Remove Unatural Links
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We hired a SEO firm to build links for us two months ago, and now, we received "unatural link" warning from Google. SEO firm informed that they have taken steps to remove these links. But, we don't think we should trust and depend on them for that. We want to be on it and would like your advise for the following three questions:
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how to determina whether a link is "natural" or "unatural"? We want to make sure we don't remove the natural ones
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We saw 933 links from Blogspot.com, that for sure do not look natural, how do we go about to remove it?
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Based on SEO firm's report, certain links have be removed, but, it is still showing on Google Webmaster, should we give it sometime to crawl and confirm?
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Thanks again for sharing.
At this point, we also lean towards building good quality links as what Ivaylo suggested.
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Some links may be unremovable. If they're all coming from one domain, they'll likely just be devalued - Google is going to see this as a single pile of links (not 900 different entities) and probably ignore it. I'd leave it, in most cases, and move forward with higher-quality links. Blogspot isn't paid or a link network, so those links are just low quality.
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Thank you for your suggestions - they are what we wanted to do. However, we lack the expertise to tell what links are "bad" among 600 links SEO company built for us.
They've started removing among 4 sites who have hundreds of links to our site. Three of them, according to SEO firm, were confirmed "removed", but one of the site is www.blogspot.com, it has over 900 links to our site, what can we do about this one?
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While I do think you can trade off positive link-building vs. cutting negative links (depending on the severity), I have to disagree with "the warning will still be there no matter what you do". We're seeing accounts from reputable firms that this warning is real, can be followed by a penalty, and will be lifted if action is taken.
The trick is that the warning covers many levels of severity, and there's no good way to tell how severe this one is. If you know you have very questionable links, I'd kill the worst of them, personally. This would include paid links or very obvious, low-value spam.
I'd also tell your SEO company to shift gears ASAP. As Ivaylo said, diverify - no matter whether you cut links or don't.
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They do send us a link report. Many of them are really random unrelated site to our business. Are they "unatural"? Should we ask to remove some so that the distribution of backlink are even, keep it under 25% from unrelated site?
The SEO company built 600 links in two month period. With variation of 10 anchor text, they've used it evenly among 600 links, we can't go back to change that, right?
We are building links now from guest blogging, but does it have potential to be scraped onto different blog networks?
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Yes, give it some time. About a week. When you submit a reconsideration request to Google make sure to provide PROOF that you are doing everything possible to remove the unnatural links. If it was truly the SEO firm's fault make sure to mention the name of the firm in reconsideration request.
Was the SEO Firm providing you with a report of the links they built each month? I'd go through that report and try to remove each link 1 by 1.
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The warning will still be there no matter what you do at this point. You don't have to resubmit your website or revamp it. Most probably the links are coming from public blogging networks and even the SEO company won't be able to remove it. Such links are already devalued by google. While waiting for a resolution try to replace them with normal quality links, links from press releases, guest blogging, etc. Diversify your anchor text portfolio. Make it look natural.
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