Friday, July 27, 2012 at 4:30 PM
Webmaster level: AdvancedLots of site owners use our webmaster console to see how their site is doing in Google. Last week we began sending new messages to sites with a pattern of unnatural links pointing to them, and I wanted to give more context about these new messages.
Original Link Messages
First, let's talk about the original link messages that we've been sending out for months. When we see unnatural links pointing to a site, there are different ways we can respond. In many severe cases, we reduce our trust in the entire site. For example, that can happen when we believe a site has been engaging in a pretty widespread pattern of link spam over a long period of time. If your site is notified for these unnatural links, we recommend removing as many of the spammy or low-quality links as you possibly can and then submitting a reconsideration request for your site.
In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves.
New Link Messages
In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created as part of a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a site’s overall ranking. The new messages make it clear that we are taking "targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole." The new messages also lack the yellow exclamation mark that other messages have, which tries to convey that we're addressing a situation that is not as severe as the previous "we are losing trust in your entire site" messages.
How serious are these new link messages?
These new messages are worth your attention. Fundamentally, it means we're distrusting some links to your site. We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might have some spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.). So while the site's overall rankings might not drop directly, likewise the site might not be able to rank for some phrases. I wouldn't classify these messages as purely advisory or something to be ignored, or only for innocent sites.
On the other hand, I don't want site owners to panic. We do use this message some of the time for innocent sites where people are pointing hacked anchor text to their site to try to make them rank for queries like [buy viagra].
Example scenario: widget links
A fair number of site owners emailed me after receiving one of the new messages, and I think it might be helpful if I paraphrased some of their situations to give you an idea of what it might mean if you get one of these messages.
The first example is widget links. An otherwise white-hat site emailed me about the message. Here's what I wrote back, with the identifying details removed:
"Looking into the very specific action that we took, I think we did the right thing. Take URL1 and URL2 for example. These pages are using your EXAMPLE1 widgets, but the pages include keyword-rich anchortext pointing to your site's url. One widget has the link ANCHORTEXT1 and the other has ANCHORTEXT2.
If you do a search for [widgetbait matt cutts] you'll find tons of stories where I discourage people from putting keyword-rich anchortext into their widgets; see http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-061608.shtml for example. So this message is a way to tell you that not only are those links in your widget not working, they're probably keeping that page from ranking for the phrases that you're using."
Example scenario: paid links
The next example is paid links. I wrote this email to someone:
"I wouldn't recommend that Company X ignore this message. For example, check out SPAMMY_BLOG_POST_URL. That's a link from a very spammy website, and it calls into question the linkbuilding techniques that Company X has been using (we also saw a bunch of links due to widgets). These sorts of links are not helping Company X, and it would be worth their time to review how and why they started gathering links like this."
I also wrote to another link building SEO who got this message pointing out that the SEO was getting links from a directory that appeared to offer only paid links that pass PageRank, and so we weren't trusting links like that.
Here's a final example of paid links. I emailed about one company's situation as follows:
"Company Y is getting this message because we see a long record of buying paid links that pass PageRank. In particular, we see a lot of low-quality 'sponsored posts' with keyword-rich anchortext where the links pass PageRank. The net effect is that we distrust a lot of links to this site. Here are a couple examples: URL1 and URL2. Bear in mind that we have more examples of these paid posts, but these two examples give a flavor of the sort of thing that should really be resolved. My recommendation would be to get these sort of paid posts taken down, and then Company Y could submit a reconsideration request. Otherwise, we'll continue to distrust quite a few links to the site."
Example scenario: reputation management
In some cases we're ignoring links to a site where the site itself didn't violate our guidelines. A good example of that is reputation management. We had two groups write in; one was a large news website, while the other was a not-for-profit publisher. Both had gotten the new link message. In one case, it appeared that a "reputation management" firm was using spammy links to try to push up positive articles on the news site, and we were ignoring those links to the news site. In the other case, someone was trying to manipulate the search results for a person's name by buying links on a well-known paid text link ad network. Likewise, we were just ignoring those specific links, and the not-for-profit publisher didn't need to take any action.
