At SEOmoz we do virtually nothing in the way of active link solicitation. We're living what I would call an SEO's dream: we've already put a great deal of effort into building a community of passionate, engaged, thoughtful people who care about the industry (that's you guys!), and we devote a ton of time and resources to creating awesome content and sharing it with you guys. The result? We've got the best kind of links: the kind that build themselves.
Imagine the sinking feeling I got in the pit of my stomach, then, when a Google Webmaster Tools check on Thursday revealed that we'd incurred an unnatural link warning:
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Challenge Accepted
When I saw this, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened. A few months ago, just as I was coming to work at SEOmoz, there was a discussion in the Traffic Planet forums about negative SEO and whether pointing a bunch of spammy links at another site (like, say, a competitor's or rival's site) could actually harm them, SEO-wise. The guys who started the thread claimed they had successfully performed negative SEO on Dan Thies' website, he disagreed that their tactics had been effective, and the debate raged.
Post-Penguin, there's been a lot of concern about links that are beyond one's control doing irreparable damage to one's site. But surely Google will put in place some algorithmic defenses against this sort of underhanded webspam attack! Rand felt so confident in this being the case that he hopped into the forum discussion and challenged the spam community to point black hat links at SEOmoz.org in the name of science:
(Personal anecdote time: This was happening after I had accepted the offer at SEOmoz, but before I'd started working here. I was sitting at my old job getting emails from Mozzers being like "just so you know, this is happening." Never a dull moment!)
Rand also discussed these efforts in a Whiteboard Friday video, Negative SEO: Myths, Realities and Precautions.
Needless to say, the spam community was like:
We did see an increase in the number of spammy and black-hat type links, including links from sites with "black hat" in the name - but we also continued the regular link growth through our usual content sharing and community outreach that we love so much.
We didn't see any traffic or ranking impact.
To be honest, I wasn't too worried about it - until we saw the unnatural link warning.
It turns out that we needn't have worried - the warning came from an update to how Google is surfacing unnatural link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools. Matt Cutts has the scoop, over on Google Plus:
"If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.
If we've taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it."
TL;DR: You may see an unnatural links warning if Google detects unnatural links, but it's more of an FYI - as long as you don't see a concurrent drop in traffic, you should be just fine. Phew!
We'll be continuing to test the effects of spammy links on SEOmoz, and we'll keep you guys updated as we learn more. In the meantime, if you see an unnatural links warning, don't panic. Many sites have attracted lots of black hat links without intent to manipulate Google's rankings. If you're in that group and still receive the warning, you should watch your traffic and rankings, but unlike the past, when these warnings were more directly impactful, it may simply be a "heads up, you've got some spammy links," message.
If you've received the warning or have insights, we'd love your feedback and opinions, too!
I might have to bill Google for the time wasted scrutinizing my backlink profiles :)
Agree! They might as well just have sent out emails saying "You have links to your site".
With a natural link profile like seomoz sure you dont have to worry. I am not sure, however whether that is also true for small sites that dont have those all important natural high quality links (yet).
A webmaster i know received the unnatural links warning a while back and also got the subsequent drop in rankings. It really hit them hard.
Although the manual penalty was revoked, they are still nowhere near where they used to rank and visitors have still only reached half the original rate.
So I guess the rule has to be to do the upmost to get bad links removed, especially for those small, vulnerable sites.
I agree, I would be more worried that the larger companies would have a better chance of wiping out any new competitors as they surface. A better experiment would be to see how quickly you could get a newish, less authoritative website penalised.
Totally agree with you. My site had not been affected by Panda or Penguin and I have ranked high on Page 1 of Googs for a couple of years. I only had a few thousand links. But then on May 2, 2012 (about a week after all the posts of how Negative SEO could work began to show up on SEO blogs) , I started seeing hundreds of comment spam links showing up in my link profile. Before that day I didn't have a single comment link ever.
A competitor started firing bad links at my site and I got my first letter ever from Google on June 30th and was wiped out. Negative SEO 100% works for a small site. I went from about 4000 links to 18,000 in about a month and 14000 were comment spam with a single keyword anchor text.
I've done a few reconsideration requests but get the same stock reply from Google so that tells me they haven't even read my request. They probably just crawl the site looking for changes but I cannot get those links removed.
It is crazy to think that someone can ruin your site. It seems like online terrorism to me.
Agreed- seeing something similar right now over here. Does anyone have a solution? Not sure if there's even a way to get links removed from a spammer?
Former Mozzer Cyrus Shepard had a post on negative link removal on his personal blog not long ago, which includes some tools: https://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/. There are new tool providers coming out with "link clean up" tools and services all over right now - if you can find a link cleanup service provided by a company you trust, it might be worth looking at.
I found some good backlink removal tool that is for free in the link your shared... Is seogadget backlink removal an accurate tool? Thanks Ruthburr
SEOGadget is a company that we trust. I haven't used the tool so can't speak to its effectiveness, but the company is definitely trustworthy and knows their stuff.
By the way I found out that I tried to analyzed all the badlinks or angelas type of links that I've made before and I found out that most of the links are safe but I already remove my link there..
Which is unrelated sites..
Why a link clean up tool that you have to pay for no doubt. Why doesnt Google give webmasters the ability to say ignore this link I did not create it like Bing does. This is the only way this will get corrected.
I've been experimenting with www.linkdelete.com and have had amazing success with it. One of my clients came running to me after buying a bunch of links on Fiverr and we used that site to remove a bunch of the bad links. We cleaned up their link profile and submitted a reconsideration request and now they're back!
Quite frankly, I've become pretty frustrated with what SEO has become. Having little control over this and now knowing that a competitor could potentially blast links at your site in hopes of Neg. SEO is very unsettling.
Did you submit the reconsideration request via Google Webmaster Tools or via the penguin reconsideration request Google doc?
Why doesn't Google go after those spammy sites who ARE sending these unnatural links rather than the target of these spammy sites?! If they want to delist anyone, delist those.
Absolutely create a report where you can report that these sites are pointing to you and are pure spam. Why should I have to file a reinclusion when I did nothing wrong.
I have seen a large site with lots of links survive and a smaller site with less links wiped out so yes Anna you are correct. Sites like SEOMoz will survive but the little guy trying to make it can be taken out by a competitor. This post is accurate for a site like SEOMoZ but not for John Doe.com.
