Should I report unnatural links via Webmasters?
-
We have a client who fired their last SEO firm for backlinking. The company has the actual emails and evidence that it found. On July 19, 2012, they received a notice in Webmasters that "unnatural links" had been detected to their site. The notice states that they should request reinclusion, but Matt Cutts is saying something different:
https://plus.google.com/u/3/109412257237874861202/posts/gik49G9c5LU
My client wants to ensure that they are NOT impacted, so should they notify Google anyways?
The notice in Webmasters reads:
Dear site owner or webmaster of….
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
-
We do not see any penalties at this point.
-
Has the site been penalized or no? If not don't report anything. If yes then you need to clean it up and file for reconsideration, don't just assume that Google will lift the penalty you need to be pro-active.
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
-
Benefit of internal link in content
Hi, Is there a real benefit to having internal links in content other than at the bottom of a page for example and not surrounded by content. Would the benefit be 1 to 10 or 1 to 1.5 ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Have a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages as a client and they are currently not getting much organic traffic to their level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: https://www.domain.com.au/category/s...-category-type These pages have been on-page optimised, category content added, yet hardly any traffic. However the site level 1, level 2 pages do quite well. So this suggests this might be an internal linking issue? The site is definitely not penalized and as enough authority for these level 3 pages to rank. Any ideas would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Lost Links in Google Webmaster Tools
Last week I had over 1800 backlinks showing up in GWT. 4 days ago I had 20, and now I have 5. I have a very diverse link profile ranging from social bookmarks to YouTube, to Business Listings (Yelp, etc), and they're all gone. Clearly there is not a particular segment of my links that are being targeted here, they've all been completely wiped out. My rankings have fallen, and where I was on page 1/2 for all my targeted KWs, I'm now on Page 3, 4, and 5. There are no penalties showing up in GWT, so I'm completely at a loss as to what is going on. Please help! Website is: http://brownboxbranding.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBick0 -
Internal links to blog posts
I am linking manually to blog posts in my site from my Home page. Our site isn't set up with an auto "Recent Posts" that shows on Home. Should I use the exact blog post title as the anchor text or do I need to create something that is not an exact match to the title of the post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfiedel0 -
Best tools for exploring links?
and not just every single link, but ones you know that Google is actually indexing. I find seomoz to be super easy, but there is no way to distinguish links that are actually counting "juice", or am i missing something. What about majesticseo - any other similar tools you use when trying to find linking sites that pass juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Linking to Authorities
Hello, I know that if its good for the user, its not a bad move. But for this question I am specifically asking for how it affects my ranking. Does it help my ranking to link to appropriate authority sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser
Have you done any tests to see if linking out to authoritative sites like .gov info pages, industry leaders, etc. help with a sites ranking. I am thinking about taking of all of these outgoing links and just link to my important pages. Thank you, Tyler0 -
Does 302 pass link juice?
Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains. However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com. Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0