Unnatural Link Warnings
In “a step towards transparency,” Google webmasters initiated a series of warnings to sites against spammy activity and sketchy, manipulative links better known as unnatural links. On July 19, a confusing link warning was sent to a large number of sites. Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his Google+ account soon after to address the SEO hysteria:
If
you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site,
don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action
on a site as a whole … For example we may take this kind of targeted
action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The
innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency,
but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry
about.
Despite the internet storm the announcement caused among SEO’s, some marketers were left wondering. what exactly is an unnatural link?
Generally, unnatural links are artificial links mainly intended to manipulate a page’s ranking. These can include purchased links or links created by scrapers and spammers that attach themselves to your site under the radar and potentially link your site to another in a bad neighborhood of the internet.Unnatural links became a Google target after their Penguin update in mid-April of 2012. The algorithm update was established to penalize sites for low-quality links, over-optimized anchor text and keyword stuffing – all tactics that Google considers unfair and unbeneficial to users. As a result of the recent upgrade, all negative SEO and questionable page ranking tactics have been targeted, but at what cost?
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