Last night there was a post up in the Google Webmaster Central Blog written by Matt Cutts.
There were many people talking and discussing about the new unnatural links notification messages that Google started sending out again. And to provide guidance in a quicker way, matt posted a comment on his Google+ page. With reference to the same message Matt Cutts has now written a public post to provide more insight.
Key Takeaways from the post.
1. Google reduce the trust from the entire website when they find that the website is engaging in a widespread pattern of link spam over a long period of time’
2. If you’ve received unnatural links notification in GWT then Google recommends removing as many spammy/low quality links as possible and file a reconsideration request. Also mentions not to forget of mentioning list of links that are unable to be removed in the same reconsideration request.
3. If directories/blog networks website owners ask for a charge to remove the links, then notify them to Google when filing reconsideration request or in the webmaster forum or in a separate spam report.
4. Google sometimes distrust specific spammy or artificial links that were created as a part of a link scheme, rather than taking action on a site’s overall ranking.
5. Only targeted action on the unnatural links is being taken instead of the site as a whole.
6. Previous messages were conveying that “Google is losing trust in the entire website” AND current messages convey that “Google is distrusting some of the links from a website”.
7. The new messages are fundamentally were intended to be as a notification that Google is distrusting some of the links to your website. However, Matt Cutts clarifies that if a website is mostly good but when spammy or artificial links found, they do take this action. Those kind of links include “widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.” This action won’t affect a website’s rankings overall, but certain phrases won’t be ranked.
8. If you get the new link message, go to GWT, download backlinks to your site sorted by date, check with the most recent backlinks to your site, if you find anything as an unusual/suspicious activity which is generating unwanted/unnatural links to your site, then it’s worth cleaning them and then filing a reconsideration request.
9. Google is working on to provide more concrete examples with the aim to make these messages more actionable and to help the webmasters where to look when they get a message.
10. Less than 20,000 domains have been sent these new messages – that’s less than one-tenth the number of messages they send usually every month.
11. In the near future, as per Google’s current level of action, everyday about 10 sites will receive this message that becomes about 300 websites in a month.
On top of this, Matt Cutts has given 3 example scenarios of different types of links ; here are they as they are in the original post.
Example scenario: widget links
Example scenario: paid links
Example scenario: reputation management
To conclude, these new messages are not sort of a panic but Google suggests to not ignore them completely. Distrusting links stands for not being able to rank well for certain amount of links than being considering a penalty for entire website.
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