This is just a cover up for SEOmoz using black hat SEO tactics to promote themselves on the Googles. Mad Cuts, ban them noooow!
:)) this is a good one. :))
I barely have any comment on this incident. It's hard enough to fight for our natural link graphs, and they keep making it harder on us to identify the real problems.
I believe last thursday' email by GWT ranks among the worst emails Google has ever sent.
If the premise of the email targeting by GWT team was to notify webmasters that their websites are linked by distrusted links then the content of that email failed to make that explicit.
Paul no doubt backtracking in response to the negative publicity and outrage and using their fans at SEOMoz to help them. This can, will and does take down a smaller site saying not to worry is bad information.
So......
Now that Google's right hand has gotten everyone distracted,
wonder what the left hand is up to?
I wonder if Matt Cutts realises the impact these 'heads up' messages will have had...
I work on behalf of a client that has more than one agency dealing with their SEO (for different sections of their website). I'm completely comfortable that the work I have carried out on their behalf has been legit - within Google's guidelines etc.
So when I came into work on Friday morning and saw that they had received an 'Unnatural Links' notice (the only one of our many clients to receive a notice), I was pretty shocked and ended up spending almost my entire day looking into their backlink profile, working out what could have caused this, and most importantly making sure I was able to prove that it wasn't anything to do with our own work.
Despite my best efforts and using a range of link analysis tools, I couldn't say for certain which links could have been picked up as 'spammy' - their backlink profile was very natural... brand name accounting for a good 80% of anchor text etc.
My point is, the time genuine SEO's spent panicking and looking into the cause of these warnings could have been far better spent adding value to the web.
I lost the better part of a day, as well. I think the timing of the warnings and then the explanation was pretty unfortunate - but I'm happy to have the explanation! Big sigh of relief from me.
I think I may be going TOO white hat then. I passed Penguin, Panda, and now this. No flags. Hmmm, makes me think I'm not marketing hard enough.
starting to feel left out, Francisco? :)
FUNNY! The reason I do white hat seo is because my client have employees who have mortgages, kids, and everything. I follow their business objectives which is to have slow steady growth. The owners want to retire so there's no negative SEO for me.
Yeap, but my main white hat site was hitted by Penguin (I assume) and there was a "happy letter" ;)
Danny Sullivan has a good writeup on the new batch of link warnings: "I predict this is all just going to cause greater confusion and panic, not more clarity and calmness." What's the point in telling people there's a chance they may suffer if the only way they can know for sure is after they already see themselves suffering?
I think confusion might be Google's goal.
The other piece of this that's important to remember (we've been seeing it come up in Q&A a lot) is that you can be hit with a Penguin penalty without ever receiving the warnings - so not getting one is no guarantee of safety.
Indeed. So getting a warning might mean you get penalized but it might not, and NOT getting a warning might mean you get penalized but it might not, so the only way to tell if you're penalized is... when you get penalized. So the warnings are... useless?
I wish they would just settle on a standard - Get a message = get penalized. That would stop this nonsense of penalties without a message, or getting a message and not getting a penalty. I wish they'd also specifically point out what links they find questionable (although they'd never do that).
If Google is so interested in transparency they would have included the gist of Mr. Cutts subsequent Plus posting in the original notice instead of recycling a manual penalty notice.
This whole episode makes Google appear to fuzzy headed and unprofessional. I can only hope that Google's search results are the product of a more thoughtful implementation.
I saw a comment talking about the fact that this was all just a Google mistake. Something triggered the broadcast of the message, prematurely probably. I commented on this in my post.
The way Matt responded after people started panicking sounds like he was trying to save face. Look, this is all speculation but it just doesn't add up. Why the sudden jump to action to correct the message and ensure webmasters that they will be revamping the message in the spirit of transparency. Did this not occur to them before sending the blast? It was a mistake, and now we are all led to believe it's all planned.
Anyway, good to know it's only an FYI, or is it?
This is a really tough one for large sites.
We have immaculate linking guidelines, extremely restrictive whats allowed and it is also mandating disclosure, benefit for the user and so on. And we still got this message on a site. How are we going to find out what happened? No chance, really. Google is not entirely clear what is ok and what not, plus with millions of links, how are you going to sift through that? And especially since we're looking for natural links back, we don't have influence over what happens.
Yes, I read it too, its just a warning, but what comes after a warning? Google, this is just a mess. If they devalue a link, I think everyone is fine with it - we are, at least. Punish a link target for getting a bad link is fixing on challenge and opening many others.
Received one of these warnings from one of my sites last week and was worried for a bit there, but this gives me some relief.
Seems like Google might be going on a trolling expedition here, trying to get worried webmasters and those with guilty consciences to file reconsideration requests unnecessarily. If they are intended to help, these messages are extremely misleading.
the unnatural links message asks for webmasters to fill out a response for re-inclusion. Are people filling out the form or just ignoring this all together?
You should ignore it unless you've seen an actual traffic drop.
This is a total fail on Google's part.
Round 1 - send out link warning messages and penalize sites.
Round 2 - send out link warning messages, which included a bunch of high trusted and respected websites. Try to cover up the huge algorithm fail by sending out a super confusing and ambiguous email that explains nothing.
Seriously, this has to be one of the larger blunders I've seen by Google in the past decade. It's getting ridiculous guys.
If I may, I published a post this morning about what to do if you got an unnatural links message. Some here might find it useful:
https://www.johnfdoherty.com/deal-responsibly-unnatural-links-messages/
Matt Cutts Just twitted that they will send news messages with complete explanation about these warning.
He Said : Quick update on link messages from last Thursday: we can't easily change the old msgs, so we'll send the more specific messages later today.
This is the kind of luke-warm, ambiguous terminology that has, and continues to frustrate business owners, webmasters and marketers.
"Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. "
How is a webmaster to know this? Where is the detailed information telling us that Google has determined what they believe to be hacked links to the website, and the business owner should not be concerned.
Is this not the EXACT same email that business owners have been dreading?
And how can a business owner be "expected" to simply wait it out to determine if a link penalty is taking place? One week, 3 weeks, or will all penalties have already taken place if one received that recent unnatural links penalty.
