As you know, I’ve been reviewing tons of websites that have lost Google traffic lately. Most of the reasons that the sites lost favor with Google have been fairly obvious (to me) – especially the sites that have seen steep declines. Most of the reasons include any combination of:
* Keyword-stuffed copy anywhere on any page.
* Copy buried at the bottom of pages, more for search engines than for people.
* Title tags that are just lists of repetitive keywords.
* Product information that is not as good as what the competitors have.
* Not spending money to market and/or advertise your site.
* No social media marketing being done.
* Old site that hadn’t been updated in many years.
* Sites with very poor usability.
I’ve talked about each of those in previous articles, but one I’ve only touched upon is:
* Placing keyword-laden anchor text links on other sites either by buying them or through content creation and submission schemes.
Let’s face it – everyone in the SEO industry knew that paying for links in order to gain link popularity and PageRank was always something that Google frowned upon. After all, it subverted the very nature of Google’s mantra that a link signals a “vote.” The problem was that paying for links was an extremely efficient way to get them. And despite Google’s claim that it was against their guidelines – it worked like a charm!
The main reason why it worked so well was that it was an easy way to use keyword anchor text as opposed to just a company name like typical natural links would end up with. Everyone who ever tried to figure out why certain sites ranked where they did would see the top-ranking sites almost always had fake paid-for links, chock full of keyword anchors, of course. And on the next page of results would be all the great sites that only had real links – you know, the kind others linked to out of the goodness of their hearts (using the company name as anchor text).
So it’s no surprise that more and more people blew off what Google requested and instead did what worked: They paid for whatever kind of links they could get that had keywords in them. And then they paid for even more. And they kept paying for them because if they didn’t, they’d lose a good portion of their website traffic (and business) to their competitors who did it.
Until the Penguin Came A-Callin’
After so many years of allowing people to subvert their algorithm with purchased links of one form or another, Google finally put their foot down. They sent out messages and emails to those with Google Webmaster Tools accounts, explaining that they had discovered links pointing to their sites that they deemed to be “unnatural.” They told people they’d need to get rid of the unnatural links or risk losing their Google traffic. By sending out these messages and actually penalizing sites for fake links, Google was now taking action. The only problem was that, by allowing them to work so well for so long, Google was basically trying to cut off the head of the very monster that Google had created.
Most of that happened toward the end of April 2012. Interestingly, 2 sites I had recently reviewed had lots of links pointing to them that I would certainly call “unnatural.” Yet they had never received the message from Google. I assumed they had enough real links to not have to worry about bad ones. But last week Google sent out a second round of warnings, and both of those sites were included. In a way, I felt vindicated because many of the links were so obviously spammy and/or paid for. Both sites had already lost some traffic (which was why I was reviewing them in the first place), but neither had lost as much traffic as I had seen with many other sites I’d reviewed. In fact, both sites were doing lots of things right and were leaders in their space.
New Warnings
Even before receiving the notice, both of these site owners were working to clean up as many of the bad links as possible, based on my recommendations. But the notice definitely put it higher up on their list of things to work on. A few days after receiving the first notice, Google sent out a new message. This one said that while they found some unnatural links that were concerning, there was no wide penalty being assessed. Still, it still seemed prudent to clean up as much of the junk as possible.
What Are Unnatural Links?
Unnatural links are generally using specific keyword-rich anchor text. And while I can’t speak for all sites that received Google notices, here are the types I found that I would personally classify as unnatural:
* Affiliate links without nofollow on them and/or that didn’t go through a tracking script.
* Banner ads with direct links that didn’t have the nofollow attribute.
* Blogspot or other free blogging platform blogs likely created by the site owners themselves (or friends of them) as a way of creating links back to their main site.
* Low-quality articles with links either in the body of the article, in the bio, or both – published on lots of free article directory sites.
* Scraped versions of articles (not much one can do about these).
* Blog roll links from irrelevant blogs where they’ve obviously linked to anyone who’d be willing to pay.
Something to remember through all this is that anyone can haveany links they want pointing to their site. If a link brings you targeted traffic, then in my opinion it’s a good one, regardless of whether Google likes it or not. That said, if you’ve paid for it, Google would like you to let them know this. You do that by adding a nofollow link attribute to it.
The Clean-Up
When you add nofollow to paid links, you can have whatever links you want without Google wondering if they should count them as a vote for your site or not. That would work well for affiliate links and any paid-for online ads. In addition, any links you (or someone working on your behalf) managed to have placed on completely irrelevant sites (especially those next to really spammy links) should be removed if at all possible.
The other thing that you should be aware of, one that is counter-intuitive to what we as SEOs have been saying for years, is that you may want to completely forget about using keywords in anchor text. My hope is that Google finally understands that real natural links rarely have keywords in them, and that they’ve adjusted their algorithm accordingly. I can’t say for sure whether they have done this yet, but I imagine they’re working toward it more and more with every update.
