Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links

We have also discovered this problem in Sweden. In some cases this has been due to unnaturally many external links with keywords (at clients websites).

However, I wonder if it’s really smart to submit a reconsideration request? Is there a risk that Google somehow manually can punish the website? For example, if they find links from other sites that are not already punished.

/Per

So how would I go about dealing with this if the SEO company I was using had caused this in the first place?

I hope this is just more FUD from Google. I’ve gotten the message on a site or two with zero impact on rankings/traffic. It would be an absolute bloodbath if they start enforcing it. xrumer sales will go through the roof. Mturk armies would pop up. This is an arms race Google would lose.

For those worried about competitors ruining other competitors sites with crappy links, have you thought of this: once a website is deemed “authoritative” with Google, it can get away with much more questionable things than newer/non authority websites.

Why would someone want to ruin someone who’s ranking #8 or page 2? They would want to target competitors whom are ranking high already, who are likely already authoritative, and thus can get away with more.

Thoughts?

Hi Patrick, perfect timing for this post as we have just recently received a message and its a painfull process of removing links…i am just recently getting removed so many spam links we have received in the past. Its not a matter of when you getting them, it can be whenever you might have received in the past. ..i am not sure if webmasters are understanding the wider implications of this problem. Its better to get temporary drop in rankings instead of permant drop and out of SERP’s for long time. Sooner or later search engine will catch up and find it by sniffing your link profile

I am not sure what are the best techniques you can advise we can follow if we are not ble to find the automated footer links which are build to our website in the past,before i joined and inherited this company.

Hello,

If you can’t contact the sites that links are residing, what do you do? Also, how can you tell if they are harming your site?

Many thanks!,

Dave

@Ryan I got hit with the message on two of my sites. Nothing dropped until today, which is 7 days after receiving the messages…

Nice post Patrick. It seems as though receiving such a message does not necesarily mean equate to a penalty. Quite a few people have received them and just experienced a downward bump in rankings, pointing to a mere discounting of those dirty links. Probably the best way to do it.

Hi Patrick,

There seem to be more and more of these warnings popping up all over the place. It does beg the question, how long will it be before a large number of negative SEO services start to surface?

Dan,
This is a good thought but let me ask you a question. How many websites in first page have received the Google warning? Are you sure all the websites where in second page or lower? I agree that I’ll never ruin sites like Amazon or some big player but when you see sites that are run by marketers like you (and you can understand this most of the times), and rank higher than you, it’s not that hard to think that you could improve your ranking by eliminating them. And they couldn’t even guess where are those unnatural links because they didn’t do it, so it would be hard for them to adjust things and have the rankings back

Me receive that notification too, after that I was worried why this sent it to me, may be my sight was blocked or some other problem,

700,000 messages via webmaster tools, crazy. Think of all the sites likely effected that don’t even have webmaster tools setup.

Pretty sure no webmaster tools will be correlated to a dodgy link profile.

@Craig

One of my sites which i received the notice on started to lose rankings about a week ago and everyday since my traffic has been dropping – now virtually dead. It’s too early to tell if this is permanent or if I will be able to correct my link profile and recover. Of course, its also too early to tell whether my drop is due to a penalty against my site or indeed if its just a result of links that were passing juice being de-indexed.

Big question now, is how to react. build good clean links and ignore the big G or open a dialogue with the big man himself – I think ignoring it won’t do much good to be honest.

Derek.

This seems to me to be a license for blackhat competitors to start spamming on the behalf of a competitor and make their way to the #1 spot by process of elimination. So does SEO now evolve into more of a game of sabotaging one’s competitors than attempting to promote one’s own site through a variety of methods, some of which more ethical than others?

Any thoughts on whether or not this is a legitimate concern?

I haven’t had this happen to me at http://www.childthings.co.uk but have when I ran another Internet business, reduced a fair bit of my web traffic

Fortunately, I didn’t receive any message in my Google Webmaster Tools, but I am happy that we now get to be notified in case something fishy is going on in our link profile. It’s a great thing!

Steve

Ok let’s do a case study. We got the message March 18th – 7-days late our rankings dropped between 3-12 pages.

Lets share experiences on what you have done -

1. have your rankings returned?

2. What actions have you taken?

Thanks for the post Patrick. We’ve had one of our sites get listed as having “unnatural” links, I think our issue is we have specific anchor text for the majority of the links coming in to the site. The issue is most bloggers on the web now understand the importance of anchor text and will link to sites using the proper anchor text just to help them out. So where do we go from here?

Also, love the fact the people are spamming the comments of a post focused on spam issues.

Our company’s website just recently received this message from Google as well. We are unsure which links it could be but are concerned primary due to the fact that our marketing department took place in the purchasing of Facebook and Twitter followers recently. Could this have anything to do with the ‘unnatural links’? Thank you