HELP - got the following message - Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links
-
Hi All,
While trying to grow we used several freelancers and small companies for guest blogging, article submissions etc.
We lost about 90% of traffic from our peek at December.
We don't know if it is related but we got the following message last week:
"Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to www.domain.com"Is it related (getting this message after two months of losing traffic)?
What to do????
(P.S
We fired most of the companies we used months ago since we noticed they used bad methods. We didn't believe it can hurt us - just thought it would be useless...)Please Help...
-
Hi there,
A lot of people have been receiving these warnings for blog network use and other low-quality/paid links. I wrote about it on the blog recently. My advice is to do your best to remove the links that are clearly low-quality - Google is telling you directly to clean things up, and may hit you with a penalty if things don't get better.
-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2008/07/requesting-reconsideration-using-google.html
I did see a interview with a google staffer, who said thet they have never come accross a case when a compeditor had did such a thing, but most claim it so.
I would assume it ws one of the people you hired.
-
The thing is that we didn't hire "professionals" until we were very highly ranked and were "busy" of work and had to outsource it. We tried several companies and freelancers and within a couple of months stayed only with the best one but it seems that the damage was done.
I always thought that what they did can't hurt me but rather won't do any good.
Otherwise, what prevents me from hire these guys to "promote" my competitors?
Who knows, maybe someone did it to me?Do you know what is the proper way to ask for reconsideration?
Thanks
-
I have seen this particular warning on a website with over 9,000 inbound links and 2,000 inbound linking domains. When going through various link reports what I noticed were a lot of SPAM sites pointing to the website that the owner had no control over.
Here's my take - I think this is just a warning and certainly nothing to lose a ton of sleep over. Google must certainly know that there's no way you or I can be in complete control of inbound links. If Google worked that way it would be all too easy to crush your competition. If a competitor gets pissed that you just took them over on Page1, Rank 1 what's to stop them from loading up black hat SEO tools and going to town on your domain?
My advice is to continue building ethical links that conform to Google's guidelines. If you are already doing this, there's no way you can control the other links in most cases so ignore the warning. I think Google just wants you to be aware of it so that if you ARE building the bad links yourself you stop doing it and wasting time/money on it.
-
Bingo!!
I think it certainly is, but sorry i have no idea how to go about fixing this as you cant just remove them.
To be honest, it is a good thing for those that had to compete with you honestly.
I cant be too harsh on you, as they temptation to get easy links is great, but so are the risks.
You could try asking for reconsideration, if you are flagged, but there is no way Goolge is going to give you your link juice back.
-
Hi!
It may very well be a direct correlation of your previously mentioned link building methods. You mentioned guest blogging - this is one of the best ways to build links if done to reputable sites, so that might not be the cause..
Could you go into more detail on some of the other techniques they used? How many links, how long of a period they were build, and perhaps a live example of something they did? We should be able to tell based off of that info.
Thanks,
Casey
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
-
Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded in Google webmaster tools.
In Google Webmaster Tools, I have a coverage issue. I am getting this error message: Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded. It gives the below blog post page as an example. Any idea how to resolve? At one time, I was using handl utm grabber, but the plugin is deactivated on my website. https://www.savacations.com/turrialba-costa-ricas-garden-city/?utm_source=deleted&utm_medium=deleted&utm_term=deleted&utm_content=deleted&utm_campaign=deleted&gclid=deleted5.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alancito0 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
To follow or nofollow paid internal links?
I am having an internal debate on the need to use nofollow tags on sponsored internal links that link to internal pages. One thought is based on this Matt Cutts video (Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?) in which he says that there is never a need to use a nofollow tag on an internal link. The other school of thought is that paid links with follow tags are a violation of Google policy and it does not matter if they link internally or externally. Matt was just not thinking of this scenario in his short video. Would love to hear if anyone has had any manual action from Google based on their internal links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Heavy Internal Linking Help
One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links). For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things. My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links. So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Penalized for "Unnatural Links" on Webmaster Tools
Has anyone ever logged in to Google Webmaster tools and seen a message about them seeing unnatural links (as a warning) Our homepage lost all its rankings. I will submit a reconsideration request. We don't engage in link buying practices (some directories, thats all.) Any feedback, please? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Google Plus Links - Good for SEO?
I created a link on my Google Plus page under the recommended links with the relevant anchor text and url. It turns out that this is a do-follow link from a webpage with a Page Rank of 8. Is this just too good to be true or have Google genuinely missed something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinHof1 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0