Clean Up Internal Links As Well
While I haven’t heard others saying this, my advice about anchor text includes your own internal links. I’ve been telling people for quite awhile now that they need to dial back the keywords within links from their own blog posts or their navigation. While Google hasn’t said it (that I know of), I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the unnatural link notifications has to do with internal linking. Some of the sites I’ve seen that have lost a lot of Google traffic were doing some heavy-handed things with internal keyword-rich anchors.
If you received the first unnatural link warning from Google (without the subsequent second one), then you’ve likely got a worse scenario on your hands. You’ll need to get rid of as much junk as possible and then submit a reinclusion request via your Webmaster Tools account. If you received the second one, you probably don’t have to do a reinclusion request. But I’d still try to get ofollows onto any paid links and take down any links that are on irrelevant sites.
You may also want to read Julie Joyce’s new article: Time & Value of Link Cleanups: Should You Even Bother?.
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston, MA area since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen.
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Thanks for the nice article. I am worried for my website http://www.hd100.in
I have submitted my site to many Online Directories, Websites, Search Engines etc. but at the moment I cannot recall where I have placed my registration for inculsion. Some might have registered and rest have kept on hold to review and add my URL. But I don’t think the later part will be fruitful and probably will not include. My concern is not that but as per above article if my Linking is found any unrelevant or less related site, what I have to do? As I am not sure now where I have submitted.
Pl respond.
Thanks.
If Google penalize for Paid Links – what, I wonder, are Adwords?
Paul Axford CEO
Comsec Networks Inc.
Thanks for the post. Will surely follow the instructions if recieved an Unnatural Linking Message From Google.
HI,
Thank you for sharing all your insight. I have also read your previous articles. I am no SEO guru, but simply try to do the best with my site’s ranking I can with the knowledge I have been able to acquire by reading and researching. Useless SEO companies have sucked me dry so now I have to see if I can do better by myself. I even had one of those seo firms who placed a link on my site back to theirs like the one you pointed out in your previous article. There are a few things in your article I still have trouble understanding though. The first is pertaining to links. Part of what I do to get links, is to create content which includes writing for good and SELECTED industry related blogs which as far as possible has a reasonable PR of 2, 3 or 4 and recently got invited to write for PR 6 blogs. Needless to say these kind of blogs has strict review policies and also only allow one and sometimes two links in the body of the article or in the author bio. Naturally, these links are free and I include a relevant text link back to my site. In your article you say “Blogspot or other free blogging platform blogs likely created by the site owners themselves (or friends of them) as a way of creating links back to their main site” are unnatural. Because I view your articles as helpful and worth considering, yet with so much confusion going on, I am now concerned I may once again be on the wrong track, because, how does Google know who the blog belongs to that I am linking from. Also, as mentioned, I use relevant anchor text in my links because I am creating the content according to Google’s wishes. Why would there be something wrong with that? If i used my site name as the anchor, I would really be trying to cheat Google to make them think someone from the goodness of their heart created the link and used my company name as text links. At least now they can see I created the well written content on a relevant platform without keyword stuffing it.
The other thing that I am concerned about is “paid for links”. While I have never paid for a contextual link, I do have several directories linking to my site and for these links I did pay, because, pre-penguin, it was my belief that if you want a directory link, rather go for one with a reputable, high PR directory, because at least most of them adds your link manually after having checked the quality of your site and request payment for their time and effort. Making money online by directory owners is normal online business practice right? If it is bad for seo to have links from paid directories (good ones), then these guys are going to go out of business and an entire online industry would fold because no one will buy a link from a directory any more. Lets face it, nobody buys a link from a directory for advertising, they do it to get PR. So what is the deal here? I am not arguing your points, rather, I seek clarification on these issues in normal layman terms from someone who should know.
Thanks in advance and hoping to hear from you soon.
Google are targeting paid for links which try and manipulate the natural (organic) results. Adwords have no effect on natural results.
Who has the time to look for some links, which Google may treat as “bad”. And who the heel is Google to decide which link is ok and which is “bad”?! If they are so great they should just ignore such “bad” links in their algorithm. But the real true is that they have a great reason to drop ANY site in rankings (they can say that any link is unnatural!) and make more money fro AdWords! And this is the real reason for all of this stupid actions!
Jill, great stuff – Thanks!!
Thanks everyone!
@George here’s the thing. Google has never wanted people to get links for links sake because they might help your rankings. So if you were writing guest posts in order to get a link so that Google might rank your site higher, then that’s what they don’t like.
On the other hand, if you were writing guest posts to market yourself and show that you’re an expert on your topic, then that of course is fine.
As I mentioned in the post, if the links pointing to your site bring you genuine traffic then they’re good links. So many links that people get just for search engines never bring traffic. Have you ever seen traffic from the directories you submit to? Most of them (the Yahoo directory included) rarely bring any visitors, making them mostly useless.
