Please help me find unnatural links
-
My URL is: http://bit.ly/hBJAG4
Just been hit with an unnatural imbound links penalty and don't know what to do. I haven't done any link building work for the last 3 years other then creating an infographic at Christmas that was incredibly popular: http://bit.ly/14lao4G
I have 0 paid links and I have never spammed a blog or forum.
The only thing I can think of is back in 2006/2007 I was directory crazy - I got listed in all of the (what I thought at the time) were good quality paid directories - could this have come back to haunt me?
Why do you think I have just been penalized now when these directory links have been there for years?
Should I start getting rid of the directory links? - they did cost me a lot of cash.
Can any of you spot any other links that could be seen as unnatural?
Thanks to anyone who can help in advance
-
and thanks for the good advice, I never looked at it that way
-
NP
-
"Unnatural" does not always have to mean "paid". The problem that I see is not with the infographic, but with the embed code. You are asking people to embed the infographic and include your desired anchor text. Now, the debatable thing here is that the anchor text is your brand...but it could also be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate the search engine results for "SEO Company".
Unnatural links warnings are all about breaking the quality guidelines. Under link schemes there are a few things that could apply to infographics. They say "Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme."
Matt Cutts put out a webmaster video a few months ago about infographics and the gist of it was that they are ok, but you should not be trying to do it with the intention of manipulating search results. If people choose to imbed your infographic and decide to link to you then that's great. But, when you start dictating what anchor text then it gets iffy.
I'd likely start off with the directory listings first though and you can always go after the infographic links as a last resort.
BTW...if you pass your reconsideration without removing your infographic links, can you let me know? It will help me in knowing how to advise others in this situation.
-
Hi Marie, I hear most of what you are saying and will try removing some of the worst directory links, but I don't understand what you mean when you say the infographic links could be penalized - none of those links were paid for, I submitted to a few free infographic blogs and the rest are 100% natural
-
If you got a manual warning like this it's often because a competitor has filed a spam report on you. At that point, it doesn't matter when links were acquired...What Google wants to see is that you get rid of (or make attempts to get rid of) the vast majority of the links that were not naturally earned.
In working with sites with unnatural links penalties I have seen a couple that were penalized (I believe) because of widespread directory links. I see on your ahrefs profile that you've got 90 backlinks using the anchor text "search engine optimization". That type of pattern doesn't happen naturally.
What's going to be difficult is deciding whether all of your links have to be addressed or whether you can save some. You could take the tactic of addressing one type of link at a time and reconsidering. But my guess is that the infographic links as well as the directory links are going to have to go. I see that you have some guest blogs too...these are debatable. If you've got lots of them and they are using anchor text Google may want to see them gone as well before they lift the penalty.
-
Did you pull your link profile from webmaster tools, opensiteexplorer, majestic, or ahrefs? I would start with pulling your profile from as many of these as you can. Are you sure a competitor didn't hit you with some negative SEO?
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
-
Internal linking
Hi, I currently have built my website with internal links to boost my category pages (the ones that are the most important with the most traffic). Is the way to go or nowadays or doesn't it matter what pages you boost. I beleive what I did is some sort of "page rank sculpting" but is it still useful ? or I should I link natural across my website even though some pages will get a boost and some won't ? The link that I have are at the bottom of my content (not in the footer) but at the bottom of the page next to each other ? does they count or is it really bad to have them that way ? I have a blog and I was wondering if when I link from my blog page for example about "Barolo" to my page about "Piedmont" if I should also link from my page about "Piedmont" to my Barolo page or if the link only has to go one way from my blog / Barolo page to my piedmont page to boost Piedmont. Thank you,
Link Building | | seoanalytics0 -
Unnatural Links To Your Site — Impacts Links warning, Should I do something?
Hi, I got: "Unnatural Links To Your Site — Impacts Links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " I don't see any dropping at rankings, could the best solution here to be, just to leave everything as it is and be more careful with the link building in the future? Or is there a danger that Google gives further penalties if I don't act on this one do something? I am little afraid that if I start removing links, my rankings will drop, even though they have remained same if don't do anything? Any help is appreciated.
Link Building | | pok3rplay3r0 -
Internal Linking - Post links vs Side Bar Links behaving differently
Hi, I have a question regarding the internal linking behavior. My website is www.hindimeaning.com which is approx 3 years old. I have approx 450 posts. Now i have a widget on right sidebar "Popular posts". A widget below my posts "Related Posts". And a simple html CSS menu above the posts (I removed menu around 6 month before so currently it will not show.) I crawled my site with moz crawler (same are the result from google crawler as well) and it shows menus links as internal links. While sidebar widget "Popular posts" and "Related Posts" are not showing as internal links. If we talk theoretically what i learn till now is "every link on a page behaves as internal link". Then why the widget links are not showing as internal links. Thanks, Mahesh Kumar
Link Building | | chaudhary04890 -
Any successes getting SEO/link vendors clean up Penguin-related problems they helped create?
Hi all, I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create? I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify. There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed. Cheers all, Matt
Link Building | | MattBarker2 -
Is there a tool to find out our website's link in some other website?
sometimes we know our site link is there on a site but the site is so big its hard to search manually. Is there any tool which can crawl the whole site and find the page having our site link ? though I know about OSE, and we can also see backlinks from webmaster tool. But still if you know any tool where instead of seeing the whole back link profile, we can add a specific url and see our site link in that url.
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Pursuing Links on Sites You Have a Link From
Is it a bad idea to spend resources to get a second link from a site that already links to you? It seems like the marginal value of each additional link is much smaller than the first link.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
How to improve (ASAP) the linking root domain, the followed linking root domains and the linking C-Blocks? Linkbuilding (or whatever) techniques.
I have a small site (.com) like any website in my sector. 30-90 pages. I have no crawls errors. Everythings is fine, just I need to improve my linking root domain, the followed linking root domain and the linking C-Blocks. Example: my competitors have 300 (one of them have 1300) of total links. I have 30. Anyone know some good strategies? techniques? tips? I just dont want to be in a farm directory, I want free links. I'm already running two strategies but it works so slowly. I want something faster at this moment. Also, any recommendation will be thankful.
Link Building | | NicoDavila0