Updating the system and getting manual was a great step by Google that showed promise. This recent comment and round of messages shows just the opposite - that Google really has no real clue how to effectively deal with link spam in an appropriate and timely and fair manner.
Todd total BS. Do they just like messing with peoples heads or do they actually have a strategy for this.
Regarding those people commenting that they were hit by negative SEO, I really think it's a percentage thing. If you've already got a good link profile, then it's going to be very hard for someone to hit you with enough spammy links to put you over the edge into a penalty.
Now, if you were teetering on the brink of having too many crappy links in your profile already, then I think it is possible for someone to push you over into a penalty.
Which is a shame really. Negative SEO should not be possible. It should not be possible to be destroyed by a competitor doing this. If you have a small legitimate website and are starting to move up in ranking it would be pretty easy for a competitor to negative SEO that site into oblivion. I really think that if google can detect unnatural links then why not just give them 0 value? It would have the same affect as penalizing a website because those links would not be providing any PR juice so the spammers would not get anywhere using that tactic and other websites wouldn't be penalized for having those links associated with them.
Either that or they need the disavow tool so we can get rid of them ourselves.
That's best idea ive heard - GOOGLE - ARE YOU READING THIS!?! DO THAT!
Google has come to a point that it's so ridiculous I stopped worrying about them.
On one of my websites, my privacy policy ranks high for the product I'm selling and my useful pages with original content are nowhere to be found.
The only difference is that my Privacy Policy page has zero backlinks, while the others have natural backlinks. Go figure. Great user experience, Google.
My biggest client is even more organic and natural than the Moz, and has a huge community of interested educators and historians that follow it religiously. The company is a large, non-profit historical trust that gets a Google Grant (!) every month. They just got tagged by the latest link alert - I'm this close to switching careers and becoming a bartender.
I got warning messages in some of my client's GWT. But, no drop in ranks insofar. As far as Negative SEO is concerned, i guess this is the right time when google should introduce the link disavow thing. It will not only help legitimate seo guys to feel safe about their campaigns, but also will discourage those who are involve in Negative SEO. Ruth, frankly speaking, I am great follower of Google's web-spam team and their efforts, but last few weeks and the substituent results from google are disheartening. Crap Spam websites with zero content are ranking on top positions, one of my site which provide great level of information and user experience is no where in serp now.. I guess Google should not experiment these things, because millions of people out here are dependent on Google for their livelihood. I am hoping to see some significant(good) changes from Google. Changes, which will prove to be good for good people and bad for bad people out here...
It is a wait and see game with this search engine. I wouldn't change anything unless you see a change in your rankings.
This is indeed interesting, and really makes me worry about the future of SEO. Let's face it, SEOmoz.org is not going to get hugely impacted but we are talking about small to mid sized websites that 75%+ is coming from organic searches. That can be a huge problem.
Even if one removes all inbound unnatural links to a penalized website, and submits the website to Google's reconsideration, it still won't restore former rankings. It is a purely mathematical matter:
The value of the inbound unnatural links contributed to the relevance score of the page, and determined indirectly its present ranking in Google's SERPs. When, throughout "Panda", Panguin" or whatever, this value is either reduced, or becomes 0, or becomes a negative value, removing the inbound links assigns them a 0 value, and the new relevance score is thus lower than before, and corresponds to a poorer ranking (much poorer if the main promotion technique was creating plenty of unnatural links).
However, if the page has already been punished, and the punishment assigned a negative value to those links, there will be a certain increase in the relevance score of the page, after removing the links, and probably also a certain improvement of rankings, but not back to the value prior to the punishment.
The same is true if one removes those links after getting only a warning.
You hit the nail on the head Emanuel.
My website was practically black listed in the penguin - since then I have spent countless hours trying to change anchor text works to Branded links with our company name or URL, and have submitted 4 reconsideration requests thus far and have been denied every time. I get the same email from google that says "watch for unnatural links....paid link....link schemes". The only thing I was guilty of that I know for sure was having too many links with keyword anchor tags, which have been mostly changed to urls or our company name.
I went from 250 unique's/day to about 25. I cannot figure out why my website is still tainted: www.survivalistfood.com I have been following this blog and doing everything I can think of to make my link profile better, but I don't know what else I can really do. Any ideas anyone?
This might be a better question for the Q&A forums, where people have more room to discuss possible solutions: www.seomoz.org/q
If you were hit by Penguin then it won't help to submit a reconsideration request. You've got to clean up and then wait for the next Penguin refresh. There was one on May 25. If you made your changes after that then you've got to wait until they do another one.
The reconsideration requests are only for the folks who initially got a manual unnatural linking penalty.
It wasn't till after my site dropped off the face of the earth that I went into Webmasters and saw that I had a message waiting, which I believe was a manual unnatural linking penalty that I received. I have submitted reconsideration requests in both places, and I had cleaned up most of the links before May 25th. I'm too the point where I have cleaned up everything under my control, and non-commercial anchor texts are well over 50% now, where as they were probably 90% before. So I don't know if I'm being blamed for something else like a link scheme or paid links or what, which to my knowledge has never been done to my site - only too many commercial anchor texts....frustrating. I'm at a dead end it feels like.
A really brief look shows me that you've got keywords as your anchor text for most of your links. You've got 1201 links with the anchor text "survival food" and 16 for your URL. That's likely your main problem! But the 1201 survival food anchors are only on 39 domains so I'm guessing there are probably some site wides there that could be cleaned up.
And just out of curiosity, what's the deal with the commented out "survivalist food" repeated hundreds of times in your source code?
thanks so much for your comments. I just emailed you - let me know if you didn't get.
You guys get a heap of links from people sharing your posts to search engine land everyday which is great for you.
A wrote about Bing's Disavow link tool recently and used it on 20 of so low DA sus looking sites but it made no difference to my traffic from them.
I really think Google is rating top quality sites which have a strong brand in their niche so they're pretty much untouchable and everything else is penalized if they're unpopular regardless of how useful the content is.
I like this article but it seems like Google just set the stage for massive link savotoge from one competing website to another.
Good post! It sounds like it would be very hard to make negative SEO foolproof. I wonder if there are any negative SEO success stories out there.
I wish that everyone could play fairly by the rules, but there are malicious SEO's out there that don't have a correct moral compass that makes it harder for those who do. I got hit by the 3rd wave of Penguin updates and am now finally resurfacing on Google in the SERPS. It wasn't because anyone spammed me, but because I wasn't as knowledgeable starting out as I am now about SEO.