What should I do if I get the new link message?
We recently launched the ability to download backlinks to your site sorted by date. If you get this new link message, you may want to check your most recent links to spot anything unusual going on. If you discover that someone in your company has been doing widgetbait, paid links, or serious linkspam, it's worth cleaning that up and submitting a reconsideration request. We're also looking at some ways to provide more concrete examples to make these messages more actionable and to help narrow down where to look when you get one.
Just to give you some context, less than 20,000 domains received these new messages—that's less than one-tenth the number of messages we send in a typical month—and that's only because we sent out messages retroactively to any site where we had distrusted some of the sites' backlinks. Going forward, based on our current level of action, on average only about 10 sites a day will receive this message.
Summing up
I hope this post and some of the examples above will help to convey the nuances of this new message. If you get one of these new messages, it's not a cause for panic, but neither should you completely ignore it. The message says that the current incident isn't affecting our opinion of the entire website, but it is affecting our opinion of some links to the website, and the site might not rank as well for some phrases as a result.
This message reflects an issue of moderate severity, and we're trying to find the right way to alert people that their site may have a potential issue (and it's worth some investigation) without overly stressing out site owners either. But we wanted to take this extra step toward more transparency now so that we can let site owners know when they might want to take a closer look at their current links.
65 comments:
Hay Matt Cutts after reading this post i found myself wondering if there any effective way to measure the importance of the messages for each site
Maybe split them to few levels of importance, depending on the spammy links for each website.
What do you think?
Matt Cutts link farms down! Thanks for policing the results!
Hey Matt,
Can't seem to find answers about a competitor pointing thousands of comment links at a site.
For ex: My site never heard a peep out of Google until June 30th. We noticed that on May 2 (a week or so blogs started giving instructions on negative SEO) that we had hundreds of spam comment links pointing to our site.
Before articles telling people how to do this appeared online, we had no comment links in our profile. Now we have thousands and we were removed from your index.
3 recondsideration request later that explain how we cannot get rid of these and still no help. It seems that nobody really reads them.
Why on earth would we start spamming comments to our own sites a week after the Penguin update when we were on Page 1 of Google? We don't even participate in link building, but apparently our competitor does.
We need help and in the webmaster forum as suggested by the "letter" people are only nice enough to ask us for money to clear up this problem.
Please help
Is anyone else impressed by the transparency and go-to advice that Matt and his Webspam team is giving to Webmasters these days? Gone are the old days of penalty-without-explanation in fear of reverse engineering. Gotta give a shout out to MC and his Webspam team. Thanks, Guys.
Very nice.......
link submission
The notification will surely help people to get quality website and trustworthy websites without any spam or unnatural links.
Wow step, it seems in few cases that competitors also do some link spamming free for you. These notifications will really very helpful. The main issue is with the turnaround time google will take for reconsideration requests. But it will surely control spam and people start thinking ethical only.
Hope this is going to help webmasters to improve their websites.
Getting quality links from different sites surely helps in SEO
Hola:
-Sois elusivos. La claridad no es común en tus comunicados, Matt, siempre me queda la sensación que no lo pillo todo. Claro que si fueras totalmente transparente el SEO perdería parte de su encanto.
-Are elusive. Clarity is not common in their communications. When I read or hear Matt Cutts is the feeling I always get it not all. Of course if totally transparent lose some of its charm.
Un saludo: Huberto, de CORBAX
So, should we just put no follow on our widget links to avoid penalties?
Hi Matt,
Please please please give us hard working rule following webmasters a DISSAVOW LINK TOOL in Webmaster Tools.
It would prevent competitor sabotage and allow us to disassociate really old links where (yes we admit it, we may have been a bit over zealous in our link building efforts in the past).
Thanks
Tim
Now that is something to keep in mind before I'll make those mistakes. Upon reading it I think I need to undo thing that could get me in trouble.
