Well, if you’ve been actively promoting your website, sit back for a moment and think
about all the links you managed to generate to your site because you DID NOT
come from a position of actually building a rich informative site – yes – all those links.
If you paid someone else like a seo to get you links, yes, those links (probably). If
you are using cheap submission services that actually are not a scam, yes those
links. Those tactics to get easy-to-get links you got that were linking to your
competitors’ websites? Yes, those links.
In short – if you are using unnatural links to get top positions and don’t deserve them
Google will nuke your site if it detects them. Google knows exactly which keywords
to hit you for to destroy your ability to rank. Sometimes keyword phrase by keyword
phrase, sometimes page by page – sometimes site by site!
I’ve seen sites penalised for their main keyword and the main keyword in anchor text
back links from other sites is not the problem.
Sensible opportunistic links still pass a manual review, it appears. Paid links and lots
of ‘spam‘ still dominate lots of competitive niches – that is – white hat seo has little, if
any chance, of ranking in these serps.
The important thing to realise is there is a certain amount of risk now associated with
backlinks that point to any site and any page.
How Do I know if I have unnatural links?
If you honestly do not have a clue….
Google is telling a lot of people by email if you are subscribed in Google Webmaster
Tools. If you have unnatural links you need to worry about – the best place I think to
detect any issues is rather obviously Google Analytics.
There is a case to be said Google is kind-of forcing people into using Google
Webmaster Tools.
What happens to my site if Google detects unnatural links?
Sometimes you’ll get an email from Google:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com/, We’ve detected that
some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links
pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of
unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link
schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our
quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for
reconsideration in Google’s search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that
you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your
reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue,
please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Google is moving in various directions:
In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created
as part of a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a
site’s overall ranking. The new messages make it clear that we are taking “targeted
action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole.”
Other times the indicators might be more subtle. You might not rank at all in Google
for something you used to rank for very well for. Your traffic might reduce month by
month. You might disappear overnight for valuable keywords associated with your
content. You might disappear for one keyword phrase. You might be reviewed
manually. If you are actually penalised, you’re going to have clean your links up if
you want to restore your ‘reputation’ in Google. Penalties can last from 30 days to,
well, forever (if the penalty is a manual action).
Google appears to crawls a site slower under a penalty. Google caches changes to
your pages a lot less frequently, too, it appears and new content seems to struggle a
bit more to actually get into Google. In some case – you might not rank for your
brand name (like happened to Interflora a few weeks ago). In the very worst cases –
your site can disappear from Google.
When you get a penalty revoked, things start to get back to normal within a month or
two.
What can I do about unnatural links?
If you are a small business – you probably don’t want to start again with a new
domain. Do you want to use 301 redirects to postpone a Google slap? That option
works, for at least, a while. The best option is to clean them up.
First, you’ll need to download your backlinks from Google.
Download links to your site
On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
On the Dashboard, click Traffic, and then click Links to Your Site.
Under Who links the most, click More.
Click Download more sample links. If you click Download latest links, you’ll see
dates as well.
Note: When looking at the links to your site in Webmaster Tools, you may want to
verify both the www and the non-vww version of your domain in your Webmaster
Tools account. To Google, these are entirely different sites. Take a look at the data
for both sites. More information
Which unnatural links am I supposed to worry about?
I think these can be summed up if you are ranking for money terms with a low quality
site and have:
a high % of backlinks on low quality sites
a high % of backlinks on duplicate articles
a high % of links with duplicate anchor text
Basically the stuff that used to work so well for everyone and is mainly detectable by
Googlebot. Google doesn’t just ignore these links anymore if intent
to manipulate Google is easy to work out. Most low quality links are (probably) easy
to detect algorithmically.
Do I need to remove bad links?
We know that perhaps not every link can be cleaned up, but in order to deem a
reconsideration request as successful, we need to see a substantial good-faith effort
to remove the links, and this effort should result in a decrease in the number of bad
links that we see. GOOGLE
It kind of looks as though we’re going to have to, especially if you receive a manual
action notice.
How To Remove Unnatural Links?
There are services popping up everywhere offering to remove unnatural links – I’ll
blog about those later as I have little experience with any of them. An seo needs to
be able to deal with this new problem in seo with the very basic of tools.
I’ve had success using simple methods.
Removing pages that are the target of unnatural links
Google Webmaster Tools
Excel
PageRank
Do I need to audit my backlinks?
Most definitely. Google is fully expected to make a lot of noise about unnatural links
this year, and that always involves website rankings being nuked with traffic
decimated, and lots of ‘collateral’ damage.
Whether or not you eventually use the Disavow Tool in Google, you should be
looking at your backlink profile and see what various links are doing to your rankings
for instance. You should at least know who links to you, and the risk to high rankings
now attached to those links.
Download your links from Google Webmaster Tools, pop them into Excel. I assume
you have SEO Tools for Excel (I also have URL Tools installed)?
Get the root domain of each link (I’ve used URL Tools for this for a while), and check
its toolbar PageRank with SEO Tools for excel. Most of those links with zero -1
PageRank on the domain are worth looking at. Do the same for the actual page your
links are on (on domains with PR). Similarly, if you have lots of links and all your
links are on page with -1. That’s probably not good indicator of reputation.
If you have a LOT of links (tens of thousands) filtering, in Excel, for only unique
domains can speed up this process.
I normally get the PAGE TITLE of the linking page too (using SEO Tools for Excel),
so I can easily detect duplicate articles on lower quality sites, and sites not yet
affected by a PageRank drop.
Of course, there are some false positives. PageRank can be glitchy, or flat out
misleading. So a human eye is often needed to reduce these. If you are using this
method, you can run it again in the future and see if sites you identified as low quality
by PageRank have changed, and perhaps modify your disavow list.
Using this method I’ve successfully identified lower quality sites fairly easily. To be
fair, I know a crap link. Ultimately, if you have a lot of links, you can never be too
sure which particular links are ‘toxic’. It may very well be the volume of a specific
tactic used that gets your site in trouble – and not one solitary link.
If you have a load of low quality directory submissions in your backlink profile, or
have taken part in low quality article marketing recently, the next Google update
might just be targeted at you (if it hasn’t already had an impact on your rankings).
Once you’ve examined your links and identified low quality links, you can then
submit a list of links to Google in a simple text file called disavow.txt.
What is the disavow Tool?
A tool provided by Google in Google Webmaster Tools. You can specify which
domains you want to disavow the links from (you can also specify individual pages).
Generally speaking if disavowing a link, you are better of disavowing the entire
domain (if it is a spammy domain).
The disavow.txt is just a simple text file with the following list of domains:
domain:google.com
domain:plus.google.com
The way it appears to work is you tell Google which links to ignore when they are
calculating whether or not to rank you high or boot your rankings in the balls.
If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from
the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down,
you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take
certain links into account when assessing your site.