I do believe Google has to take this kind of stuff into consideration by simply discounting links that are less value or not relevant at all. Doing so across the board would make an even playing field for all.
I am sure this was one crazy weekend for most or a lot of the SEO's/Webmasters/Website Owners. Thanks SEOMoz for sharing this data/information about seomoz.org. Very useful to the community.
That unnatural link warning is enough to make an white hat SEO's heart drop. I too have spent plenty of time agonizing over every link in a portfolio trying to decide if it would or wouldn't make the cut. I appreciate the heads up, but maybe a different message would have been better.
Here's proof that it really does "happen to the best of us." Thank you, Ruth!
Also, I can't imagine your reaction to the e-mails about Rand's spam challenge! Never a dull moment, indeed. :)
This was an interesting test you guys ran and the results are even more interesting because spammers still aggressively pursue links this way even after Panda and Penguin.
We've surprisingly seen improvements in our sites post Panda and Penguin. I really like the opening paragraph "We've got the best kind of links: the kind that build themselves". Aggressive link building and negative SEO are the practices I try to stay away from. It seems as if it's not so much about the quantity of links (even though the more the better), but rather the quality.
Great Post
I think the disallow-links function that Google has just added to analytics is a great counter-part to these messages. After careful analysis these bad links can be removed.
Thumbs up to the heading Challenge Accepted. Accepted beacuse it's seomoz?
The answer is -- Yes, Negative SEO did beat seomoz. The Negative SEO'ers tripped a google flag and a notice was issued.
The real question is -- what does this new notice mean?
Everyone knows that google shows a bias to Brands; it's been developing since the Vince update in 2009 so no one ever thought that Negative SEO would bring down seomoz (to include the Negative SEO'ers).
google has many reasons to want to protect brands and we can only speculate as to what they are. I would guess they are at least 2 fold -- 1) What if you searched for BMW and found no search results -- how much credibiltiy would google have? 2) Eric Scmidt (when he was CEO) said, "Brands are the solution, not the problem...brands are how you sort out the cesspool." I'll let you decide who he thinks the cesspool includes. Here's a good infographic on the topic --> https://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/brand-branding-brands.php
So what is the purpose of this new notice? -- 1) Is it issued to Brands instead of the "unnatural links" notice (which in theory will result in a site wide penalty) because google doesn't want to affect their rankings? 2) Is this what everyone will receive from now on? 3) Is this a repudiation of their old "unnatural links" notice strategy that, in theory, affects the whole site and results in a penalty? (Maybe. However, there are many sites waiting for the other shoe to drop -- of the ~ 1 million notices issued, most have never been penalized and requests for reconsideration haven't been responded to.) 4) Is the new notice tripped algorithmically based on evaluation of the site's link graph? 5) Other?
What This Test Proves -- That a notice can be generated through Negative SEO, even on a site with a broad link graph.
The Fear -- Your E-Commerce site won't get the same treatment as seomoz because the nature of E-Commerce doesn't allow you to generate the kind of link graph that an information site can. Based on google's actions towards E-Commerce sites in general, I think you should be worried that you won't get the seomoz treatment, i.e., that, instead, you'll get a penalty. Afterall, google says you're not their customer, they're not interested in providing customer service to you, and they want to sort out the cesspool -- their Branding and PR strategy, not mine.
Along those lines --
“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” --Andrew Carnegie
What has google done to business websites in the past?
I disagree that this blog post proves that negative SEO was effective against us - I think the fact that a notice was generated but that we weren't punished actually proves the opposite, that Google is aware of unnatural links being a problem but wants to correct for them algorithmically rather than punishing individual sites.
These new notices are intended to alert more people (small sites as well as big) to the presence of unnatural links in their link graph. It's not a repudiation of their old strategy so much as it is a modification - now there are two levels of link warnings, a "we found some bad links but don't think they're your fault, so we're just going to devalue them" warning and an "if you don't fix this you'll probably be penalized" warning. The new, less-serious warning is the reason so many sites, us included, saw a link warning for the first time in July. It's tripped algorithmically rather than manually.
Ultimately Google will have to solve for the problem of unnatural links and negative SEO algorithmically - that's really how they want to solve most problems. I think they'll have to move more toward aggressively devaluing spammy links (which is a big part of what Pengun was), rather than manually punishing sites, both because it's more scalable for them and because it's the best way to prevent negative SEO from becoming a reality.
I am confident that over time Google will find a way to prevent negative SEO from working by devaluing links rather than punishing sites. They have a vested interest in doing so, because negative SEO is another "manipulative" technique. Keeping manipulative techniques from working is how they maintain the quality of their results, which is how they keep market share, which is how they make money. Even if negative SEO works in the short term (which I'm still not convinced of), in the long-term it will be a non-starter.
I believe that Google is now indeed punishing sites by devaluing links, and by devaluing links it devalues the relevance scores for all or some of the key phrases of the linked page.
Mr. Randfish always say Negative SEO does not work for good sites. But after Google's Unnatural Links Warnings to SEOMoz i think Negative SEO work. What is your opinion RuthBurr Plz. tell me.
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday
I think Google has a vested interest in negative SEO not working, which means it's not going to work. We may see some volatility in the SERPs as Google figures out the best way to treat spammy links so that neither spam links nor negative SEO works, but over time they'll work to combat it. They'll have to - otherwise spammers will start appearing in the results and they don't want that.
In the short term, the best defense is a good offense - the more high-quality links you build, the more likely Google is to believe that you're not the one building bad links to your site should someone try negative SEO on you - they'll just devalue the bad links, like they did for us, and it will be like nothing ever happened.
There's also a possibility that they will be able to figure out who is trying negative SEO on you and penalize them instead of you. I wouldn't be surprised if they did that.
This may be proof that you're wrong, a case where a large site was likely the victim of a Negative SEO attack and lost 50% of their traffic. And it only took 900 links to do it! -- https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4481912.htm
I appreciate your youthful optimism, but truth is; Google can't control their algorithm and they don't want to spend money to make sure that honest sites aren't victimized. You don't have to work on very many clients to figure out that most of the things Google does aren't very accurate at all. That's why we handle as much as possible server side rather than relying on Google to get it right -- of course, if you don't care about your client's rankings you would trust google, LOL!
