I am getting an error message from Google Webmaster Tools and I don't know what to do to correct the problem
-
The message is:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.whitegyr.com/,We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
I have always tried to follow Google's guidelines and don't know what I am doing wrong, I have eight different websites all getting this warning and I don't know what is wrong, is there anyone you know that will look at my sites and advise me what I need to do to correct the problem?
Website with this warning:
artistalaska.com
cosmeticshandbook.com
homewindpower.ws
montanalandsale.com
outdoorpizzaoven.net
shoes-place.com
silverstatepost.com
www.whitegyr.com -
Great advice!
-
I'd take a step back and stop building links, and start cleaning up the links that have already been built that are a bit fishy.
There's an article directory on a site with a domain about best pet insurance that links to the shoe store (http://bestpetinsurance.org/myarticledirectory/). A UK SEO directory has a link to the same shoe site, under the category of flowers (http://www.seoukdirectory.com/index.php?search=Internet).
If these links were built with your knowledge and you have access to the list of links that were built, go and remove the ones that were bought to just be links and serve no purpose to a reader. Also go through Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, and Open Site Explorer to look at incoming links and remove those bad links.
Look at the content in those websites. Clean out the junk and make the content good enough that someone would link there without prompting.
In short, think about if you were sitting down with someone from Google and explaining why these sites should be included in the index and have a high ranking. Make sure that everything under your control can be explained and is not embarrassing or going against their guidelines. Clean things up, then ask for a reinclusion request.
-
So now we should look for links back to our site using the site's URL as anchor text?
-
Here is some reading that may help explain what changes Google is making as of late to combat unnatural linking practices:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-survive-googles-unnatural-links-warnings-avoid-overoptimisation
-
The site: operator would be going to Google and typing in
site:artistalaska.com
for your search. It's telling google "My search is for everything you will show me on this one particular site"
-
People who do that are often ones who don't know about SEO or wanting to optimize anchor text and the ones who haven't been asked for specific information for a link. They're the ones who help contribute to a natural-looking link profile. If all of your links have anchor text that looks like someone coached them about what to write, it looks a bit suspicious to the engines and less like someone linked there on their own and more like they were prompted to do so.
-
"Web Page Design" is the keyword phrase we have targeted for our online web business and when you search for that phrase on Google our site is in #6 on the first page a place we have held for years. And yes we have asked for that anchor text and have never heard of using our site's URL as anchor text. Who does that anyway?
-
I would agree that this really is an unnatural links warning even if that is not stated in the actual message. I took a look at a couple of sites to see whether your backlink profile looked natural.
The first one I looked at was shoes-place.com. If you look at it in OSE and select "Anchor text", you will see that your most common anchor texts are your keywords. A natural link profile would have predominantly the URL as anchor text. It looks like you have placed a lot of directory links using keyword anchor text.
Next, I looked at whitegyr.com. You've got a whackload of links using the anchor text "web page design" and the next popular ones are all keyword anchor texted links like "good web content", "web design prices", etc. Your URL is not even on the first page (EDIT - I don't mean on the first page of Google, but rather, on the first page of what anchor texts your links have) when it comes to anchor text. This is definitely not natural.
I think you have an uphill battle and I don't envy you.
-
Thanks Keri:
Thanks for the look and will clean up those items this AM. And look after your other
suggestions ASAP, one question though, what is a “a site:” ? -
I took a quick look at the first site. I don't know about triggering any type of warning, but are you aware that there are multiple pages with lorem ipsum text still? http://artistalaska.com/about.htm You might want to clean that up for a better user experience. Also, some pages are indexed that you probably don't want viewable, such as http://www.artistalaska.com/$_alternate1.htm.
Just those eight sites got targeted, and not the others that you also did (via http://spyonweb.com). Look and see if you can find something in common with those that the others don't have? I noticed this page http://www.whitegyr.com/using_free_link_exchange_directo.htm and while the Google notice doesn't mention linking, I'd maybe clean that up as a preventative tool.
Right now I'm on limited bandwidth and time, but if this were me I'd go through and do a site: on each of the sites and see what google has indexed and see if anything jumps out (like the default text, see if there's evidence of anything being hacked, etc). I'd go into open site explorer and look and inlinks and look to see anything fishy is there. I'd look at the source code to see if something looks off there (like a bunch of hidden text). I'd look to see if I was using unique content on the site.
-
There was no "Unnatural Link Warning" >>> rather it was a "Quality Issues on" warning but no explicit explanation and I do not know what is needed to remove the problem.
-
Read this article about Unnatural Link warning. It provides a good explanation and how to access the problem. I hope it helps.
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
-
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Will you get more 'google juice' if your social links are in your websites header, rather than its footer?
Hi team, I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look. I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google. Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that. Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions! Thanks is advance, Jake S
Technical SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
Getting Errors On Server Connectivity-??
Hi Guys I am getting a massive crawl errors on googlewebmaster ,stating there is over 2162 errors connect time out - anyone know where I can see exactly where the time out is from? I have browsed through my site and I do not see any connect timeout occured. Thanks Cary
Technical SEO | | ilovebodykits1 -
How to know which pages are indexed by Google?