So, on 27th July we saw the latest Inbound links message from Google
I happen to be one of those webmasters who had a pre-April 24th 'unnatural links' message... was then hit on 24th April and have on 27th July received the latest message.
The question I am asking is: The early April unnatural links resulted in a site-wide penalty... BUT the latest message I have received is basically saying I don't have a site-wide penalty - so why is it still there?
Reconsideration request submitted and waiting to see what comes back...
I'd like to say well done Matt.
This is what we need on the web these days. The amount of links people are buying is ridiculous. Also there are too many people paying virtual assistants or company's to spam backlinks all over the web on completely non related sites. Although natural links being created by people on non related sites happens naturally and not as often as someone who is doing it pro-actively.
Nice to see Google taking action on this.
Here is the story about how our site got in July 16,485 links from the dating site because we did not paid 500 USD for single link removal.
In May we started to investigate the possible problems of traffic decrease. We got aware about Google updates and started to reorganize our sites and look into our link profile. Our websites are started in 2004. Since that time they gathered “good” links and “bad ” backlinks. We found many websites with not relevant anchor texts in the links leading to ours.
We asked some webmasters to remove links, which they placed on our site without our permission and on their own initiative. It took just a lot of time to find them via Whois Domain lookup tools and via hosting companies. Mostly the webmasters were very cooperative and removed the links.
Finally we encountered a very “clever” person who ask us to pay 500 USD for link removal. When we refused he placed via automated system links on more than 60 sites (directories, porno sites and etc). We tried to inform Google team about this via reconsideration report, but we just got a reply possible generated by a robot. We also report this sites via Spam report.
At this moment we see, that the blackmailer keeps doing his job, because some days ago we discovered that the Russian dating site www.zapretoff.net has around 16.485 links leading to our educational portal. You can see them here: http://goo.gl/GvoL2
Now we are being in contact with the hosting of this website, because the owner of the site does not answer.
Here are my questions:
1) How we can protect our business from such attacks?
2) How we can mark such links as inappropriate in our Google Webmaster account?
3) What can be done in such cases?
Hey Matt,
It seems like RSS syndication will be no more in near future.
Reverse Engineering Should Be Strictly Good for Bad Neighbourhoods.
If you're algo gets changed, why business will have to pay for it.
"Innovation is for Improvement, not for fear"
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.
We provide some free hosting which is abused. I note we receive the original "suspicious linking" messages via webmaster after we've already taken the linked to page down (returns 404).
Any chance Google might check if the linked page still exists before complaining about unusual linking, or is that too open to abuse?
Presumably if they deliberately return a 404 to Google, and other results to others, then they know they are doing abusive stuff and don't need to get an email?!
I hate the fact that you don't read a lot of victory stories from people who have recovered.
While article portals were very acceptable for years now they have been pointed out as spam. The same with directories.
Problem is you read story after story about people who have removed as many of those links as possible and never receive word that manual penalties have been lifted.
Hello Matt,
When you will give the opportunity to report inappropriate links using the account of GWT?
Hi Matt...back in May we received 2 unnatural link warnings in WMT on the same day, for the same site. Is this likely a bug, or a double penalty applied to our site?
We have spent the past 2 and a bit months cleaning up as many links as possible that we believe may be considered "unnatural".
how to optimasi webmaster tool on the my blog
I think you are way off base on widgets. If it's a code snippet they code can easily be removed. Why should websites give something away and get nothing in return? does this not help you rank websites and decide what a page is about? Google still sucks at this btw, and it gets worse with each 'penalty' update.
what is inbound link?
While being analyzing your site in Google webmaster tool if you receive any message or penalty for artificial links that google have to face some problems during indexing your link pages and drive your attention to respond back them via reconsideration request report to fix the spamming problems and google will also tell you about the links nature that they find some inorganic or unnatural links pointed to your site.
I've never done any unnatural link building, and only posted high quality original content. And yet, my sites continue to slide in the search results. I'm just tired of trying to understand Google and their BS.
Hi Matt,
I have one of these message, but, with more than 408 503 links (example for a website that has been online since 1999), it's hard to solve without more informations.
