Ask a QuestionBacklink Anchor Text Profile

[hvwltd]

I'm looking to clean up my back link profile as we have a Google penalty for unnatural linking. Any pointers on what I should be looking for in terms of what makes a link bad? We have a massive percentage of links under the anchor text of "workwear" and this is the keyword we have the penalty for. Is it better to get the links removed or the anchor text changed? Thanks

[Horizon]

Hi Daniel,

Have you received a notification from Google (in Webmaster tools) that they have penalised you? In theory, they should not penalise your website for receiving links from dodgy sources, just not pass on any link juice from the dodgy site.

If you think about it, why wouldn't every business just set about getting loads of dodgy links to their competitor's website? Then google will penalise their competitor and all will be good with the world, right? Wrong.

If you have not received an official notice from Google, it is very unlikely (near impossible) that you were penalised for getting spammy links.

If you're hell bent on checking backlinks, use SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer. This will tell you the domain authority of the websites you receive links from. I would cull any backlinks with extreme caution though... Domain authority may not tell you the whole story.

Good luck

Matt

[hvwltd]

This is the latest message we have from them from webmaster tools. We never had an actual notification of a penalty but our 1st page ranking for Workwear dropped to page 20 overnight. All other rankings suffered as well:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www../,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www../ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality 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 comply with 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 additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

[josh-riley]

The answer to if it's better to get the links removed or just change the anchor text is maybe to both. If there's an inbound link that seems spammy or doesn't really fit in well with the topic of your site (ex: your site is about cars, but a site about oranges is linking to you), then removing the link could be the better long term plan.

If it's a quality link from a credible source, you want to keep that link so look for anchor text diversity as far as the keywords used.

[Horizon]

Well I guess my next question in that case is 'did you buy or source links from a link farm?!' My understanding is that it's very rare for there to be manual intervention in this fashion, and if you have received a penalty, it's probably for good reason.

Having looked through OSE there's nothing that's massively obvious (for me), but will probably be more obvious for you. Bear in mind that data in OSE could be some weeks old.

Cheers

Matt

[VentaMarketing]

Hi Daniel,

If you have a penalty for "workwear", most likely many of the links that have the anchor text "workwear" were built unnaturally. I would anaylize all of your links with this anchor text and remove the ones that are unnatural or spammy.

Google implemented this penalty to find unnatural link building tactics from bad sites, and one easy way to spot unnatural link building is if an anchor text is repeated. Google uses this measure because that is not how a quality website link to another website. Quality links do not have a standard anchor text, and the anchor text often includes the brand name.

The links that are worth keeping are the links from sites with a high domain and page authority and were not built automatically.

As a rule, the links that matter now and in the future are built by communicating with people and doing "link worthy things" not by pressing a submit button.

[hvwltd]

Hi, thanks all. We actually employed a so called reputable seo firm to improve our rankings and 12 months on and several thousand pounds lighter this is what we are left with. I've noticed that many of the sites are almost identical in terms of their design and domain name. Even some ip addresses are the same so it looks like a content farm to me. I think I'm better trying to get them removed, hopefully some key somewhere can delete our site from their db and remove all of them in one go, it's never that easy tho I suppose. Amazing that you can give people money in good faith to promote your site and secure quality links and this is what we and up with. Thanks for your input tho guys

[VentaMarketing]

Daniel sorry for your negative experience. Not all SEO company's work that way.

It is a great idea to first try to get those links removed yourself, but if you cannot, Google has recently released a disavow tool, which allows you to tell Google what links you want to disavow from your website. Here is the URL to the disavow tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Hope this helps.

[VentaMarketing]

That looks like a penalty to me.