High DA Press Release Site

[ScottBaxterWW]

Hi Guys,

So we have just received a message from Google confirming that we have an un-natural link profile.

We are currently in the process of gathering all our links and going through them 1 by 1, at the moment I'm just stuck deciding if we should remove this link.

It's a high profile PR site, its updated every day with quality news??

What do you guys think of this?

Thanks,

Scott

[EvolveCreative]

It's pretty natural to have press releases in your backlink portfolio. I'd spend more time going after high quality links than trying to remove spammy ones if I was you. You'll never get rid of all the spammy ones, and all Google needs is one to penalize you.

[ScottBaxterWW]

But they have asked us to remove the links that are un-natural?

Thanks,

Scott

[DeliaAssociates]

That one probably isn't the issue (unless google specifically identified it as such).

Take a look at your backlink profile.  Sort them by anchor text.  Are there any blocks of links that have the same anchor text, likely keyword saturated?  Take a look at the pages that they are coming from.  It's likely that this is where your bad links are coming from.  It's what we've seen most often.  That's where I would start.

[DesignbysoapLtd]

I wouldn't necessarily count a press release site as 'unnatural' - you should be more focused on sitewide, direct match anchor text links, article marketing sites, blog networks, etc.

Just be sure you're only removing links that you know are there to manipulate rankings, and that usually means direct match anchor text. I wouldn't be concerned about brand-name links.

You may well be better served focusing your time on creating some high quality content and gaining some high quality, relevant backlinks.

[858-SEO]

Adam,

What would you suggest if after everything you suggested you realized that your top 20 anchors are exact match money keywords? How do you recommend diluting the link profile if the site is an old site (12 years+) and has a large number of links.

[DeliaAssociates]

Well, there's not quite enough detail in what you said for me to get a totally clear picture, but let me through some stuff out there and you can follow up to make sure you get a good answer.

It sounds like you have 20 links that are exact match.  How big is your overall link profile.  If you only have about 40 links, yeah, that's a problem.  If you have thousands of links, it won't matter too much.  It sounds like you don't have a big link profile.  I'd spend most of my time right now not worrying too much about the bad links (though if you can write to webmaster of the site they are on and get them removed, it may not be a bad idea.  We've worked with people doing that before).  I'd spend most of my time building quality links.  Make sure you have the standard directory type stuff, blog links, etc.   That will help build up your profile and make sure the exact match aren't too high of a %.  Then try to build some high quality links with generic (i.e. - natural) anchor text.

That's where I would start.