In webmaster tools, can you give us a list of links concerned by the alert ?
Many thanks,
Cyril
As yet with no recourse to request Google to 'discount' spammy links to our websites which we did not request, or over which have no control, has Google inadvertently spurned a new money making racket? I understand that requests to websites generating spammy backlinks are demanding large sums to get these links removed !
Come on Google - play fair and provide us with the means to get these links barred from our results.
Ouch! Google only doing 10 sites aday... at that rate I will be 1000 years old before their reach my site - where's that vampire blood! I have removed over 50,000 links and counting, but still no love from Google. Who would have guessed 10 years ago, writing a few articles could get your site into so much trouble.
Sorry to ask what might seem a stupid question, but how can I tell if an inbound link is suspicious, or an attempt by a competitor to spam me?
This is really helpful, Matt...kudos to you and the team. Big step forwards!
This is really helpful, I will review my blogs & adjust my links accordingly... some of them may seam spammy, yet if they stay focussed non the weightloss problems in the world, people will feel better about themself continuing their Careers !!!
Matt,
All we feel is anger, dismay, and a giant evil weight exacted on us. For no reason we can see. Search out and solve for X because you guys farted. Perfect Matt.
How much does the job pay? Oh, we can still survive. Gotcha. Maybe you should have started with TripAdvisor and then worked your way down to little guys?
Phil
Hey Matt,
5-6 years ago I wrote a whole lot of sponsored articles on several different blogs. Way back then there was no penalty for such things. At the time, the agreement (through third party ad networks) I'd write an article, review a site or product mostly, in some cases mention it, sometimes include a text link, sometimes a banner ad, and label it as a sponsored article (this was pre ftc stuff but still disclosed). The article was supposed to remain on the site per the advertising agreement for the life of the site. (A legal binding agreement with consideration provided all around.)
Fast forward to the present, I haven't written a sponsored article in years (I don't recall exactly when, but sometime in 07 or 08). I got an email today from gourmetgiftbaskets.com asking to remove two links on 2 sponsored articles from 1 blog.
I remember them well as way back then they put in a ton of orders. I not only wrote the 2 articles they mentioned in the email, but I also wrote 7 others on sites that are still live and even more on sites and domains that have since faded or been shut down.
I responded that I would be happy to edit/delete the article under 2 conditions:
1) They provide me with a release from my obligation to leave the sponsored article up for the live of the site, ergo position to edit the link as I was obligated to keep according to our original deal, (ergo permission to void the contract)
2) They pay a nominal fee of $20 per article for my time and effort. Total for my time and effort $180
:)
Yep, there's the rub isn't it.
I'm not looking to buy or sell links all these years later. My own blogs in this case were penalized a long time ago and are virtually useless to me these days. But after writing thousands of regular articles and probably close to a thousand sponsored articles way back when, I don't have the time nor inclination today to go edit/delete those old articles not to mention, I do not want to suffer the legal wrath of breaking a contract as compared to having a new agreement to void it.
Of course the response I received from Brian at Gourmetgiftbaskets.com was threatening. He quoted your article here stating that if I didn't take down the links, he report the sites.
Ha! Jokes on him, they were likely reported a long time ago, and I offered in response to report them myself now if they hadn't been in the db already. I'm bound up and can't touch them without Brian's permission, which he did not give (just threats).
All that said, I'm not unwilling to help, just don't have the luxury of legal options, and time to do that. A Google bomb is a nice pain in the ass, a lawsuit for breach of contract is a whole other problem.
This particular advertiser ordered lots of these (I saw the offers in the ad networks years ago, and saw them get filled by other bloggers.) Note these were not my networks, I was just a blogger member in many of them.
The problem is that if you send an army of advertisers (think of these as link buying junkies) out to clean up the links they purchased, you've got to expect that people are going to need compensation for their time and authority to do the cleanup and void contracts.
I see in this comment thread a large number of people complaining about competitors buying links to point to them. Way back when, this typically happened about 1 out of a 1000 times. In reality, they were more likely buying their own links and when they leave a comment for you they pretend that someone else did it. (we all know better right?)
