To Fix An Incoming Link Or Not?
-
I recently received a unnatural link notice from Google. The thing is, I haven't done any link building in the last two years.
So, I looked at my latest links report within Google Webmaster Tools and see where one of our dealer's website has been updated recently and now includes a site-wide link to us.
Site note: My brand name as the anchor text ... no keywords nearby.
I think this is what may be causing the problem because nothing else within the report really jumps out at me. Also, it lines up with the timeline. It looks like they changed their site to include the link at the beginning of April. Google was noticing the links throughout April and to the present. I got the notice May 19th.
Now, I have a good relationship with this dealer and can have him change anything I want at the drop of a hat.
The question is, by having him change it am I admitting to Google wrongdoing and thus hurting myself by inviting further scrutiny. Should I leave it as is since it truly is a legitimate link?
Google having false positives like this really muddies the water.
Thanks guys!
-
In your shoes, I would send a short reconsideration request and explain the situation: that you don't do link building, that what you think it might look odd is that link but you didn't requested, is natural so you can't touch it - and see the reply - if you have some manual action in place or not.
They are not hunting us down - but they do send a lot of notices like that to innocent people so it's worth dealing with it so you won't be colateral damage in this spamy link war.
Cheers.
-
Awesome responses guys. That's how I was leaning. Google's fishing expedition isn't going to work on me.
-
You could change it without informing Google and just see what happens.
Personally I wouldn't do anything until you've actually seen a decrease in traffic and ranking placement. I received an unnatural link notice in GWMT back in March for one of my sites and have yet to see anything happen to it. There was black hat SEO work done on that site in the past (not by me, of course) so I wouldn't be surprised if all the sudden it took a hit but to this day I've seen nothing but improvement in my target keywords for that site.
I feel like if I had responded to Google and submitted my site for reconsideration I would have seen bigger penalties. So I created a re-inclusion package and waited... two months later I see no problems so I'm still waiting.
-
If it were me I would leave it as is. It is a legitimate link coming from a dealer web site. I really think Google is baiting here.
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
-
Internal Linking
OSE only shows me as having 24 internal links on my home page. My internal links and total links are far less than my competitors, some of whom have 1700 on a single page. My site is www.CenterCityTeam.com and an example of a competitor with far more internal links is www.McCannTeam.com. 1) How do I get that many internal links on a page and 2) do I even want to?
Link Building | | frankdefazio0 -
Deleting links
I've got 280 links on my wordpress blog site, apparently it's recommended to keep under 100 links. How would I know which links to get rid of and which links to keep?
Link Building | | gimes0 -
Link Removal Services
I have seen a number of these services pop up over the past few months. My question is, has anyone used them, and did you see any results? Here is a few example of the ones I have seen appear recently http://www.removeem.com/ http://www.linkremovalservices.com/ http://deletebacklinks.com/ http://www.linkdelete.com/
Link Building | | EwanFisher0 -
OSE shows links on sites but can't find links
Hi mozzers, I'm cleaning up our backlink profile and looking up anchortexts in OSE. I downloaded and selected one anchortext. However when I go to the sites OSE found, I can't find the links. I look in the source code and onpage keywords. Is it because of my lack of skills that I can't find the links 🙂 or isn't OSE working properly.
Link Building | | StephWeigert0 -
Page links vs. domain links
Hello all, I am trying to find out how Google weighs page inbound links vs. domain inbound links. I have a domain with about 100,000 inbound links and am adding a new page to my domain which at this time has 0 links. I will be trying to outrank a competitors page that has 6,000 inbound links to the competitors page, but only has 26,000 inbound links to my competitors domain . Is there a formula or a way to know how Google values a page link vs. a domain link?
Link Building | | digitalops0 -
Reciprocal links
Hi SEOmoz Pros, We have vendors from whom I was hoping to get links. To make it more enticing to them I was planning to select a small number of vendors (with good site metrics-PA, DA, PR) and create a "Featured Vendor" module on some pages that would link back to the vendor's site as well--thereby created reciprocal links. I was planning to only have one vendor to a page and only for the pages that we are targeting locally. My hope is to help boost the ranking of those pages. Is it okay to offer our vendors to link back to their site or should I ask for a one-way link back to our page and pitch it as exposure for their brand?? Lastly, does Google penalize for these types of links? Thanks!
Link Building | | AC_Pro1 -
Types of links for 2011?
So far in 2011 we have seen some minor and some quite major updates to the Google Algorithm. So what does this mean for future link building in 2011, what type of links do people think are going to continue to work? Are directory and article submissions totally dead? I personally believe that this year a big area of link building that is going to be crucial is Guest Blog Post, finding high quality relevant websites and getting a guest post done on them. This is personally what I am really going to target this year.
Link Building | | rfksolutionsltd0