Unnatural Link Warning - What to Do??

[seoehelper89]

I just want to ask your advice or suggestions, my new client site received a link warning from Google regarding unnatural link, as I've checked his site backlinks using Seomoz site explorer there are almost 4000+ backlinks and almost 3/4 of the total links are from forum profile spam and blog comment spam. I know it is impossible to remove all those links totally. I would like to ask your advice if what's the best thing to do? Setting up a brand new site and domain or doing a cleanup. Thanks in advance.

[seoehelper89]

Thanks for the additional advice.

[MarieHaynes]

Wait!  Before you go "creating new quality links", make sure you are not making things worse!

If you've got a manual penalty, and that coincided with a traffic drop then this means that you are not going to recover until someone at Google manually looks at a reconsideration request and determines that you have done your best to clean up the link spam.

What I have found, however, is that many website owners cannot be objective when it comes to cleaning up their link profile.  They look at a link and say, "Well, that's a good link - it's from a related directory."  Or, it's in the blogroll of a niche website - it can't be considered spam.

The quality guidelines say this:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

So, when you are thinking of "creating new quality links", whatever you do, don't go doing more of the same but simply replace anchor text with your domain url!!!  This is something that may work for sites that have been affected by Penguin.  We think that if the algorithm looks at your backlinks and sees that the vast majority are url links as opposed to anchor texted keyword links then you will be ok.  But, it's a different story for manual unnatural links warnings.

As mentioned by others, you've got to address every single link that was self created with the purpose of improving your website's SERPS.  You've got to make a good attempt to get the link removed or nofollowed.  (Document that you contacted the email on site, used a contact form on site, and/or used the email in the whois info.)  In your reinclusion request send copies of all of the emails you have sent and received.  Tell Google that you realize you went against the quality guidelines and that you are committed to following them from this point out.  Do this and you should get the penalty removed.

[seoehelper89]

Thanks Donnie, I really appreciate your response

[SEODinosaur]

Yes new links will help out. However if you follow the article I mentioned it has a great 6 month plan to regaining trust.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website

I would highly recommend using this article as your 6 month plan it has everything you need in it and in detail.

[seoehelper89]

Okay thanks for the response

[William.Lau]

Massive drop..you really need to remove those links then.

Create the spreadsheet of all the links that are spam (this is most time consuming), then use one of the tools I mentioned or Donnie mentioned or others. And just maintain those campaigns by sending notices every week or two. This would help you take down as many as you can but of course you have to make the list of all of the spam links.

Make sure to keep these documents on a spreadsheet and then show Google, Google will take into good faith because they understand some webmasters aren't available or will not respond.

[seoehelper89]

Yeah, massive drop-down of traffic. By the way thanks for the suggestion, really appreciate it

[William.Lau]

Yes, that would help. But to be reconsidered, you should try your best to remove as many as you can.

So keep building links but on make sure to send notices to these sites to have these links taken down. 4000+ is A LOT of links and hopefully you can take at least 50% off with notices.

As Donnie mentioned, you should make sure that you are negatively effected by these links. Did traffic drop when or around the time you got the notice?

[seoehelper89]

Thanks for the response. How about just continue building good quality links and forget the bad links, do you think it will help?

[seoehelper89]

Do you think creating some new link (quality links) will help out?

[SEODinosaur]

I've heard many opinions on this matter, to start off Google sent these warnings to many people and also mentioned to not worry: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-unnatural-links-warnings.

Some people say to just start building good links and forget the bad links.

However, some people say to clean them up using:

• Remove'em - self-service link removal
• rmoov - the backlink removal tool

Since you are working on an existing site I recommend reading this article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website

[William.Lau]

Depends how was the site ranking before hand.

I was recently suggested by others to use LinkDelete.com and other sites like Rmoov.com can help remove some of these links. However, it can be almost futile with so many links. You have to look at how the site was ranking before and if removing the links will help you and the amount of resources that need to be used.

Best ways is to extract the links from OSE and GWT, and then use some tools like the above links and send out mass takedown notices. But 4000 is a lot!

Weigh out your options and resources and come to what would best benefit the site and company. If your online presences is vital, it might not be a good idea to start a new domain etc.