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
-
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS and google webmaster
HI, I've recently moved one of my sites www.thegoldregister.co.uk to https. I'm using wordpress and put in the permanent 301 redirect for all pages to false https for all pages in the htaaccess file. I've updated the settings in google analytics to https for the original site. All seems to be working well. Regarding the google webmaster tools and what needs to be done. I'm very confused by the google documentation on this subject around https. Does all my crawl data and indexing from http site still stand and be inherited by the https version because of the redirects in place. I'm really worried I will lose all of this indexing data, I looked at the "change of address" in the settings of webmaster, but this seems to refer to changing the actual domain name rather than the protocol which i haven't at all. I've also tried adding the https version to the console as well, but the https version is showing a severe warning "is robots.txt blocking some important pages". I don't understand this error as it's the same version and file as the http site being generated by all in one seo pack for wordpress (see below at bottom). The warning is against line 5 saying it will ignore it. What i don't understand is i don't get this error in the webmaster console with the http version which is the same file?? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Kind regards Steve User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | lqz
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Crawl-delay: 10 ceLAHIv.jpg0 -
Where are the crawled URLS in webmaster tools coming from?
When looking at the crawl errors in Webmaster Tools/Search Console, where is Google pulling these URLs from? Sitemap?
Technical SEO | | SEOhughesm0 -
Problem with Google SERPS
I am running yoast SEO plugin in WP. I just noticed when I google the client, none of their meta data is showing. I see that I had facebook OG clicked, which looks like it made duplicates of all the titles etc. Would that be the problem? I have since turned it off. I am hoping that was the problem. Also, when the client searches it says in the meta desc - you've viewed this site many times". What is that?
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Help! Getting 5XX error
Keep getting a 5XX error and my site is obviously losing ranking, Asked the hoster. Nobody seems to know what is wrong. Site is www.monteverdetours.com I know this is probably an obvious problem and easy to fix but I don't know how to do it! Any comments will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Llanero0 -
Can't find mistake in robots.txt
Hi all, we recently filled our robots.txt file to prevent some directories from crawling. Looks like: User-agent: * Disallow: /Views/ Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /routing/ Disallow: /Profiler/ Disallow: /LILLYPROFILER/ Disallow: /EventRweKompaktProfiler/ Disallow: /AccessIntProfiler/ Disallow: /KellyIntProfiler/ Disallow: /lilly/ now, as Google Webmaster Tools hasn't updated our robots.txt yet, I checked our robots.txt in some ckeckers. They tell me that the User agent: * contains an error. **Example:** **Line 1: Syntax error! Expected <field>:</field> <value></value> 1: User-agent: *** **`I checked other robots.txt written the same way --> they work,`** accordign to the checkers... **`Where the .... is the mistake???`** ```
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
DNS error on webmaster tool
Google webmaster tool is showing DNS error and that is leading to many server error (502,500) almost 50+ in every crawl. Recently Google crawled one of our sub domains that we did not want google to crawl. We blocked it via Robots.txt and also removed all the URL's and since then we are having this issue. Any suggestions how to fix this DNS error? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | tpt.com0 -
Why aren't certain links showing in SEOMOZ?
Hi, I have been trying to understand our page rank and domains that are linking to us. When I look at the list of linking domains, I see some bigger ones are missing and I don't know why. For example, we are in the Yahoo Directory with a link to trophycentral.com, but SEOMOZ is not showing the link. If SEOMOZ is not seeing it, my guess is Google is not either, which concerns me. There are several onther high page rank domains also not showing. Anyone have any idea why? Thanks! BTW, our domain is trophycentral.com
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
How does google know a search result is a search result?
In the google webmaster forums, google specifically states that you should not include search results in the google index. What is the best way to make dynamic, great content show in search results without receiving a penalty?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0