Point being the demand and money didn't come from bloggers it came from advertisers that capitalized on the results.
If you want to get this clean up fixed, you've got to look at the demand side of this, otherwise this battle is going to be as futile as the drug wars.
btw I'm happy to talk about this openly with anyone to find a better solution hence I'm using my real name and google profile and all.
Hey Matt, its taken me w while to come round to your way of thinking about this and yes, lets get rid of spam. My point though is years ago, you wanted people to collect links to their sites, now you are saying bascially dont link! In fact people are now scared of linking. PLease "WELEASE BWIAN!" or at least "WELEASE THE LINK IGNORE TOOL!." Please let me and others at least have the opportunity to correct past mistakes. Thank you
I have been posting on 3 forums for 5 days to find out why my No1 website (google keywords: chinese supermarket Edinburgh) has gone nowhere now. Hopefully, I could find answer here. To be clear, I didn't receive any warning and it's a brand new website, just happened in a less competitive market (less than 10 chinese supermarket in Edinburgh). No spam links, it was on No1 (Chinese supermarket Edinburgh) for 10 days. One possibility could be one website had links to mine, and Google asked the website to remove (or noflow) the links. But, actually, the link was still there, and I suppose the website has been use noflow for years (the website was just sold for millions pounds recently), the P/R for the website is still 2/10 now.
Some my thought about inbound links:
1. Why can't you just distrust spam websites, and leave other websites as where they are now. For the time being, webmaster would stop using useless inbound links when they recognize it isn't working.
2. Don't distrust good websites linked to spam websites. By doing so, you, Google is encouraging spam on another way, before, spam links were used to increase PR, now spam could be used to decrease PR to a website, such as 2 cases mentioned by MJ Flatow and Brett Bumeter.
3. Could google please release a tools to tell me where my website is on google search now. Apart from space for local business, after 15 pages(don't have time to look at more) I couldn't find the chinese supermarket website with less than 10 shops in Edinburgh.
DesignPromote, you talk to Google as if you were their customer deserving good service in return of what you pay. For instance, you ask them to release a tool to find your rankings because you don't have time for such things.
I'm sure a more realistic attitude would have served you better in your unsuccessful attempts to promote your website on Google's free search engine page results.
Liking all the new updates.
Hi Matt, Thanks for this notification. Prior to reading this, I have gone through many articles on the web, about Google Penguin, Negative SEO, link schemes, link spam, paid links on how to prevent from such unnatural links activities. I believe that now the time comes to closely look at the links pointing to our websites to verify its quality and this is the most tedious job. How do the site owners determine the link quality? We can't assume that all site owners have an idea of what an inbound link it is. As a solution, if Google can put a column highlighting an unnatural links under Google Webmaster Tools ->Traffic ->Links to your site based on other's reconsideration requests, spam reports request, and other factors, it would be easy for a site owner to remove such links.
With the help of new notifications now we can improve our webmaster. Recently i heard about that new penguin updates will put more concentration on webmasters so this will really help us.
Will paid/site-wide links that have been created via Affiliates or Paid ads to a disallowed landing page on my website affect my site's rankings?
GWT shows them as my inbound backlinks, even for the landing page that is blocked from robots.txt, are they being counted as my backlinks still?
Will paid links/site-wide links that have been created by Affiliates/ads to a disallowed page on my website affect my site's rankings?
GWT is showing these links in my inbound backlink profile even when the linking page is blocked in robots.txt.
Hi Matt, some weeks ago my site received a notification about inbound links.
I noticed that the largest amount of links comes from blogs where my site is present in the so called "blogroll", a list of links that is present in every page/post of the blog.
Where I was able to delete the link, I've already delete it, or flagged as "nofollow".
Now I'm ready to submit a reconsideration request but I have a big problem.
The problem comes with twitter.com...
Webmaster tools says that I have 6494 links on twitter.com pointing at the home-page of my website.
Digging in the details page, THIS IS NOT TRUE.
