"Unnatural" Links

[Onkel Neal]

While I thought this might have something to do with rainbows and the duck dynasty, I see Google has created this to discourage link spam.

You can find the link schemes portion of the Google Quality Guidelines here. The article gives us an actual definition of an unnatural link saying that “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

The first line of this article makes a bold statement about what is considered an unnatural link:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

This came to my attention when I received an email from a merchant who said

We noticed that your site http://www.subsim.com/index.php is linking to our site http://www.**************/ on the URL http://www.subsim.com/radioroom//sho...98942&langid=2

Unfortunately our site has been hit by an Unnatural Link Penalty and we are now trying to get all links taken down where possible, rather than disavowing them.

If you could spare 5 minutes to take this link down we would be extremely grateful.

So, I removed the link, although I am 100% sure it was posted legitimately.

But I do like the impact it should have on spamho's

I’m working with one client right now who got an unnatural links penalty as the result of spending $10 at fiverr.com. He paid for two separate gigs where someone promised to build hundreds of links to his site containing his main keyword as the anchor text. Most of these fiverr gigs will use automated software that finds sites where they can create links by doing things like submitting spam comments or creating fake forum profiles. If you’ve created links with automated software, or if you’ve purchased any sort of packages like, “100 directory submissions for $15” then you’ve got unnatural links. Link to article: http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatu...ity-guidelines

I hope the site moz.com does not get penalized by me quoting their helpful article. If it does, maybe we should blame http://google.com