Definitive Explanation of What Links Are "Unnatural"

[Ehren]

This post is deleted!

[MarieHaynes]

I see this from the other side of the fence.  As someone who works with people to try to remove unnatural links penalties, I can tell you that no one knows exactly which links are natural and which aren't.

In most situations the person who is trying to get links removed is not the SEO who made some bad links for the site.  So, the person deciding which links to get removed makes their best guess as to whether a link is unnatural or not.  My rule of thumb is that if I'm not sure if a link is natural or not then I ask for it to be removed.  In some cases I may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but when you're trying to recover from an unnatural linking penalty it's better to be safe than sorry.

I try to word my email to webmasters in such a way that they know that we are not holding them responsible for our unnatural links penalty and that there is nothing wrong with their website, but invariably, I'll get some webmasters writing back to me to tell me that I'm wasting my time or to educate me on what is and what isn't an unnatural link.  In many cases, it takes the webmaster more time to email me back than to simply remove the link or add a nofollow tag to the link.

In some cases, if a website is trying to recover from a Penguin hit, altering or removing even good links may be necessary.  If they've got too many anchor texted links then each one they can remove can help them recover.  (However, no one knows this for sure until we have a Penguin refresh and some good data.)

There's nothing wrong with writing back to tell the person requesting link removal that this link was indeed a natural link.  But, I can tell you that I am extremely grateful to the nice webmasters who sympathized with my client, took the time to remove the link, and wished us good luck in getting rid of our penalty.

[Ehren]

If sites are out there chasing down webmasters and getting all these links removed, doesn't that create the potential for their link profiles to become even more unnatural, on the whole?

What is my legal obligation to entertain these requests?  None, right?  Why would I invest my time and resources removing these totally natural links from my site, to the detriment of my users?

Also, if we simply add nofollow onto all these external links, will that be enough to satisfy these people or will they still want us to remove the links?

[MarieHaynes]

A nofollow would definitely be sufficient.

[blueSummit]

Hi Ehren,

like Marie said:
there might also be a good chance that those people who are complaining about your site just simply throw their links around the Internet where ever they can...and THATs the reason why they get penatilzed.

And now the panic-mode has been engaged and I am sure you are not the only one who gets Emails from them

Either strip the URLs from the user comments via regexp-function or no-follow them

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Ehren,

You're exactly right - under most circumstances, you have no obligation to remove links. Exceptions may exist for copyright infringement - courts are still working on settling that.

You should almost always nofollow UGC, unless you're editing all comments manually to make sure each link adds value. If you add nofollow, you can basically have a canned response telling webmasters that these are not the links they're looking for.