None of them is pointing at the home-page of my website, each link is pointing to different pages.
One last consideration: my twitter username is identical to my domain name, is it possible that Google treat my username (that sounds like "somedomain.com") like a link pointing to the home-page?
Thanks for help and sorry for my poor english
Paolo Groppo
Matt, you said, "In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won't take links down.... they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves."
What about directories and blogs that believe that the value they provide to their readers is in the links? Certainly if a directory or blog was selling links, the person who bought it has a reasonable expectation to have it removed. But if a directory or blog has a link because the links are intened to be useful to readers, then a website owner requesting a link to be removed is actually asking for them to (for free, according to you) remove value from their website! Google has no right to dictate such things.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for providing some more details about this notice and what we can do about making sure our sites are not in jeopardy of further issues.
I wonder if you can answer a question about links for me while I have your attention.
Do links matter anymore and will they matter in the future for Google? That is to say, is the whole system now changed where only quality, relevant and engaging content is the way to rise in the search engines or do the links that this type of content additionally help us in search rankings.
I know that might sound like a trivial question, but as you can imagine there have been lots of theories that popup with each algo update.
If you have the time, I am sure I am not alone in saying that it would be nice to get a response to this question.
Thanks!
Shawn
In the Pre PENGUIN days - it was difficult to achieve Top rankings and impossible to bring a competitor down.
Post PENGUIN - it is still difficult to achieve Top rankings as Google prefers established sites in Top rankings -
BUT it has become extremely easy to bring a competing site down and gain rankings - just build a 100000 spam links to the competitor.
Hacked sites have links posted on hacker sites, it would be really REALLY good to be able to flag these incoming links as bad things - I keep hearing rumours that this might be possible soon and if so, the sooner the better. My site has been suffering badly since a brief hack earlier this month - Google hasn't allowed the site to recover it's previous ranking as yet. Feels like punishing the innocent from where I'm standing right now.
My site has been hacked and an article directory posted without my permission. How do I remove it?
My website for my White Hat SEO business was doing really well in the local search results. It's not a huge business just a small one which is slowly growing and some idiot has gone and done reverse SEO on my website - I have spent days removing URL's in my webmaster tools account and adjusting my robots.txt to block folders that never existed but appear to be in these links. There are also hundreds of search=? queries for all kinds of things, viagra, penis enlargement, florida holidays, hairstyles and so on - you get the jist! However the search queries keep re-appearing in the crawl errors, I have submitted a reconsideration request. I have worked hard on my website and done everything to the Google Rules, my website was on page 1 for many search terms related to my business and (my phone was beginning to ring regularly), it showed up for mainly local keywords and it seems a competitor must have done this because they could not get past my website. And yet Google have set all these rules and caused this new trend of internet crime which is simply affecting businesses overnight, and now I read that even if I manage to get rid of these links I did not build my site will not go back to its original positions. I might be a small fish, but everyone who owns a website works hard to make their money and to support their families etc, what right have people got to go an do this for Google to pretty much shut a business down - luckily I do have clients and I have lots of word-of-mouth business too! It's funny how my site is still doing just fine of Yahoo and Bing! If this carries on Google are going to cut their own nose off to spite their face and people will start to favour other search engines to work with!
Does anyone have an answer to stop and remove this reverse seo from competitors?
Matt,
Getting rid of unnatural links (inbound links) is great and there are many webmasters who want to comply but unfortunately there are no tools to help. For example, once site(s) have been identified (there have a link to your site that is off topic)the only way to remove them (delete the link to your site)is to contact each site and ask them not to link anymore. That's a manual process that is not acceptable especially if you are looking for a quick turn around. The biggest issue with compliance to the (unnatural links )guideline is that there are no automated tools to facilitate compliance. Once an automated way (something other an manually contacting each site) is available you'll see big changes.
If there are automated tools please say so. I'm sure there are many webmasters who would like to know right now. Tools are out there to identify the sites but none to go beyond that.
Edward
Why does there need to be a "penalty" for these things in the first place? If Google's algorithm is superior and it can detect spamminess, what's so bad about simply ignoring the spam links?
