Unnatural Link Warning – What’s next? – SEO Video
Welcome to this weeks SEO Video blog, with Google being particularly aggressive this year Creare are inheriting sites hit with the ‘unnatural link’ warning via Google webmaster tools.
This Google penalty can ruin your sites performance in the search engine for a particular phrase, landing page or whole SEO campaign dependent on how poor the back link profile looks to Google.
From what we know the algorithm automatically flags your site for unnatural links, then the site is analysed manually by the Google spam team.
So what would lead to your site being identified in the first place, we believe the following could be a factor:
- High [exact match] anchor text
- Site wide sidebar links
- Links from de-indexed websites
- Links from blog networks identified by Google
Based on this information there we believe you are left with several options once your site has been identified.
- Back link clean up – dependent on the age of the site this could be a timely and costly exercise, obviously any previous SEO activity could have lead to lots of poor quality links being built. You would manually have to contact webmasters and ask then to remove or change the links pointing to your site and eventually after you are happy with your new back link profile you can re-submit to Google highlighting the work you have done.
- Employee a 3rd party company to clean up your back links – Companies link LinkDelete.com have identified revenue opportunities by providing a clean up service, they claim in 3 simple steps to complete a back link analysis, webmaster outreach and create a final report ready to re-submit to Google.
- Finally Start Over – If your site is less than a year old it could be simpler to start over, new domain and a new ethical link building strategy.
What ever option you choose it is going to be costly for your business, Google’s aggressive algorithm changes has replaced some excellent reputable websites in the results pages with lesser quality sites that have little or no authority, so a re-submission may be a good option.
We would love to hear any stories or case studies of you successfully overcoming the link penality, so please leave your comments on the support blog post.
Thanks for watching.
July 9th, 2012
I’ve often came across the advice of simple ignoring the warning. Many people believe that a sudden change in link profile (removing links) is confirmation in the eyes of Google that you you know you’ve done something wrong. They then use this to identify you as building unnatural links.
What are your thoughts?