Shivvyt0 -
Great idea to get back links in short order; however the links would be unrelated. . Is it worth the effort . BTW, it's a white hat method. Should I proceed?
I have come up with a very creative way to get some great back links using white hat methods. The problem is that the back links to the site would be to an interior page or external promotional website which then have links back to the main website. What kind of value for the main domain would this potentially achieve. What are peopLes thoughts on this idea?
Link Building | | FidelityOne0 -
Link Builder Tool
Has anyone used the new wordtracker link building tool? linkbuilder.wordtracker.com If so, please give your opinions.
Link Building | | azguy0