Google is not playing games anymore. After the shocking fiasco with Build My Rank and about a million websites receiving the dreadful unnatural links warning from Google, what is left for SEO-marketers?
Google’s Warning:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to [your webpage]
Dear site owner or webmaster of [your webpage]
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages 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 links 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 use our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Undoubtedly, it has become necessary for Google to take drastic measures to ensure that they’re providing the best sites turning up on their SERPs. For as long as we can remember, Google search engine’s algorithm has basically worked this way:
Google Search Engine’s Current Algorithm
The higher your webpage’s page rank (PR), the better chance it gets of appearing on the top spot or first few pages of the search engine results pages (SERPs). In order to increase your site’s rankings, already-high PR websites need to link to your site. If you still don’t really understand how it works, here’s a better example:
When Heidi Klum (A-list celebrity) married Seal (not A-list -although this is debatable) they became an A-list couple and Seal was then considered an A-list celebrity because of Heidi’s strong influence.
Similarly, if your webpage has a low PR but many high-PR sites link to it, then their influence causes your webpage to become more valuable and as a result it increases in PR.
Which Sites Come Up On Top?
An SEO-marketer’s job is to maximize a website’s performance in the search engines. Because of this, most of the sites that appear on the top spots when you search for a particular keyword or keyphrase is not necessarily the most relevant website for your search. Instead, they are website companies that have put a lot of effort into their SEO. Now, there’s no problem with that. However, more and more sites that appear on the search engines are spammy and very irrelevant to the searches.
Google’s Aim To Filter Out Spammy and Irrelevant Websites
You might have experienced this a couple of times, where you’re searching for some information and you end up with something completely irrelevant or considerably different to what you were looking for. This would be an example of a site that has used anchor text and a lot of “unnatural” linkbuilding to influence their position on the SERPs. This is also an example of the type of site that Google does not want on their search engine.
Implications
As much as I completely understand these steps necessary to better our experience with Google, as someone who is also an SEO-person I now have a lot of unanswered questions. For example: How will SEO work now? How will Google know for sure if a site is using “unnatural” linkbuilding methods? What constitutes “unnatural”? By “unnatural” do they mean ‘manual’ or do they mean ‘unethical’?
Does Google have any other precisely efficient method or will they have no choice but to use actual human-editing if they want to properly filter out unnatural links? This will be one heck of a job for Google to tackle.
The worrying thing is that this change is affecting SEO businesses because webmasters and companies now do not know how to react. It costs a lot of money to place your link on a high-PR site…is it not worth risking right now? Many high-PR webpages have a lot of traffic and this is another reason for advertisers to want to have their links on these sites. Will their intention be mistaken for participating in unnatural linkbuilding? If you’re involved in black hat SEO, this is probably the time to consider finding something else to do.
Other things to consider is this: if you are a website owner and you do not do your own SEO, this is the time to invest in a reputable company that does not use methods considered unacceptable by Google.
On another note, this is possibly a method Google’s using to get more advertisers on Adwords. If you are using Adwords for example, your site comes up on the searches as a sponsored ad. With the other method, instead of paying Google you are paying SEO companies.
Personal Experience
A handful of my advertisers on other sites have sent me emails in panic. They do not know how to react; they do not know what to do. Others have considered other ‘methods’ of advertising on my sites (I do not know if some of them have received the warning from Google but it seems to be the case).
Conclusion
The real issue here is that many people have been depending on PR for too long. For quite a while now, many experts in the industry have advised us all to stop looking at PR and not let it run our online lives. I really hope that with the possible changes happening with Google’s algorithm, online marketers will consider more ethical means of website promotion. As a result, if your site’s got great content or very useful, we can hope that people share it and it is pushed up to the top of the searches. If the content is not that great, you can always consider Adwords. Keep it ethical, and your site will be safe.
Hi Sabrina,
Another necessary step I believe for Google to make and shame on all those sites that were using unnatural methods to begin with to rank higher in the search engines. I know that a lot of black hat marketers used these methods and then some people who just were too lazy and didn’t have the patience to let time do it’s job.
I’m not a huge SEO person anyway so this was not an issue with me but I have a feeling that Google has cooked up a way to find out if links are natural or not. At least I hope so and they won’t be penalizing people who are doing the right thing.
Thanks for this share and for more information on this recent change.
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne!
The sad thing about this change in algorithm is that some people’s websites were affected without intention of “unnatural linkbuilding”. I’ve got a few SEO-related sites and most of the time it’s actually SEO agencies doing the linkbuilding for these company websites. So imagine if you paid someone to do some search engine optimization for you, and they used a lot of the PR-influence method your site will suffer because of what someone else did. This has been the case of some people I know. Thanks for visiting!
