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
-
Ran a backlink competitor analysis and found that the competitor has their links coming from various linkedin and youtube posts but my client does the same thing and im not seeing any links coming from those sources for them?
Ran a backlink competitor analysis and found that the competitor has their links coming from various linkedin and youtube posts but my client does the same thing and im not seeing any links coming from those sources for them?
Link Building | | Stongex0 -
Link Exchange
Is link exchange always bad? What if I want to add a link for other related products on my site which I do not offer, and the other site does the same for me? Will it be better to rather an article for each other product and link to somebody, than have one page with a list of other products to other sites. For example. We do training. Lets say we offer computer training. We search companies that does health and safety training offer to put their course on our site with a link to them, if they do the same.
Link Building | | Heinwest0 -
Indirect Link Earning via dofollow Links In News Articles
Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus. I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute. Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords: http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/ Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort. However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here: http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/ Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS. If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page. To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page. Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Link Building | | bionewstx2 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
What are the new ways of Link Building which will get quality links?
Hi We are doing following kinds of Link Building: 1. Article marketing 2. Directory Submission 3. Guest Blogging 4. Press Release submission 5. Infographics (Viral Marketing) I know blog commenting and links from discussion forums are considered as greyhat / blackhat by google. So I want suggestions on some other ethical(Whitehat SEO) ways of Link Building to get quality Links. Also suggest me some Free article submission sites which give " dofollow-links" Thank You
Link Building | | Virrtuo0 -
Link building
i want to ask a question. i am sure this is kind black hat seo. look at this web site http://www.199999dollars.com/ if we also create website like this and put a banner as domain for sale and in the footer put back links to our domain ? thanks
Link Building | | idreams0 -
How long does it take for crawlers to update links? As in number of back links
How long does it take for crawlers to update links? As in number of back links
Link Building | | tom14cat140 -
Links from .edu sites
I have a band website and was thinking of making some link bait pages specifically designed to get links from high page rank music colleges and then funnel that page rank to my landing pages on my band site. I am planning on finding out what these colleges link to and create great information on pages on my site that the high page rank college websites will link to thereby boosting my trust and authority. How much will the trust and authority boost my site in the search engines? Because the colleges will be music colleges they should be relevant to my band site. Does this sound like a good strategy? Take care, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100