Love the transparency as always
You guys a got ridiculous amount of links for woorank.
I always block them and updowner.com
Hi Klarke, could you please tell me how to block those sites in google webmaster tool? Just like you said, I got ridiculous amount of links for updowner.com
Both of those sites have a process/form that allows you to remove your site from their index. Once you do that, the backlinks from them will disappear when Google re-crawls their site. It takes a while though, from experience it looks like Google visits these guys' pages once a month.
Well, 30% increase of links on SEOMOZ may not hurt its rankings, but someone of our competitors put a 301 redirect from a bunch of penalized sites with a lot of spammy links, which led to increase from 1000 links to 50000 in our GWT. Not much time passed and our traffic from google dropped by 90% and we received the unnatural links message in GWT. So Negative SEO is real. Of course we used the disavow tool and filed a reconsideration request. Now waiting to see how they respond.
Sure thing nothing bad will happen to SeoMoz even it has 1kkk bad links over 1 night. Or if it has any effect - you can easily get rid of it unless you do it publicly as an experiment.
However, this experiment is going to have bad effect on any small business that is not a big brand as you..
JamesBSEO +100500
ruth nice work you give us in minute what you learn in a month thanks for that :)
I think a lot of folks posting in here REALLY have to give their heads a good shake.
Google comes out with an algo that reconsiders a site's linking profile, and based on the newly computed results, the site's SERPs were affected.
Once this was done, do you think that Google would leave the door open to anyone that wants to damage a competitor's SERPs?
Not a chance. Once they did their recalculations, any factors that could do this were turned off. (Or only under their control).
First, we need to look at the tactics the hackers would use.
Submitting your site to a whole bunch of spammy sites won't work... Google has those links on "ignore" already.
Panda was a shutting down of spammy links by deindexing link farms and similar.
Google's Penguin was a recalculation of a site's link profile, which included downgrading pages based on anchor text used on non-relevant pages.
Google had restructured PageRank in the Mayday update.
They told us outright, but this info just seemed to slip by unnoticed.
Prior to this, PageRank was not working.
It was failing because of it's core premise that only considered the amount and quality of sites linking, and did not consider actual content.
Google reworked the PR algo to be based on relevance.
It now does not matter if the linking page has a PR0 or a PR8, it is the content match between linking and linked pages that determines the amount of "link juice" assigned.
Penguin applied the revised PR algos retroactively.
If you were link building based on PR and not relevance, the terms you used got slapped down.
As for a repeat of this by 3rd parties, I do not think it is possible.
Google has made their PageRank metric a stand alone.
Links affect PR are calculated on relevance.
PR does not affect SERPs. They tell us that it is not an actionable metric.
That leaves the last component of links, anchor text.
Google told us that they were shutting off a link function.
They did not say which function but you can go and read the Anatomy of a Search Engine and Google's founders will tell you what they are.
The factor open to manipulation is anchor text's precognitive function.
The relevance of the anchor text to the content of the landing page was taken at 100% and landing page subject could be determined without visiting the page.
If this is no longer a factor, all the spam link holes are plugged.
Negative SEO is not a possibility.
Reg
In April 2012 our website ????.co.uk was delisted with the message 'unnatural links', on 15 January 2013 our new site ????????.co.uk (new domain name) received the same message.
Some history...
With regard to our original website we thought we had been saved by an SEO company, they were so confident it was un-true; I actually started to sleep again. They said they would be able to rectify the problems caused by our original SEO company.
Anyway, acotis never recovered after spending many thousands. So there next approach was to construct a new website with a new domain. Spending more thousands.
I'd like to know what to do next and who's fault is it?
I was categorically blamed last time on the GWM forum, with people saying I should have known what they are doing being I was paying them.
Well let me ask you a question?
When you take your car to the garage to be fixed do you know exactly what they have done ? Part by part, and did they use any of those cheap Chinese parts (Chinese web farms), that's what you paid for right ?
All I want to do is get in my car fixed and go to work, google you are killing me!
Where do I go from here?
Hi Acotis,
You may have more luck posting this question in our Q&A forums, where you can get advice from the SEOmoz community as well as staff on what to do next. Good luck!
Ok, thanks for your help.
Do I need to delete this before I post in Q&A ?
Nope, you're fine!
Let us know the link to your post please.
Hello everybody,,
My website also penalized, I cleared the most of the links as I can. Upon the penalized Google webmaster tools shown total total links was 4323, but now I have 2852 links including do follow and no follow. Does it make sence to send the reconsideration request to google?
thanks
SEOmoz has such a great authority that I don't think conclusions should be drawn from that experiment. A newer site with lower number of links can definitely be penalized if they receive a whole bunch of spammy/paid links in a short period of time. I see website owners do it to themselves all the time by mistake, the only difference would be to change the URL in the order form.
"If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.
If we've taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it."
That's totally bullshit!!!
I hope it's not too late to join this discussion. My site got this warning even in the end of June. Then I found my site got ridiculous amount of links for updowner.com and others. At first few days, keywords ranks are steady. But weeks after weeks, my major keywords ranks keep dropping, and now, four keywords which lead 60% of nonpaid search traffic to my site are totally out of rank, even one of the keyword ranked no.1 in the SERP!!!
Early this month, I filed a reconsideration request to Goolge. Few days later, I got reply says that my site still against its guideline. Now I'm not panic, but totally frustrated!
Can somebody give me some advise, thanks
Most important thing is we need to create our websites according to Google guidelines. https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
These guide lines are not too much stressful to any one. And the second thing is be sure the link what your site get. Google give high priority to linking between related contents. Check the backlinks what your web site currently has from webmaster tools. It's under Web Master Tools >> Traffic >> Links to your site. You can download those links and analyze further.
You can get more details about this from here as well,
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html
Hope you can fix the thing,
Cheers,
I do not understand how this would be possible...."What surprised the web team at the firm is that their strategy worked, despite Google's new and improved algorithm."
A link to domain.com/keyword/keyword/tower/ would only generate a 404.
Here's an interesting twist to this reverse link spam dilemma:
A page on my consulting firm's website (.../Get-a-Cell-Tower-on-your-Property.html) was the target of a link spam campaign by a competitor. The campaign managed to add 273 unique black hat domains pointing to this page on the site (clearly they were out for blood).
