Unnatural Inbound Links Warning in GWT
-
Hi all,
A bit of a long questions so apologies in advance but please bear with me...
My client has received an 'Unnatural Inbound Links' warning and it is now my task to try and resolve through a process of;
- Highlighting the unnatural links
- Requesting that the links be removed (via webmaster requests)
- Possibly using the Disavow Tool
- Submitting a Reconsideration Request
So I downloaded my clients link profile from both OSE and GWT in CSV format and compared - the amount of links returned was considerably more in GWT than it was in OSE...?
So I set about going through the links, first filtering into order so that I could see blocks of links from the same URL - I highlighted in colours;
Red - Definitely need to be removed
Orange - Suspect, need to investigate further
Yellow - Seem to be ok but may revisit
Green - Happy with the link, no further action
So to my question which relates to, is it 'black & white' - is it a case of 'good link v 'bad link' or could there be some middle ground? (am I making this process even more confusing than it actually is?)
As an example, here are some 'Orange' URL's;
http://www.24searchengines.com/ (not exact URL as it goes to the travel section which is my clients niche) - this to me looks spammy and I would normally 'paint it red' and look to remove, however, when I go to the 'contact us' page;
(http://www.24searchengines.com/texis/open/allthru?area=contactus)
and follow the link to remove from directory, it takes me here;
http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/help/update.html
DMOZ???
My clients has a 'whole heap' of these type of links;
http://www.25searchengines.com/
http://www.26searchengines.com/
http://www.27searchengines.com/
http://www.28searchengines.com/
...and many many more!!
Here is another example;
http://foodys.eu/2007/01/04/the-smoke-ring-bbq-community/
...plus many more...
My client is in the 'cruise niche' and as there is a 'cruise' section on the site I'm not sure whether this constitutes a good, bad or indifferent link!
Finally, prior to me working with this client (1 month) they moved their site from a .co.uk to a .com domain and redirected all links from the .co.uk to the .com (according to GWT, over 16k have been redirected) - a lot of these 'spammy' links were to the .co.uk and have thus been redirected, should I even consider removing the redirection or will that have severe consequences?
Apologies for the long (long) post, I know I'm heading in the right direction but some assurance wouldn't go amiss!
Many thanks
Andy
<colgroup><col width="1317"></colgroup>
| | -
Thanks to you all for taking the time to answer my very long question, it is very much appreciated!
I will post updates regarding my my progress!
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Welcome to the challenging world of penalty removal! Here are my thoughts on your questions.
First of all, don't worry about dmoz and 23searchengines and the like. The 23searchengines sites are scraper sites and Google knows that they are not self made links. 99.9% of the time a dmoz link is ok. The exception would be the case where a site managed to get an anchor texted link on there (usually by accessing a corrupt editor). If your link from dmoz is anchored by your brand/url then just ignore them.
Regarding the foody's link, whether or not it's unnatural depends on the patterns your client has. If you've got the occasional blogroll link it may be ok. But, when you're auditing the links you'll soon see if this is a pattern. If your site has a whack of blogroll links, especially if they are keyword anchored, then they are probably on Google's radar. What I would do in my audit is mark this as "blogroll" and then, once I'm finished my audit I would decide whether blogroll links should be removed or not. The exception to this would be if I know that my client has paid for blogroll links. If that's the case then I would flag them for removal right away.
If you've got a pile of spammy links from your .co.uk site then removing the redirect is probably a good idea.
There is always middle ground when assessing links.
Good luck!
Marie
-
I saw with your link example http://foodys.eu/ that they have alot of sitewide sidebar links. This is a big red flag. Sitewide sidebar links are one of the easiest ways to get a penalty, as the links are unnatural, even if it is a good site (i.e. one link is great, but sitewide links bad).
Any decent sites that have these sort of links and which are giving decent traffic you should get the rel="nofollow" tag added. Of course this is dependent on the webmaster dealing with your request.
-
Hi Andy,
I'd be totally ruthless with your link audit, even if 1% of you thinks it is spammy, disavow it. In fact, if it isn't driving traffic then disavow it, what are you going to lose. The question to ask yourself is would you be happy to show the link to Matt Cutts? If not, then get rid.
We heard from Google recently that they are not allowed to open any files that are sent to them for security reasons so, for me, going through the effort of contacting webmasters and sending Google files with emails etc is pointless. I know they say you should be we have stopped asking because it gets you nowhere and you haven't got the time to wait for replies. I'd just get some numbers and info together about what you have disavowed, why there was these links in the first place and what you have done to remedy it. Obviously, if you can get them taken down easily then do so.
Stop building links until you have the penalty lifted! Don't look at the anchor text used to justify whether it is a good or bad link, look at the relevance to your website. I even disavow 404 and no-followed links if I think they are spammy.
Good luck in the recovery!
-
Hello,
Ihave recovered more than 3 websites affected by unnatural link penalty (which is a manual penalty) and used the disavow tool for several clients of mine. Here is what i do recommend for u:
1. Be more determined/accurate with links analysis. You may classify links into 3 groups:
a/definetly spammy: links in footers, sitewides, links from low quality directories, linsk from blog/directory networks, etc...
b/maybe spammy: these are links that appear to be good, but you may have to digg mire to be sure if it's really good (these could be links exhanges, links from websites that have been spotted of seeling links, etc...)
c/good links: this are links using branded anchors, parital matches or low number of exact macth anchors. These links should be placed in relevant websites and high editorial level (not linking to every rubbish oin the web)
About the redirected links, if i were to take this project, i would analyze the redirected links and check if most of them are spammy or have little to no value, i will remove the redirect and take the time and effort to build new links to the .com domain. Creating new links is better than deleting the old ones, here is why:
1. creatinng links is easier and funnier (you feel success when u earn a new good link)
2. it takes less time to see results (disavowing and deleting links may take upt to 3-6 mnths to reflect resullts as google takes time to process these data)
If you have further questions, don't hesitate to get back to me.
Regards
Amine Rihane
SEO Consultant
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 would you link build to this page?
Hi Guys, I'm looking to build links to a commercial page similar to this: https://apolloblinds.com.au/venetian-blinds/ How would you even create quality links (not against Google TOS) to a commercial page like that? Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Value of no-follow links
I'm curious to understand roughly how much % of value a no-follow link has in building authority relative to a do-follow link? I understand that Google seems consistently and growingly focused on value - ie. is the link valuable in growing the business, irregardless of SEO - and perhaps therefore the no-follow / do-follow distinction is becoming a more unnecessary dichotomy. How does Google look at do-follow vs no-follow links? And how much weight now is really given to one compared to the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Too many on page links
Hi I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+ How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Best internal linking structure?
We are considering implementing a site-wide contextual linking structure. Does anyone have some good guidelines / blog posts on this topic? Our site is quite (over 1 million pages), so the contextual linking would be automated, but we need to define a set of rules. Basically, if we have a great page on 'healthy recipes,' should we make every instance of the word 'healthy recipes' link back to that page, or should we limit it to a certain number of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Linking Back
Hello, I have a blog www.digitaldiscovery.eu and I have been working the link building. Now I have a few links pointing into my blog and in Google Webmaster and in Open Site Explorer I can see the URL of those websites. In scale from 1 to 10 how usefull is to have a blogroll in my blog pointing back to those high PR links? How usefull is this in link-building strategy? Tks in advance! PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0