If your web site has lost its rankings or you have received a Google Manual Action, we can help. Get a Link Audit today.

Dealing with Unnatural Links

Link Detective provides professional Link Audits and removal of Google Manual Actions. Maybe you have spotted some bad backlinks in an SEO tool such as SEMRush, Majestic or Ahrefs? Unnatural links linking to your site can cause an algorithmic penalty.

Have you been unlucky enough to receive a Google Penalty for Unnatural Links? These kinds of penalties can be totally devastating. More often than not they will result in a complete loss of search traffic from Google. In this case, you will need to conduct a link audit to find all the problematic links. From the link audit, you can create a disavow file that will tell Google about the links that you believe are harming your web site.

The disavow file can then be submitted with the Google Disavow tool or to use its proper name; the Google Disavow Links Tool. You will then need to send a reconsideration request. A member of the Google webspam team will now need to manually review your link profile. Hopefully, you will soon see a message in the Google Search Console to say that your penalty has been revoked.

If you watch some of the 2012/2013 Google videos by Matt Cutts, removing a manual action all looks quite simple. In reality, it is never quite this straightforward. These days Google is objecting to many links that you may consider to be natural white hat links.

The Google Webmaster Guidelines are rather strict when talking about website links. Any attempt at manipulating their algorithm can result in manual penalties. Google takes no prisoners when penalizing websites. If your site is about a charity for saving kittens you are equally as likely to get penalized as a payday loan site.

Where do all the toxic backlinks come from?

Poor SEO causes many problems. Old school techniques like excessive link exchanges are now bad news.

Using spun content on web 2.0 properties is now a terrible way to get incoming links. Google is very good at detecting spun content, duplicate content and pure spam. If your backlink profile includes links on sites with poor content, your rankings can seriously suffer.

These days buying backlinks in the form of a guest post can be dangerous. Amongst various online SEO communities, people will openly sell links which we consider to be bad links. Some guest post links can be very valuable, but one that is blatantly bought for money may not be.

Negative SEO can also be a problem. Black hat SEOs may use automated backlink generators to ruin your link profile. This is usually easy to spot as often they will use irrelevant porn keywords for anchor text. A more clever approach to negative SEO is to completely overdo the anchor text for the keywords that you are intending to rank for.

Scraper sites that use automated scripts to produce thousands of pages are everywhere today. Although Google claim to ignore these type of links, we cannot be sure that they do. We have definitely seen cases where a client’s website rankings have been completely ruined by these types of links. It’s best to clear them up.

For further reading about how backlinks can seriously effect your traffic, please read the Backlink Audit and Google Penalty Removal Service FAQ.

Are you ready to get your rankings restored? Get a Link Audit today.