The spammers tactic included modifying the end of my URL in the spam links with additional slashes and keywords, for instance (.../Get-a-Cell-Tower-on-your-Property.html/keyword/keyword/tower/).
A savvy Analytics Strategist on the team caught the signals as soon as these awful URLs started to appear in our Site Content report on Google Analytics.
What surprised the web team at the firm is that their strategy worked, despite Google's new and improved algorithm. The spammers were able to change the firm's naturally indexed URL for the page to the fake ones used in the spam campaign.
Google replaced their index of our good page URL with 200+ unique bad URLs, triggered by our usual organic traffic. Keyword searches started to return organic results with the most awful URLs that allegedly existed on our website. Our saving grace was that our CMS is a proprietary platform and the bad URLs resolved to the authentic page no matter how terrible the variation.
As if we didn't have enough to worry about at the time, the spam campaign generated an "Unnatural Inbound Links Warning" on 7/23. Fortunately, the site's organic traffic didn't take a hit.
Can only comment based on my current client base, however so far Google seems to have got it spot on. Only sites that have really suffered in terms of rank and visits, are those that deservered to be.
Either through duplicate content - on site human errors, over aggressive on page optimisation techniques or where have been using link building techniques that are known to be risky. Play with fire, going to be get burned, so to speak.
Personally feel Google should get their own house in order more before targetting link sources, etc. Particularly in terms of Adwords geographic target and use of broad and phrase match keywords.
Automatic negative keywords for towns, cities, countries surely by default, site in London, UK, targetting SE England, surely do not want to send visits from those looking for services in Los Angeles!
Said it before and will say it again, why paid links are not officially allowed between related wesbites in either different towns, cities, states, counties and countries is beyond me, would be a lot more professional and lessen manipulative link building activities.
In terms of negative SEO, if have own house in order, variety of link sources and anchor texts, good on page, etc - going to be very difficult for anyone to cause drop in visits to your site.
FIMS, I think you will find that Google does not frown on paid links if the linking domain advertises the fact that links are purchased, like Kelly Search does, and if the paid links are nofollow.
What happens when a webmaster receives BOTH types of unnatural links messages... one in April and the second one on July 27th.
My website has a penalty from April and hit on April 24th and have now received the July 27th message which says that a whole site penalty doesn't apply - but does that message supersede the April one as I still have a whole site penalty...
I would assume that the first message, the April 24th one, is still in effect, especially if you're still seeing an impact to your rankings and traffic. Since the late-July messages were automatically triggered, it's entirely possible for users to have received 2, but the one from April is the one to take much more seriously.
What does the article title say, this means people are really not sure and also the article writer is also not sure, no one is really sure as what it is LOL
"May Not Be Cause for Concern"
There is a discussion at Creasite.com about which notice you received -- the old "unnatural links" notice or the new "targeted links" notice. For the sake of transparency, post up the text of the notice you received. If it's the old notice, the new rules aren't going to do you any good.
I believe that Negative SEO is alive and well and may be coming to one of our sites soon, so be nice to your competitors, :) And, please, please, please -- do be nice to pixelgrinder and jammy!
Seriously, though, post up the text of the notice so we can get all the facts which will help us plan.
The next questions is -- what about the 1 million "unnatural links" notices that are out there that Google has done nothing about -- no ranking penalty, no response to requests for reconsideration, no nothing. Are they going to back track and just devalue links, which would make a lot of business sense since the Neg SEO Brand isn't helping them any or us honest business owners trying to avoid the collateral damage because google can't get along with people.
If google is backtracking, now that would be "big news" worth reporting.
The first notice we got was a generic unnatural inbound links warning - the same as many sites received on July 19th when Google updated the way they send messages. It looks like they have since removed that message from our account entirely. When they sent out the "updated" message on the 23rd as Matt Cutts discussed here, we got this one:
"We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole. If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum."
I think that ultimately Google is going to have to move toward algorithmically devaluing links. If you have received a message about unnatural links but haven't seen any decrease in rankings or traffic, I would assume that they've taken action against the links themselves rather than your site as a whole.
Hi Ruth,
I know you believe what you say and you're intentions are good.
I agree, the best defense is to build high authority links so that your site is elevated to brand status in google's eyes and they will exempt you from penalties, much as they have done with seomoz. But that isn't as easy for an e-commerce site as it is for an information site such as seomoz.
The problem is, you're just guessing, same as I am.
We don't know what google is up to and if we did, we wouldn't be able to trust that they wouldn't change their mind tomorrow and turn on us. It is unlikely they will be as fair as you suggest. They will do whatever feeds their bottom line and they won't waste a minute to throw us under the bus to get it.
They have an aversion to publishing clear rules that can be fairly enforced because they don't want to be bound by them if the rules get in the way of making money.
They make it impossible to plan for a business. When it comes to google, the only business plans that seem to be clear is that everyone wants to leave google on the dust heap of long forgotten, past technology.
One day.......
Google actually tells owners of e-commerce sites who do not invest in exceptional content to fire their SEO "experts of bygone Google" and advertise on Adwords.
And that is why Bing developed a suite of killer SEO tools. Bing knows google has alienated most e-commerce site owners and SEO's and Bing is trying to win them over. Slick marketing, I hope Bing wins. Here's a good discussion at Cre8asite on the topic --> https://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=90456&hl=&fromsearch=1
I think Google wants to move away from offering free listings on their SE and only offer paid listings... can you imagine the money they will make once they convince the public that SEO is too hard, too complicated, changes too often, etc and makes them move into PPC only? hmmm do you really think Google is here to help us to get free traffic? I am sure Google has an agenda that they will try to do little by little but for sure making us move closer to PPC only traffic.
While Google is making grabs for more and more on-page real estate for paid listings, especially for keywords with strong commercial intent, I doubt they'll ever be completely a pay-to-play engine - why would people go someplace just to be shown ads? To maintain their market share, and to continue having results on any query out there, they'll need to continue including organic results.
Hi we monitor our webmaster tools and recently this has shown nearly 40000 backlinks from a directory, we queried them about these and advised that we weren't happy and their response was:
I can reassure you that back links from our site to yours won't do your rankings any harm. We have a good relationship with Google and in the 15 years we've been in business have never seen links from our site causing a detrimental effect on any of our advertisers listings. If I explain how the structure of our site works hopefully I can lay to rest some of your fears.
