Google recently made a post regarding its Webmasters Tools and unnatural link profiles and removing potentially harmful links. If you’ve received a message regarding these unnatural links pointing to your domain, or are worried about getting that slap on the wrist or the potential banishment of Google, here are a couple quick things you can do to help the situation.
Google unloaded 20,000 of these messages last week, which is one tenth of what they usually deliver each month (200,000 a month is a lot!). These messages are to domains who potentially contributed to any of the following: widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, and other types of link spam. Google advises that if you’ve received this message, to purge your link profile. You can log into webmasters tools and do this through the “Traffic” tab, under “Links to your site”, downloading the pages to your site conveniently by date to a CSV or put it on Google docs.
Then next step is checking these links to make sure there are unnatural ones. This could be a very large process if you have a large site, so spot checking may be best fitting for this. Take away all spammy looking links (saving this list to give to Google), and then after you are done you can send in a reconsideration request. Google is letting people know to keep this in mind and not to have webmasters freak out over this, however definitely take a look and see what kind of link profile you’ve accumulated so you don’t get penalized.
With Google cracking down even more on unnatural links, it’s clear that Google is trying to “clean up the internet” by doing this, and with each previous search algorithm change in the past couple years. If your website wants to be tidy, SEO compliant and be on Google’s good side (who doesn’t?), it’s best to keep things cool with your relationship with the search engine giant.
