A couple of website owners recently got a warning from Google with regards to artificial or unnatural links. Also referred to as deliberately misleading links, artificial links are made for the sole purpose of increasing a website’s popularity. It’s considered unnatural if it’s coming from a popular but irrelevant content. Thus, search engine bots do not value this type of links at all. In turn, it doesn’t benefit for a website’s page ranking.
On the part of the search engine giant, this is not a fresh crackdown on link networks. They are actually shifting their bad link penalties from “silently distrusted” to being more vocal about it. At the Google Webmaster Help forum, there are users who posted a sample of the warning letter that they got from Google.
One warning issue reads:
Dear site owner or webmaster of __________
We’ve detected that some of your site’s page may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying link to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely
Google Search Quality Team
Eliminating Link Networks
Last month, it should be recalled that Google made a move against several link networks like BuildMyRank.com. The site confirmed that the search engine giant removed majority of their networks from the index, pushing them to immediately shut down their service and provide refunds to their customers.
Although the search engine giant has a history of going after link networks, it is not the reason they send out warning issues to webmasters. According to their spokesperson, they just opted to report bad link penalties more than what they previously did.
It is true that actions on link networks have been more visible lately, but there’s an important disclaimer to that. Google has been able to trace and take action on many types of link networks; we recently decided to make that action visible. In the past, some links might have been silently distrusted or might not have carried as much weight. More recently, we’ve been surfacing the fact that those links aren’t helping to improve ranking or indexing.
This only goes to show Google is watching unusual sites more closely than ever.
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