To my knowledge 40000 links from any site is poor SEO and also since we have such limited links will be frowned on by Google. Furthermore, it would appear that this number is increasing which suggests to me that everytime a search is made a new URL and link is created or that our link is in the template of the site.
I'm not going made or anything am I - I think these need to be removed but your advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Hi there,
Please help, I received unnatural link from google webmaster tools. As I check my website I noticed Review center Logo is there with the outbound link, so when you clcik the logo/widget you will be directed to review center https://www.reviewcentre.com/mywebsitereviews. The Logo/widget is just beside facebook and twitter logo. Does this Review center logo/widget https://www.reviewcentre.com/mywebsitereviews considered as the unnatural link googles sees on my website? Please help my ranking now gone down to 50%
Here is Matt Cutts review related to this topic.
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html
We just go the follow up GWT message - it doesn't include the warning symbol so i assume we are safe.
Unnatural inbound linksJul 23, 2012
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole. If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our
Greta informative blogging....
Thanks for the trafficplanet link, I hadn't read about this yet. That's a fun read
Interesting study, too. I haven't gotten through all the trafficplanet thread yet, but there's some good points made about announcing the challenge publicly on such a high-profile site.
For anyone interested, imo there's a really good discussion about links, google, and FUD at WebmasterWorld.
One thing I didn't notice until right now is the notice in Google's suspect link warning: "If we've taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic". This may be a stretch, but I wonder if this is in any way connected with the "traffic throttling" phenomena that some have reported.
In conclusion - even if your inbound links increases at an "un-natural" rate, but your traffic stays steady or increases naturally -
No need to worry?
I would say that in addition to keeping an eye on your traffic, make sure you're building as many or more natural, quality links as your "attacker" is building spam links - make sure your link profile is still predominantly natural.
Ruth how do you reccommend John Doe.com does that. You say SEOMoz has the best links the ones that build themselves, what about somebody starting out with agressive competitors in the space already how do they get links to build themselves.
This was the classic example of dont check your e-mails just before you go to bed!
Getting the unnatural links message from Google seemed really odd at the time. We have been experiencing an increase in traffic according to webmaster tools, and furthermore we have not done any link building for about 9 months.
We have since had no effect on our traffic.
Strangely we feel pleased to have received it. We experienced a massive drop in traffic in March but this is the first time we have had a message from Google.
We think we were penalized in March but have only just got the e-mail, rather than it being a warning.
This was one of our neglected sites, no after months of fixing all technical SEO issues we are now embarking on good quality content and social media, so fingers crossed.
I'm a little bit confused right now because one of my competitors ranking is on top of Google even if most of its backlinks are coming from spam blog comments or auto approved blog comments and unrelated sites, for the keyword of "website design cincinnati", and even to other main keywords as well. Try to search this keyword, "website design cincinnati" and you'll find this website https://bit.ly/PFLtG1 on the first place of Google.
IMO your competitor is ranking #1 because of their presentation of the phrase, "website design cincinnati"
Their title is
Cincinnati Web Design & Graphic Design | EV-Studios - HomeTheir h1 is "Cincinnati Web Design & Graphic Design "
Their first h2 is "Cincinnati Web Design Company"
Their 2nd h2 starts with "EV-Studios is a professional Cincinnati webdesign and development company."
They have also immediately localized their site with their phone number in the header.
For giants sites that links stats are fine, no need to worry as it could be justifiable on the traffic
With so much misinformation about Google. It is reassuring to know unnatural link warning might not result in a site dropping like a rock.
SEOMOZ can receive a message like unnatural Link, I can never imagine. I don't think in SEO World any site can get more natural Links than SEOMOZ. Anyways Matt cutts Message is sufficient to clear the situation.
SEOMOZ can never hurt by unnatural links because i trust that those links which are counted as unnatural by Google might not be taken for manipulation of PageRank.
I once saw someone build almost a thousand of spammy links to one of my posts for no reason whatsoever. I think they were testing the negative SEO. Links had nothing to do with the URL, they had usual spam anchors like "buy viagra" and similar.
Never got a warning or anything inside GWT.
I've seen this on client websites in the past, as well - hundreds of links with anchors like "buy viagra" and "online dating". We never saw a penalty then, either, but that was a couple of years ago and a lot has changed in how Google interprets links. I think in a lot of cases these outright spammy links are so poor quality they just get devalued rather than hurting your site.
Thanks for the analysis, Ruth. Very useful.
On a side note: turns out to be very useful and enlightening that Rand asked spammers to spam seomoz.org so you get the same treatment as so many sites that have a somewhat dubious link profile.
Thanks for the update was rather interesting.
Good post, and an interesting outcome, there has been an update since from Matt Cutts basically saying that there are 2 types of warnings being sent out one identifying that "individual links aren't trusted" and the other which is the original message that was sent out which states that "our opinion of your entire site is affected". It would be interested to know which one you have received?
The changes to the messages are for new messages going forward - Google hasn't updated the initial round of messages, so we just have the generic one. Here's what it says:
By the look of it they are going to send out the new messages aswell. According to Matt again.
It seems that most of the cases with negative seo campaigns aren't entirely affecting the entire site just the pages in which NSEO have been targeted.
This is the kind of luke-warm, ambiguous terminology that has, and continues to frustrate business owners, webmasters and marketers.
"Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. "
How is a webmaster to know this? Where is the detailed information telling us that Google has determined what they believe to be hacked links to the website, and the business owner should not be concerned.
Is this not the EXACT same email that business owners have been dreading?
And how can a business owner be "expected" to simply wait it out to determine if a link penalty is taking place? One week, 3 weeks, or will all penalties have already taken place if one received that recent unnatural links penalty.
Updating the system and getting manual was a great step by Google that showed promise. This recent comment and round of messages shows just the opposite - that Google really has no real clue how to effectively deal with link spam in an appropriate and timely and fair manner.
I received this notice in late March earlier this year. After consulting a few other SEO pros, we all agreed to ignore it. Bad idea.
Since ignoring this legitimate warning from google, our traffic has plummeted by about 15% every month since May.