So apparently we have some sites that are just duplicates of our original main site but aiming at different markets/cities. They have completely different urls but are the same content as our main site with different market/city changed. How do I know for sure which ones are indexed. I enter the url into Google and its not there. Even if I put in " around " it. Is there another way to query google for my site? Is there a website that will tell you which ones are indexed? This is probably a dumb question.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
What to do about Google Crawl Error due to Faceted Navigation?
We are getting many crawl errors listed in Google webmaster tools. We use some faceted navigation with several variables. Google sees these as "500" response code. It looks like Google is truncating the url. Can we tell Google not to crawl these search results using part of the url ("sort=" for example)? Is there a better way to solve this?
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0 -
Google Webmaster Tools: Keywords
Hi SEOmozzers! I'm the Dr./owner/in-house SEO for my eye care practice. The URL is www.ofallonfamilyeyecare.com. Our practice is in O'Fallon, MO. Since I'm an optometrist, my main keywords are "optometrist o'fallon" and "o'fallon optometrist". As I get more familiarity with SEO, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, I've discovered the Keywords that Google feels best represent my website. About a week ago I noted Google counted 21 instances of "optometrist" on the 28-30 pages of my website, which ranks as #32 in the most common keywords. #1 is "eye" with 506 instances. Even though 21 occurrences seemed low, I went though every page adding "optometrist" a couple times in the body where it would naturally be appropriate. I also added it to the address shown on the footer of every page. I changed the top navigation option of "meet Dr. Hegyi" to "our optometrist". I must have added at least 4 occurrences to every page on my site, and submitted for a re-crawl. I even tried to scale back the "eye" occurrences on a few pages. Today I see that Google has re-crawled the site and the keywords have been updated. "Optometrist has DROPPED from #32 to #33. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions why I'm not seeing increased occurrence in Googles eyes? I realize this may not be a big factor in SERPs, but every bit of on-page optimization helps. Or is this too minor of an issue to sweat? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JosephHegyi0 -
Site 'filtered' by Google in early July.... and still filtered!
Hi, Our site got demoted by Google all of a sudden back in early July. You can view the site here: http://alturl.com/4pfrj and you may read the discussions I posted in Google's forums here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6e8f9aab7e384d88&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276dc6687317641b&hl=en Those discussions chronicle what happened, and what we've done since. I don't want to make this a long post by retyping it all here, hence the links. However, we've made various changes (as detailed), such as getting rid of duplicate content (use of noindex on various pages etc), and ensuring there is no hidden text (we made an unintentional blunder there through use of a 3rd party control which used CSS hidden text to store certain data). We have also filed reconsideration requests with Google and been told that no manual penalty has been applied. So the problem is down to algorithmic filters which are being applied. So... my reason for posting here is simply to see if anyone here can help us discover if there is anything we have missed? I'd hope that we've addressed the main issues and that eventually our Google ranking will recover (ie. filter removed.... it isn't that we 'rank' poorly, but that a filter is bumping us down, to, for example, page 50).... but after three months it sure is taking a while! It appears that a 30 day penalty was originally applied, as our ranking recovered in early August. But a few days later it dived down again (so presumably Google analysed the site again, found a problem and applied another penalty/filter). I'd hope that might have been 30 or 60 days, but 60 days have now passed.... so perhaps we have a 90 day penalty now. OR.... perhaps there is no time frame this time, simply the need to 'fix' whatever is constantly triggering the filter (that said, I 'feel' like a time frame is there, especially given what happened after 30 days). Of course the other aspect that can always be worked on (and oft-mentioned) is the need for more and more original content. However, we've done a lot to increase this and think our Guide pages are pretty useful now. I've looked at many competitive sites which list in Google and they really don't offer anything more than we do..... so if that is the issue it sure is puzzling if we're filtered and they aren't. Anyway, I'm getting wordy now, so I'll pause. I'm just asking if anyone would like to have a quick look at the site and see what they can deduce? We have of course run it through SEOMoz's tools and made use of the suggestions. Our target pages generally rate as an A for SEO in the reports. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Go2Holidays0 -
Issue with 'Crawl Errors' in Webmaster Tools
Have an issue with a large number of 'Not Found' webpages being listed in Webmaster Tools. In the 'Detected' column, the dates are recent (May 1st - 15th). However, looking clicking into the 'Linked From' column, all of the link sources are old, many from 2009-10. Furthermore, I have checked a large number of the source pages to double check that the links don't still exist, and they don't as I expected. Firstly, I am concerned that Google thinks there is a vast number of broken links on this site when in fact there is not. Secondly, why if the errors do not actually exist (and never actually have) do they remain listed in Webmaster Tools, which claims they were found again this month?! Thirdly, what's the best and quickest way of getting rid of these errors? Google advises that using the 'URL Removal Tool' will only remove the pages from the Google index, NOT from the crawl errors. The info is that if they keep getting 404 returns, it will automatically get removed. Well I don't know how many times they need to get that 404 in order to get rid of a URL and link that haven't existed for 18-24 months?!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0