Reply to: Notice of unnatural links detected

Of course Matt Cutts has connections and because of that his personal blog wouldn't suffer any long term damage but it would prove a point and it would also be quite funny for him to receive one of his own penalty notices.

Personally I don't think it would be too difficult - I checked his backlink profile and it's nothing outstanding. His PR is 6 - again above average but nothing outstanding.

I agree with you to a point Mike however I know from first hand experience that a 10 year old site with over 25,000 natural links, many of which were authority, was completely nuked by the dreaded 'Google notice of unnatural links' after just 2 months of cheap private blog network links at a post rate of 200 a day.

By natural I mean that I did not create the links - the product sold on the website was popular. This was a real business with 10 years of growth and no off-site SEO up until 2 months ago.

Agreed, its going to depend on how strong your site is. A bullet from a nine millimeter can kill a human, but that same bullet will probably just get stuck in the skin of an elephant =D

If I can ruin my 10 year old site in two months with a Google Unnatural Link Notice then I can do it to competitors. I had 10 years of natural links totalling 25,000 yet I still managed to kill the site in less than two months.

Care to share the link to backup your theory

Another example of people fanatical belief in the power of Google. Google does not have the power of the NSA or CIA to invade a website and then hack into peoples computers to see who is leaving a link. They cannot "somehow detect" by magic who left a link where.

Yeah, I would love to see that video. Google cannot tell who is creating the backlinks.

I ruined my own site and business with 2 months of continuous private blog network links - fact. Google even kindly posted a message in my webmaster tools informing me.

Some people are saying that my site will bounce back in 30-90 days. Even if this were true, which i doubt, i'm still out of business. Few businesses can survive 30-90 days with no income?

Some people are saying that surely only my unnatural rankings dropped? - all of our rankings dropped, even the rankings we had before building any links.

So if i know I did this to my site/business using backlinks that anyone can create, it stands to reason that you can harm competitors.

Hey, SeoDemon, how about contributing something more than a just one-liner? Nearly every one of your posts are short little quips like "Nice Report, thank you for sharing!" and "nice opportunity, wish you luck," and so forth.

Posting these types of short comments makes it look like you are trying to beef up your post count, rather than offering anything of real substance.

I really don't know James to be honest. I'd guess that if you feel you can remove the links in question then go for it. There are a few people who have submitted for reconsideration and the reply is always: remove more links - pretty difficult to do unless it's a few rented homepage links you can easily ask to be removed.

I asked the guy who runs the blog network I was using to remove the links to my site and he point blank refused - he's a big player here on Warrior and is convinced that backlinks will only ever improve your ranking! lol I had three sites hit and the only thing they had in common is that they all used his network.

All of my sites hit had: 100's of pages of unique content indexed, some natural links, some authority links, were aged, had links from many sources and the anchor text was well mixed up - it is fallacy that this protects you indefinitely.

What would be interesting is for someone to request reconsideration and say I did not create the links so how do you expect me to remove them?

Obviously the BMR links were de-indexed. So there was really nothing for you do. The important part was the fact that you stated you have no control over any other links. That's why they revoked the penalty.

I received the notice on March 18th, my client's rankings were uneffected at first, so I ignored the message. I'll be the first to admit, i was purchasing some links offshore that were passing PageRank, that was much less than 30% of the link portfolio i was building for this domain, other than that I was dropping Press Releases through PRweb backing causes and movements in my niche, doing some AM2.0 through UAW, AR and AMA. Building a thoroughly useful blog of articles following news and "how to" question answering, social action proofing and promoting those posts through the niche specific blogosphere along with of course many other strategies etc....

Well, about a week after the notice, all the client's major terms got docked, Sunday bloody Sunday into black Monday this morning (that was a tough conference call)... So i'm in the thick of it, ran an updated majesticseo report, SEO spyglass report, backlinkwatch etc... and getting ready to dig my feet in, rub the elbow grease and make a priority list of sites i feel tipped it off and work on getting them removed, before I "play dumb" and submit my request as a weary webmaster for reconsideration from the all-ruling big G, here's my itemized action plan

1. Obviously stop all offshore link building to targeted key terms
2. I'm already was using good anchor text diversity, spinning 75-100 key terms into any article I distributed, what i wasn't doing a good job of, was mixing up the URLs those links were targeting, leaving me with too high a concentration to the homepage and 1-2 subpages, and not linking directly to my blog posts from articles distributed through networks. I think this was by far the largest component, through my comparisons with other client campaigns, that flipped the red flag and resulted in the notice
3. I wasn't using BMR (thank God), was only using AMA, UAW and AR as i previously stated, I don't think those are sniffed out, but there were sites who constantly added my articles every publish, so I'm slowing that down on a monthly basis while mixing up article topics to fall under a farther reach of categories to get on different publishers sites with each submission.
4. I am going to make my anchor texts and HREF targets much more random on all web2.0 sites, articles, guest blog posts, comments, everywhere, to create a stronger sense of naturalization of inbound links
5. I am going to focus more on the PR distributions and work on using those to aquire high PR inbound links from organizations by standing behind and promoting their causes as I have done
6. Write 2-3 times more quality posts and informative articles on the blog and layout my internal linking and navigational structure better than it already is (it's pretty darn good now)
7. Develop a priority list of 100 inbound linking websites, I feel to be the main culprits (based on IP, OBL count, Blogroll (multipage links), crappy content and Get those buggers removed.
8. Submit my reconsideration request to big G for my manual review outlining the steps in this post and respectively pleading for a review and a penalty lift
9. get on my knees and pray to the almighty they get back to me before this client goes out of business, hence not being able to pay me any longer

Any thoughts on this plan of action? Anyone else deriving steps to take action then humbly appeal to big G to open the flood gates of rankings back to them?

PS It was a brand new domain, and I think we we're too good too fast with a few crappy links mixed in that used to work until this month's updates from Cutts' team focused on "penalizing over SEO'ed sites in an effort to level the playing field"

What do yall think? Am I off track, wasting my time? Or do i have a shot at saving this client?

Thanks RatRace,

Yes, time will tell, and I share your grievance of seeing other crap websites stay on the 1st page. One in my niche in particular is hillarious, you click on their blog, and it's a complete white space with one sentence "my product is the best and you will love it". doesn't even have a blog back-end installed! Yet they seem to be a posterchild for "producing consistent high quality content that others would want to link to" and I happen to know that they only build links in India, with very low anchor text diversity and HREF target, so I question my adjustment strategy, but you can't waste all day doing that, you pick your plan and get to it...

I tend to spend some time getting angry at big G when i see this, and i get docked simply because I got their ethically, yet too quickly (besides the offshore links i imagine). Too penalize a site that does "too much SEO" with an emphasis on "leveling the playing field" is like taking Tom Brady's pads off because he's too good of a quarterback...ok maybe a bad analogy.

So we must wait and see, there are some whispers that this notice and the following ranking slash was a scare tactic to pry webmasters to snitch out their SEO companies... I mean read the message you get above the reconsideration submission request box...

"Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reconsideration requests. If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered."

Maybe a hint that Google is wanting to get intel on SEO providers? Or maybe this is a shadow game to once and for all get rid of offshore/Indian SEO firms?

I will continue to fight the good fight and keep this thread updated as I go, I hope all of you do the same so we can continue to constructively help eachother as we assess our plans, adjust and take action!

Thanks for the input, I'm from Palm Harbor by the way, good 'hood there...