Now we are in the process of removing a lot of so-called bad links to regain our rankings.
For the record, we are a national brand with very competitive keywords. We do not use black-hat tactics. However, some of our SEO firms have, obviously.
To clarify - the message that was sent out on July 19th was a new round of unnatural link warnings, targeting a much broader set of sites - any warning notices received before then were much more likely to be followed by penalties.
Higher rank, established sites need to worry less than newer sites do. Link sabotage maybe, but I think unless you're a major three way spammer, it isn't as much a concern.
Hmmm! I may be missing something but don’t the charts presented in this article show something about the value of spammy links. SEOmoz has a link increase of 30% (about 2,700,000 links) and sees relatively stable organic traffic!
but SEOmoz has millions of links. Say a website has 1000 good links, then they get like 10,000 spam links from a negative SEO spam campaign. What's going to happen then? The spam links far outweigh the good ones. Is google smart enough to see this? Or are they just going to see a horrible spammy backlink profile and penalize the website?
I don't really know the answer to this questions but from what I've read this type of scenario could obliterate the website out of the rankings.
When interpreting this chart it's important to remember that we saw a 30% increase in total links - some of them were spammy, but we also continued seeing our usual rate of link growth. So not all of those links that added to the 30% increase were spammy.
I was interested in the absence of a big up-tick. With SEOmoz’s strong link profile – if spammy links had real positive value then 2,700,000 new links (+30%) should have made a noticeable impact.
That's because google can sniff out the spam links now and not give them any value. Also seomoz already ranks very high in google. They may be at their organic traffic ceiling. I bet they get a ton of visits for outside google as well because of all the content they provide and is linked to.
I got the generic message Ruth got on the 19th, as well as the new one today.
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google'sWebmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole. If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.
Oh my goodness. Google strikes back again. It seems that Google doesn't want any SEOs to rest for this or next few years for sure. We are still hearing the cries and outbursts of people who have not yet recovered from the aftermath of earlier unnatural link warnings or Penguin update. Now, this a fresh assail against link spam to make matters even worse for them. Google might have started enjoying/loving this game, and hence have decided to dedicate its full power to tackle only web spam in 2012 (you know, for whatever reasons, they don't want to go slow on this). The year will go in the history of SEO as the most frightening, chaotic and rule changing year, the rise and only rise of Google - the clear winner.
By the way, thanks RuthBurr for being open, transparent and honest with the entire SEO community. We appreciate all efforts by SEOMoz team for finding the facts in the world of disinformation especially surrounding the negative seo and taking the wrath of spammers.
In this context, on what anchor text you noticed the rise of back links, and did you recently noticed any drop in the rankings for those specific anchor texts/keywords? Are you also planning to take any further steps for removing these links like contacting individual webmasters, etc. or any plans for filing reconsideration with Google (if so, please do share a copy as it will help many who might be planning the same in future)?
Between, good follow up post by Danny Sullivan on further analysing the recent GWT messages:
https://searchengineland.com/google-updates-link-warnings-128431
Small unknown businesses don't have any choice at the moment expect keeping fingers crossed, as these poor mortals never knew and will never know what's coming next from Google's arsenal in its fight against web spam. My advise to them - please go and appoint some reputed SEO agency who will help you to become a known brand by taking all your money as their fees or sit in the laps of Google and start spending huge sum on Adwords.
We didn't see enough of a target on one anchor text to really impact rankings - on the terms we really target our rankings have stayed fairly steady. We will probably not be contacting webmasters to clean up the links, since the second warning notice we got from Google was the "we're just going to devalue these links, you probably don't need to do anything" notice. We did file a reconsideration request when we first got the warning - it simply explained that we didn't build the links so could not remove them.
SO in your opinion bad links will not give any bad impact neither good impact too.!!!!
heathshowman - this is the first instance I have seen of a solid, well structured response from Google.
Looks like you are one of the first to receive this.
"Quick update on link messages from last Thursday: we can't easily change the old msgs, so we'll send the more specific messages later today."
That's like sending layoff notices to half of my staff last week, telling them now they shouldn't be concerned unless they have slacking at work or not getting their job done and the only way to update them as to whether they have a job will come in a future message.
Absolute dropping of the ball in my professional opinion
Ruth or anyone who got this warning from google. Are you filling the response (the notification says to submit a request for re-inclusion) or just ignoring it?.
I think that you should probably just ignore it, unless you see a negative effect on your traffic.
The question is how long should one wait to see a drop in traffic or rankings?
We're on the verge of putting our team full-force into removing bad links..
Could our time be better spent on something else?
I would say if you haven't already seen a hit, you might want to just put one or two people on removing bad links, instead of everyone. Matt Cutts also said today that they'll be sending out the newer, clearer WMT messages later today, so you could also wait and see what your updated warning message says, then act accordingly.
2 weeks
I manage a few good-size ecommerce sites and received these messages. We've been trying to do clean link building for a long time now and have even removed links we thought weren't worth having. I was a bit confused why we received it, but without a loss in traffic or rankings, I decided to not take it too seriously at the moment. Now I see that Google acknowledged it wasn't a real warning. Good thing, otherwise my week would have have been hell, lol.
Hi everyone , would like to have an answer 1 month ago i had 148 backlink in alexa and now even my rank is decreasing i pass to 133 backlinks and the website is https://www.flowmagazine.gr can somebody help and explain me clearly what is going on .
This is probably a better question for our Q&A forums: www.seomoz.org/q. That's the best place to go to get advice from other SEOs.
Having posted a comment only an hour or two i have just received the following message from Google Webmaster Tools.
Could I be one of the first to have received this e-mail?
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We don't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole. If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took. If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.
I'd be interested to know if this is a first?
We received it as well.
So did we. I think the updated messages all went out today.
So having been penalised in March without receiving the first message until July 19th, then receiving this ' clarified ' update will they return my site to pre-penalised positions?
Somehow I think not!
Google really seem to be getting themselves in a twist.
I wish that everyone could play fairly by the rules, but there are malicious SEO's out there that don't have a correct moral compass that make it harder for those who do. I got hit by the 3rd wave of Penguin and am now finally resurfacing on Google in the SERPS. I do believe Google has to take this kind of stuff into consideration by simply discounting links that are less value or not relevant at all. Doing so across the board would make an even playing field for all.