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?
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
-
Links from same server or not?
Hello, I make websites so every website I make has a backlink to my website. Currently all my websites are hosted on server A, but my OWN website is hosted on server B. I plan to move my website to server A too. This will indicate that all the backlinks I have currently are from a difference server, now all these links will come from the SAME server. Will this have any results on my positions? Is this something that you have to take into account? Jeroen
Link Building | | conversal0 -
Do links in hosted documents help with domain authority?
When giving presentations in our industry, we often find that the PDF or PPT document is then hosted on the origination's domain for download by event attendees. If these files have links, do they count as inbound followed links?
Link Building | | ULCRobotics0 -
How to find out why a link is not working
In URL Open explorer I ran a couple of others and saw they were getting link credit. Our site is not, does anything look wrong in the url below? www.XYZclientsSiteXYZ.com Anyway to find out why everyone else on the page of artists is getting credit but we are not? Thank you,
Link Building | | klemtek0 -
Confirming unnatural link removed
My SEO firm confirmed on 4/5 that they've removed links from a site www.fantake.com. However, as of today, it still shows on GWM there are 1100 links coming from that site. Questions: where can I find out bad links from root domain listed on GWM? There are some domains showing they have hundreds of links to our site. Between the lag time of GWM crawling, is there a tool that I can use and verify if a link is indded removed?
Link Building | | ypl0 -
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 -
Link building
I have two separate websites on different servers and was wondering that since reciprocal links effectively eliminate each other, I'm curious if this link strategy will keep the links counting. Here's the strategy: I will have someone link to my site A and if i link to their site from my site B in a three way link strategy, will the links count even though both my site A and B have me listed as the Whois so Google knows that both sites are owned by me? Or will the links be discounted as reciprocal? Thanks in advance for your feedback! Take care, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Do you think it's a good idea to try to find synergy between clients for blog posts/citations/links, or should you keep clients away from each other?
Say you have for example three (in this case) clients, and: Client A sells red widgets Client B is a doctor Client C sellls blue widgets With some research, you find that: Red widgets (A) can make the process of blue widget creation (C) even more effective. Red widgets (A) can protect you from harmful things that doctors (B) are qualified to recommend that you stay away from. Furthermore, there are things that doctors (B) recommend that you do in order to maximize the benefits of red widgets (A) Blue widgets (C) carry with them certain potential health risks, which according to doctors (B) can be minimized using the following means Sometimes blue widgets (C) can be used to effectively repair red widget (A) factories ...and so forth. Sure you're really writing these articles to generate links and exchange authority, and frankly you started with "how can I find synergy between these clients?" rather than a with a great article subject that needed a citation which luckily happened to be another client, but the citations are legitimate and the clients are qualified to speak on the subjects where their expertise and interests overlap. Would you consider going ahead with this? Does anyone have any experience doing it? I could see potential pitfalls if clients were to interact with each other, but keeping yourself as the intermediary might well work and overall it seems like a decent way to grab low-hanging fruit as they say. What do you guys think?
Link Building | | PathMarketing0