Well, I am on your blog for the very first time. Nice blog you have here and I enjoyed reading this post. I cannot disagree with whatever you have written here. I think finally Google has done the right thing. Link building is one the primary SEO activities and surely gaining a better Google PR is one the major driving factors behind it though we all know PR hardly matters these days. Natural or Unnatural Link Building…I think it is never easy to decide the same. Natural to me is link baiting which ofcourse is very legal and effective in the long run. Unnatural could be the paid links, links exchange between sites based on completely different themes, etc.. Well, I am no more into this link building. I stopped doing it a long back, 2-3 years back. I have been concentrating mostly on the content part which I believe is the whole and sole of any blog or site. I really don’t care about the algorithm changes, panda, penguin, etc.. To me, it is finally all about a great quality content where I have to give my best and I am sure it would bring me the desired results in terms of better ranking and higher traffic.!
Also, I had one article on my blog which I could relate to this post. Please do check it out if you have time – http://www.aksindiblog.com/2012/04/natural-and-unnatural-link-building-and.html
Thanks..!
Hi Aswani, and welcome to my blog!
I’m completely with you on this Aswani, I believe content is key to any blog’s success. That’s the only way to get people actually bookmarking your site (naturally, as opposed to paying people to do it for you!) and it is the only way to get people coming back. According to SearchEngineLand.com, Google didn’t search for rule-breakers manually so warnings were sent out automatically to sites owners who met the criteria for the slap. Cheers.
I hope it is not all about the money with Google and the adwords. (That is just my fear that the big companies will have that advantage of small businesses) I do like that they are punishing those spammy websites that offer no value while you are searching for something in particular. Hopefully great content will rule.
Hi Lisa, nice seeing you here again! I do believe great content will rule.
Although for the Penguin update I don’t think Google concentrated on penalizing anyone based on content rather than the way they’ve been building their links. As long as we keep it ethical, I believe we’ll be safe.
Nice article Sabrina.
Whilst we all want to see results related to our searches. I would be interested to know how the google algorithms will view advertising.
e.g Will an advertisement about cars on a business website have less weight because
it has ads related to a different topic.
Hey Claude, thanks for reading the post. Unfortunately, I do believe that due to the new algorithm, there is now such as thing as “over-advertising” and I wouldn’t put it passed Google to penalize any site for that. Most advertisers would want their text link, or banner up on a website’s index page because most site’s index pages get the most visitors. Even if the advertiser’s intention is solely to obtain maximum exposure, coincidentally most website’s index pages also carries the highest PR. Now, assuming the advertiser places his/her link on 10’000 PR+ pages, this can dramatically influence the PR of the advertiser’s page. This might also be considered an unnatural way of link building according to Google’s new algorithm. At this point, I would just stay away from taking such risks because many of my site visitors come from Google SE. However, another way to look at it would be to ignore Google and the whole PR game. I suppose it all depends on how dependent your site is on Google for traffic.
Something important that I forgot to mention: there’s still the possibly safe use of nofollow links. If anyone plans to advertise to that extreme, specifically for targeted traffic and your links will be placed on high PR sites enough to influence your page’s PR, it will be wise to insist that the publisher adds a nofollow code (rel=”nofollow”) to your links.
Great stuff, sabrina. I don’t see a reason to disagree with whatever you’ve said.
Google needs to punish those sites that were using unnatural methods to build the links fast.
I think the best way to get your content ranked is by writing high quality posts and building quality links to your site.
-Dev
Hi Devesh, welcome to my blog.
Yup, it’s just better (in the long run!) to have awesome content that people would want to share and bookmark.
Hi Sabrina,
I saw your link on Adrienne’s site, and took the opportunity to visit with you. I am glad that I did. I understand a bit better, about google and their recent activity. Good insights. Thanks.
Hi Princess Shimari, thanks for dropping by. Glad to know you find my blog resourceful enough, heheh…
I love visiting Adrienne’s blog!
Hi Sabrina,
I am a newbie blogger (6 months old) and have not really gotten into SEO. I’ve heard about the changes that Google made, and how it affected some blogs. If people are using unnatural links and or methods in order to achieve page rank, then they should be penalized, in my opinion. Maybe more bloggers will start to write content for their readers and build links in a natural manner now.
Hi Jamella, nice to have you here on my blog and a very big welcome to the blogging world!
Large networks of SEO-competitive blogs were de-indexed after the update so I’m glad that the quality blogs with great content will be showing up on the SERPs. Although I’m sure that many website owners felt they were using White Hat methods.