Tackling Google's "Unnatural Links..." warning

B

bigdiscount

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Jan 10, 2012
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Hi

My second question today (I thought it would be more suitable in a separate post)!

If a site is warned about 'unnatural links detected' by Google, what would the best remedy be?

Would it be a link audit? i.e. going through all links and analysing them, and then culling them if necessary...

Or is there another starting point? Could the 'unnatural links' be diluted out with further, more varied link building?

And I know what you are thinking - but no. It is not a site that I am responsible for :) Consequently I have no experience of this directly. However, a developer friend of mine has with one of his clients. He has asked me for advice, but because I have no experience of the warning, I'm not sure what to tell him.

Cheers
Will
 


Your course of action should depend on whether you believe that Google is sending these out to scare people, or whether they truly have developed a new way of detecting "unnatural" linking.
 
in my opinion going to fix the links you've already did is just a waste of time, i would take it as a warning to reconsider your link building strategy and fix it from now on
 
Your website will get "unnatural link" warning from Google if the back links that you have are not in sync with your site's "theme." If for example your site is about a specific niche (say, weight loss) then your back links should also be those about weight loss or anything around that topic. If however, the back links you have are off-topic, it would come out fishy and questionable to Google.

The best course of action should be to stick with your site's theme and link only to sites with quality content that jibe with your own.

Hope this helps.
 
Thank you guys....We were talking last night about a link audit, but perhaps that would be overkill.

The warning he received was more than just 'warning'. Google did indeed take action and severely penalised him. He was completely lost from search for a few weeks until he removed some 301s from old URLs he had pointing to his site. I told him that I didn't think that this was causing the problem, but he made the change anyway.

He also revealed to me however that he has both paid for links: 2 blog links, and utilised a link wheel.

Obviously paid for links are bad (according to Google anyway), but they will surely only be bad if Google ever found out that they were paid links. Because of that I told him to leave the paid for links unless he had good reason to believe that someone would have reported him. If he thought that somebody may have done: remove the paid links.

Link wheels, I'm not experienced with so I couldn't comment on those.

On second thoughts, maybe the link audit wouldn't be a bad idea. That way we would be able to pick up any of the 'unnatural' looking ones. Then pick up on the link building program after completion.

Thanks for your advice!!
 
That type of warning has been symptomatic (recently at least) of using bad neighbourhood blog networks (not the individually owned type but the subscription ones). It's most likely that they have dabbled or hammered links via those either by subscription or buying "seo" services that people did for him.

Way out? Keep building good links and eventually he'll work out of any penalty however in extreme situations I've heard removing webmaster tools completely and re-registered in the future (months) can help but that is hearsay.
 
@bharte I've just heard of someone who got hammered by the warning and doesn't even have Webmaster tools....I did think seriosuly about removing it until I heard that! :)
 
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