My suggestion is to simply stop thinking about what Google may want or not want and instead think about how you can market your website and yourself in a way that gets more people (especially those in your target market) to know about you and what you offer.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for posting this article. I always learn so much. I’ve always wondered why so many intelligent business operators use paid link services. The ads for these services are so hokey and scammy that it should be obvious. But then again spending quality time writing good content and researching good relevant backlinks is definitely harder than using a pay-for mechanism.I try to tweek my content on a regular basis. It’s an ongoing process of seeing what works for your competitors and tweeking along the way.
if you want to pay advertising or backlink for your site, for the good and safety you can choose Google Adwords and penalty not come to you
It has been years people have been doing it. I know it was wrong but what google doing isn’t fair after that many years. I don’t even remember which directories or forums I submitted my blog and I didn’t do most of it just to gaining backlinks.
Hi Jill, great article, i bet all these websites with bad links are regreting their actions now but you can understand why it got so big because if your competion bought links then to keep up with them they did the same. Hopefully google will now have made it a level playing field for everyone and quality will win through.
@Jill,
Thanks for the reply Jill, it does help. The articles I write for blogs is indeed sharing knowledge, information and experience. There is no focus on keywords or website promotion in the text of these articles. Th idea is to provide useful info to readers in this way and by showing a certain level of knowledge, I hope they visit my website. For them to visit my site, I include a link in the author bio. From your reply it seems this is OK. However, I think i should maybe use the official website name more as the link, rather than a keyword link.
hello all,
great article but from my knowledge I would say there is nothing wrong with putting very descriptive text in the title attribute of your link. This is an HTML attribute that is created for this purpose and is documented at W3.org to be used for such purpose. It is not only for search engines but is to help with usability and in particular screen reader for impair, so I would say make it relevant to the link.
I have 12 years in the industry of making and marketing websites and have always been about quality content, keep producing strong relevant content for people,not search engine as Jill says, add relevant titles to you links and Google should love you. Penguin update was needed and as Phil say quality will win.
One final note on this title attribute debate would be that WordPress makes it so easy for you add the title as it is W3 recommendation, who would Google be to debate this?
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 – and the one message in between.
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…
Simon, not sure what the title attribute has to do with this article, but google ignores the information in that attribute anyway.
I’m not sure I can agree with this line:
‘my advice about anchor text includes your own internal links’
Particularly the reference to navigation, this is a clear opportunity for a website owner to inform the search engine spiders of the destination of a particular link. Yes, I wouldn’t suggest a novel as anchor text, but I would definitely recommend a succinct description.
Hi my ranking went from page 1 to 14 , I spent lots getting my website running from being a single parent with a minimal investment putting all my profits back in for 7 years of true graft blood sweat and …………help !!!
Great artilce. I have a question – as I have some affiliate partnerships with different companies where I earn commission from bookings, from your article I can assume that affiliate links that include a tracking segment in the link will be ignored. However, I do have one affiliate where I just use their domain URL, and their own system then gives me credit for the potential accommodation booking derived from the visit. I use this link on over 5,000 pages. Would this be my problem? Would I have to add the rel=”nofollow” or should I just add my allocated account code to the link? or should I add both? Your article is the most informative I have read so far on this subject.
@Colin Even if you have tracking information appended to an affiliate URL, that doesn’t mean it won’t pass PageRank. It needs to go through a JavaScript kind of redirect (I believe).
But yeah, if you add nofollow to other affiliate links, you should be fine where Google is concerned. That tells them not to pass PageRank of that link and they’ll know you’re not trying to do anything fishy!
Thanks for that Jill. I actually just watched a quick video from a question: Will Google penalize sites which only link using the nofollow attribute? The video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1A5wF3Ac4&feature=player_embedded
The video makes it confusing as it talks about “nofollow” of links and then once the other side is trusted, then the “nofollow” should be removed. If I take this at face value, then I would trust my affiliate and not include any “nofollow”… love to hear what you have to say about this…
@Colin, that’s a good point. But the thing is, an affiliate relationship is based on money so it’s not a vote for your site.
I’m pretty sure that Google doesn’t want to count affiliate links as votes and have them pass PageRank. I believe Matt may have discussed this previously, but I’m not sure. If not, it would be a good question for him!
Great article! I was hoping to get your take on my site, which on July 27th was de-indexed not sitewide, but for just a few categories. The problem is that I’m a product review site and I know there are quite a few scrapers out there with my content. I also copy basic product information, with permission, from the manufacturer’s site about the product I’m reviewing and then add about 80% more unique content.
Recently, my site’s PR went up to a 4 even though about 75% of it has been de-indexed. Do you know if there’s anything I can do to rectify my situation and get back in Google’s good graces again? Thanks so much for your help!
http://www.mommylivingthelifeofriley.com/
Melissa, please see the site review / audit services offered on my site at highrankings.com
@Jill my mistake about title attribute, I guess it is not directly related to this, however it should be used as stated.
like I said good artcile