With a recent Google+ post, Google tried giving certain clarification regarding its unnatural link warnings; yet the confusion prevails among the SEO experts and Webmasters.
Few days back, Google was sending alerts via Webmaster Tools, warning certain website owners that their website pages are detected of using techniques outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google encouraged the necessary changes, so that websites can meet the quality guidelines. Also, Google gave the recommendation of removing the unnatural links from the sites, which was to be followed by the submission of a reconsideration request. Otherwise, the penalty is known to everyone: a noticeable drop from search traffic.
Identified with a yellow mark, these warnings generated an immediate panic among the webmasters & SEOs, who feared of getting downgraded in the Google search results, within 7-10 days. Consequently, all got busy looking into their link profiles, which is definitely a nerve staking job, as one site connects to thousands of links.
Further, the webmasters and SEOs got confused with certain common questions like: How an average man can identify the artificial or unnatural links? What if the owner himself has not made those Links? What to do avoid a penalty? How to fix the issue? How to avoid doing accidental harm by removing a quality link?
Answering to this plethora of questions from SEO Experts and webmasters, Google has recently made a post on google+ giving its clarifications. The post reads:
“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. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. 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.”
This clarification gives indication that Goggle has identified two sets of websites; one which violates the webmaster guidelines “as a whole” and another one which are contaminated because of certain “distrustful individual links to a site”. Further, Google also clarifies that some unnatural links are outside the control of the website owner, and can’t be removed by the owner. In light of these facts, Google decided to take targeted action on the unnatural links instead of the entire site as a whole.
Though, this clarification put light on certain points, yet many confusing questions still prevails. The major being: If Google knows certain unnatural links can’t be removed by the owner, then why is Google urging webmasters to make changes? And if Google algorithm can identify the distrustful links why it’s not sharing those links with webmasters or why don’t Google just ignore or discount those links.
It seems, SEOs and webmasters have to wait for a while till Google completely unveils all the confusions.
