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?
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
-
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
Link Building
Hi Mozzers, I work for an IT company specialising in outsourcing Cisco Engineers worldwide. Due to being involved heavily in outsourcing, I'm finding it impossible to generate genuine and organic links to our website. My question is that is it essential to have back links back to our website to achieve high search engine rankings? I'm unable to get clients and other partners to provide links as we're the outsourced company,but I can get backlinks from unrelated c ompanies. For example we're running a CSR initiative with a National Gym relating to health & fitness, also links from our web designers etc... Do these links have any type of value? Any help and feedback would be greatly appreciated. Jason 🙂
Link Building | | 4Cornernetworks0 -
I am getting links on people's wordpress blogs but are not showing up on the just discovered tool. Is it true that wordpress links are no-follow links that do give off any link-juice?
A blogger told me that "wordpress.com does not allow blogs to show advertisements or use links to sites that sell merchandise of any kind" is this true? Am i wasting my outreach time trying to get links from wordpress operated blogs?
Link Building | | odegi0 -
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 -
Does link from a blog in Blogger.com helps in SEO ?
Do you guys think that adding good quality blogs to blogger.com and then getting a link from those blogs will help ?
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Which is better - A) links from multiple IP addresses, or B) Links with more associated social signals?
If you had to choose: A) 100 links contained in posts on 100 PR2* blogs, all on separate IP addresses, where none of the posts had associated social signals, or B) 100 links contained in posts within a single PR2* blog (single IP address), where each of the posts had 20 associated social signals, Which would you choose to increase your SERP performance? *I chose PR2 so that PageRank would not be a factor in the decision.
Link Building | | JohnScottDixon0 -
Reciprocal Links Or One Way Links?
After reading a recent blog post on guest blogging and ways to build relationships for link building purposes, I began to wonder about something. It is my understanding that one way backlinks are superior to reciprocal linkage, but reciprocal is better than no link at all. So is it still worthwhile to do reciprocal guest blogging, and will the value of the links be worth it when completed? Or should we just be of the opinion that: One Way Link > Reciprocal > No link
Link Building | | dignan990