Natural or Unnatural backlinks

[pianomother]

Somebody embedded a link to one of my websites on the sidebar of her blog.  It ends up hundreds of links from this blog.  Will this type of links be considered unnatural links by Google?  Here is the url of the blog.

http://chordsandmore.blogspot.com/

To find the link to my site, please search "yoke wong".

Thanks.

[RobertFisher]

Hi Marie, 
Thanks for the input. I always hate trying to short answer something like this...cause I know someone's going to fill it in. You make good points. I still think given he has around 6500, if half of those are sitewide, it isn't to his benefit. What do you think? (I know you do a lot with penalty removal.)  He has gotten a partial penalty.

Best to you,

Robert

[pianomother]

Hi Marie,

I think the blog owner likes my site.  And she did the same type of linking to other sites too.  I already emailed her and asked her to add rel="nofollow" to the <a>tag or move the link to the body of an blog article.  But I am still waiting for her response.</a>

<a>Thanks.</a>

[MarieHaynes]

Just wanted to add my two cents to say that the fact that the link is sitewide doesn't make it any more or less unnatural than any other link.  John Mueller commented on this in a webmaster central hangout.  I've transcribed his words here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/are-sitewide-links-bad/

Regarding the link on the blogspot site you mentioned, how did it get there?  Did you pay for it?  If so, then it's unnatural.  Did you trade something for it?  Then it's unnatural.  Was it a reciprocal link (you link to me and I'll link to you)?  Some of those can be unnatural if you've done lots of this type of linking but if it's a rare occasion for you then it's probably ok.  Or did the site owner like your site and decide to link to you on their own?  If that's the case then this is a good link.

[RobertFisher]

Probably the easiest way to assist you is to first say: this type of linking is not a good part of a healthy link profile. Yes, they must go.

It appears someone has spent a lot of time using comment spam as a linking tool. That is going to blog posts, placing a comment that has a link in it and doing that several thousand times:        The anchor text on the top three of these is piano sheet music and chords lessons, your domain name in two iterations_, and piano lessons. _That exact anchor text occurs in about one half of over 6000 links.

It is just obvious that these links did not occur by someone finding your site, saying this is cool I will put it in a post, writing about it and then linking back to your site for attribution.

You need to clean this up immediately. Sorry, wish there was better news.

Robert

[AlanMosley]

I agree with Robert, one website, I would not worry.

Google is looking for a pattern of manipulation.

too many links with same link text is a bad thing, but google is smart enough to realize that one website is not manipulation

[pianomother]

Hi Robert,

Thank you for your input.  This is only one of the blogs that have sidebar links to my site.  There are thousands of this type of links.  Google imposed a partial action to my site.  Here is the message from Google.

"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."

Should I get rid of all this type of links?  What is a healthy link profile?

Thanks.

[RobertFisher]

John,

This type of "sidebar" link creates a sitewide link typically and that is the problem with it. If it is recent, and you know the blog owner, contact them. But, remember, this link in and of itself is not "bad": it is more about the overall link profile of your site. Are there a lot of these and a lot that are on blog comments, etc.? that is not good. 
Look at your link profile before you worry too much over this.

Robert