Friday, July 27, 2012<\/p>\n
\n Lots of site owners use our \n First, let’s talk about the original link messages that we’ve been sending out for months. When we \n In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won’t take links down. \n In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created as part of \n These new messages are worth your attention. Fundamentally, it means we’re distrusting some links \n On the other hand, I don’t want site owners to panic. We do use this message some of the time for \n A fair number of site owners emailed me after receiving one of the new messages, and I think it \n The first example is widget links. An otherwise good site emailed me about the message. Here’s \n The next example is paid links. I wrote this email to someone:<\/p>\n \n \n I also wrote to another link building SEO who got this message pointing out that the SEO was Here’s a final example of paid links. I emailed about one company’s situation as follows:<\/p>\n \n \n In some cases we’re ignoring links to a site where the site itself didn’t violate our guidelines.
\n webmaster console<\/a>
\n to see how their site is doing in Google. Last week we
\n began sending new messages<\/a>
\n to sites with a pattern of unnatural links pointing to them, and I wanted to give more context
\n about these new messages.\n<\/p>\nOriginal Link Messages<\/h2>\n
\n see unnatural links pointing to a site, there are different ways we can respond. In many severe
\n cases, we reduce our trust in the entire site. For example, that can happen when we believe a site
\n has been engaging in a pretty widespread pattern of link spam over a long period of time. If your
\n site is notified for these unnatural links, we recommend removing as many of the spammy or
\n low-quality links as you possibly can and then submitting a
\n reconsideration request<\/a>
\n for your site.\n<\/p>\n
\n If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, you can let us know about
\n that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our
\n webmaster forum<\/a>
\n or in a separate
\n spam report<\/a>. We have taken action on
\n several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves.\n<\/p>\nNew Link Messages<\/h2>\n
\n a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a site’s overall
\n ranking. The new messages make it clear that we are taking “targeted action on the unnatural links
\n instead of your site as a whole.” The new messages also lack the yellow exclamation mark that
\n other messages have, which tries to convey that we’re addressing a situation that is not as
\n severe as the previous “we are losing trust in your entire site” messages.\n<\/p>\nHow serious are these new link messages?<\/h2>\n
\n to your site. We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might have some
\n spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam,
\n excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.).
\n So while the site’s overall rankings might not drop directly, likewise the site might not be able
\n to rank for some phrases. I wouldn’t classify these messages as purely advisory or something to
\n be ignored, or only for innocent sites.\n<\/p>\n
\n innocent sites where people are pointing hacked anchor text to their site to try to make them rank
\n for queries like “buy viagra”.\n<\/p>\nExample scenario: widget links<\/h2>\n
\n might be helpful if I paraphrased some of their situations to give you an idea of what it might
\n mean if you get one of these messages.\n<\/p>\n
\n what I wrote back, with the identifying details removed:\n<\/p>\n
\n “Looking into the very specific action that we took, I think we did the right thing. Take URL1
\n and URL2 for example. These pages are using your EXAMPLE1 widgets, but the pages include
\n keyword-rich anchortext pointing to your site’s url. One widget has the link ANCHORTEXT1 and
\n the other has ANCHORTEXT2.<\/i>
\n
\n If you do a search for “widgetbait matt cutts” you’ll find tons of stories where I discourage
\n people from putting keyword-rich anchortext into their widgets; see
\n https:\/\/www.stonetemple.com\/articles\/interview-matt-cutts-061608.shtml for example. So this
\n message is a way to tell you that not only are those links in your widget not working, they’re
\n probably keeping that page from ranking for the phrases that you’re using.”
\n <\/i>\n<\/p>\nExample scenario: paid links<\/h2>\n
\n “I wouldn’t recommend that Company X ignore this message. For example, check out
\n SPAMMY_BLOG_POST_URL. That’s a link from a very spammy website, and it calls into question the
\n linkbuilding techniques that Company X has been using (we also saw a bunch of links due to
\n widgets). These sorts of links are not helping Company X, and it would be worth their time to
\n review how and why they started gathering links like this.”
\n <\/i>\n<\/p>\n
\n getting links from a directory that appeared to offer only paid links that pass PageRank, and so
\n we weren’t trusting links like that.\n<\/p>\n
\n “Company Y is getting this message because we see a long record of buying paid links that pass
\n PageRank. In particular, we see a lot of low-quality ‘sponsored posts’ with keyword-rich
\n anchortext where the links pass PageRank. The net effect is that we distrust a lot of links
\n to this site. Here are a couple examples: URL1 and URL2. Bear in mind that we have more examples
\n of these paid posts, but these two examples give a flavor of the sort of thing that should
\n really be resolved. My recommendation would be to get these sort of paid posts taken down, and
\n then Company Y could submit a reconsideration request. Otherwise, we’ll continue to distrust
\n quite a few links to the site.”
\n <\/i>\n<\/p>\nExample scenario: reputation management<\/h2>\n
\n A good example of that is reputation management. We had two groups write in; one was a large news
\n website, while the other was a not-for-profit publisher. Both had gotten the new link message. In
\n one case, it appeared that a “reputation management” firm was using spammy links to try to push up
\n positive articles on the news site, and we were ignoring those links to the news site. In the
\n other case, someone was trying to manipulate the search results for a person’s name by buying
\n links on a well-known paid text link ad network. Likewise, we were just ignoring those specific
\n links, and the not-for-profit publisher didn’t need to take any action.\n<\/p>\nWhat should I do if I get the new link message?<\/h2>\n