It seems logical to focus your effort on detecting more spam links--even if it falsely accuses a large portion of legitimate links--and then simply ignores those links. That would completely prevent reverse SEO and would greatly reduce the effectiveness of link directories.
We as webmasters work for our clients, obviously. Our clients want the most effective SEO for their money, and when 3rd parties are involved because of budget limitations, we cannot guarantee they will use ethical means. I tell Abdul that my client needs a certain search term at a certain rank. He promises to use "white hat" methods only. When he's failing, he may just push a button and script-spam my client's competitor to remove them and I never know about it. "Well done," I say. Likewise this may be done to one of my sites. This is a serious problem and I hope you have a solution soon.
Thanks for the great search engine! Please keep improving it.
George
Would be nice to have a way in Web Master Tools to refresh the "Links to your site" list. As webmasters are working the list it would be great to get an updated list of linking sites(s). My list an old list. I know for a fact there are many sites that are no longer linking to my sites because I have contacted them but yet they still show as they are linking.
How do we get Spam inbound-Link message?
Does the google system look negatively upon html data from 3rd party sources? To be sepecific, will it be a negative thing to have rate tables and widgets in my pages?
Hi,
Will google look negatively at sites that have a bunch of html codes bringing in data and articles from 3rd party sites? To be more direct, will I be penelized if I'm offering rates and articles by inserting html into my pages?
Dear Sir,
I have a few ideas for Google that could make them tons of money and would like to know how I can protect my idea with minimal court interaction and full Google support. Thanks.
Kevin Sadler
kvnsdlr@yahoo.com
With the help of new notifications now we can improve our webmaster. Recently i heard about that new penguin updates will put more concentration on webmasters so this will really help us
I am very impress to look it. because my site page rank was 1 but now site map reset submit after my site page rank down to 0 now.
What if never got the un-natural linking message in WMT, but someone in Google webmaster forum has highlighted I have some spammy back links how can I check if this is the reason for sites SERPs drop..?
Hmmm, here's a new weird twist to this silly program.
I recently received an email from someone claiming to be Zach Sayward.
The email goes like this
Hi,
This is the second time we are reaching out to you regarding your link to our site http://www.globelifeinsurance.com from http://softduit.com. We really do need to remove this link. We have to report to Google any link we were unable to remove, and I wouldn't want to have to include your site in the list. Could you please remove our link from this page and any other page on your site?
Thank You,
Zach Sayward
So here's the thing. That link is not on my site! I'd be the first to admit if it was.
I should also mention that this email was also the first email I ever received on the topic, and not the second as claimed in the email text.
I half wonder if this is just a mail merge gone wrong or someone running some kind of phishing expedition using the threat of Google web reporting, although I can't figure out how this would be useful to them to do that.
My response was short and simple
Thank you, your threat has been noted and will be totally ignored.
I guess I changed my mind on the 'ignored' part, as I generally always report these goofy emails here.
We recently had someone ask to have their website removed from our Pennsylvania directory. Google is showing thousands of link backs to the persons website and we assume the person feels this hurts their ranking.
We are redoing part of PAontheweb.com as a Wordpress MU aka Network. However our old index page is located at http://paontheweb.com/directory.php
Example of 60,707 link backs to http://buyherepayhereharrisburg.com. However, it says only 1 linked page.
Our system is a database driven site that must be showing links to websites similar to a blog that has a link in a sidebar widget. Is 60,707 links with one linked page actually hurting the persons website?
I'm using Google Webmaster Tools to see what domains are linking to my site and how many links from their site go to mine. I was wondering if there is a way to see others' inbound links in the same format as Google Webmaster Tools as to see how many links each domain has going to these other sites?
On person has posted this link http://seolinksubmission.blogspot.com in a comment in this post. And his link is visible in Google, When we Search. And title of his post is link submission. And Google post title is "New notifications about inbound links".
I think engineers, forget to manually crawl their own blog.
:( ,, Crapp!!!!
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