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| Unnatural Link Message from Google |
You don't want to get one of these emails from Google if you are a web-master or SEO specialist.
(This post has a new update below)
The email provices advice about what you need to do change the status of how Google looks at your website.
To understand how you can revert your website to being viewed as valuable and not spam by Google, you are advised to visit your 'Google Webmaster' account and check the 'Links to your site' section in this tool.
In this section, you will see a list of websites linking to your site and how many links from them there are to you.
Links to your site are important. You need these links to show Google how influential your site is to people looking for the type of content you publish. You can have good links to your site and bad links.
Good links are quality sites that link to your website because what you publish is relevant to their audience. Bad links are those which are from 'spammy' sites which provide no value to the audience and are there purely to try to trick Google into thinking that your site is more worthy than it is in reality.
Google's recent changes to how it operates have made it very dangerous to even consider getting links from these spammy sites.
What can you do about it?
Here's a quick check list to help you take action to get your website onto the good side of Google when it comes to links to your website:
- Visit the websites which link to your site according to the list in your Google Webmaster service.
- Check their 'PageRank' to see if Google rates them or not with a ranking using a checking service like 'PageRank Free'. If it has PageRank of 1 or more then the site is OK.
- If it has no PageRank, then contact the offending website and ask them to remove your URL from their index.
- If they don't respond or take no action, then use the Google 'Disavow Tool' through which you can submit websites that link to your site but who will not comply with your request to remove your URL from their index.
- Next, ask Google to reconsider how they have classified your website. You can find out more here about what they are looking for.
- Now, you just have to wait and see if they act upon your request.
Having your website classified as spam is not good. You will lose traffic to your website which will ngeativley impact your business if you rely upon it for sales. Make sure your SEO specialist is creating good links to your website. If not, sack them!
UPDATE
Since writing the post above, Google has replied to me to say they have revoked the action they took on one of my websites and have not classified it as 'spam'.
That's a fairly quick turnaround ( a few days) and it is a small relief.
The website is an affiliate website aimed at consumers which brings in a small but regular income. It's a small website in terms of visitor numbers. But, the decreased amount of visitors on it is going to have negative impact on the revenue generated from it. (You can see how the action Google took impacted the visitor number below in the image).
Check what your SEO specialist is doing
In a wider context, if you have a website upon which you rely to generate sales, then you need to be very careful with who you employ to carry out your SEO. You need to make sure they are building quality links to your website. You need to make a plan about how you are going to deal with the potential for your website being marked as spam by Google. What would the impact be on your business if your website was incorrectly categorised as spam?
What Google is doing with their algorithm is good. They are cutting out increasing numbers of low value, low quality websites to improve the experience of users. This means it is even more important that you scrutinise the SEO work being carried out on your website to prevent any drop in the visitors to your site and the drop in sales.
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