Which links should I begin with if I have been flagged as building unnatural links?

[ButlerRaines]

This post is deleted!

[TakeshiYoung]

Rather than removing links, it can also make sense to build your way out of the penalty, that is building more links with natural anchor text rather than focusing on removing the poor ones.

[ButlerRaines]

Do you think this is effective even though Google has specifically said they were penalizing me until I remove these links?

[ButlerRaines]

Do you think this is effective even though Google has specifically said they were penalizing me until I remove these links?

[TakeshiYoung]

Did they specifically tell you you were penalized, or did you just receive an "unnatural link warning" like thousands of other webmasters?  Because those two things are very different.

From doing a site: search of your domain and searching for your branded keywords, it doesn't appear that you are penalized.  Did you see a drop in traffic overall, or just a loss of rankings for that one keyword?

[ButlerRaines]

They specifically told me. I initially thought I got caught up in a Panda update. I hardly think about bad links anymore since it had been years since I attempted article marketing. I asked them to reconsider and they replied:

"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."

[TakeshiYoung]

It looks like you submitted a reconsideration request?  Did you see an overall traffic drop across your site, or just for that one keyword?

[ButlerRaines]

I saw it for my entire site but my inner pages keep their rankings very well. I get several pieces of new content every day.

It is also hard to tell because my traffic is oriented towards to school year. I monitor my keywords and like i said,

for the keyword chemistry help i had been ranked 3-6 for years and it just dropped to 100

for chemistry tutor i was always 2-3 and it dropped to 8-10

so I sent in a request for reconsideration because I felt I had done nothing wrong

[TakeshiYoung]

I've looked at your backlink profile, there are definitely a lot of exact keyword match links from article directories and other sites, but not an exceptional amount.

It could be the case here that Google is not penalizing your site here, simply de-valuing the low quality links that were pointing at you before.  If that's the case, just work on building some better links with diverse anchor text.

If you still have contact with the SEO company that built the links, they may also have the account information for the sites that your links were added to, which should help you remove them if you want.

Here are some other recent threads on link removal:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-low-quality-links-be-removed

[AlanBleiweiss]

If you've gotten an official notice, then they are most definitely penalizing you for the links.  This is an absolute certainty in light of the Penguin and related updates they rolled out this past month.

And if that's true, you cannot easily work your way out of it by building good links.  That would likely need to take a lot more time and effort, and would still likely require other efforts across a more complete SEO best practices strategy.  I say that because if they felt you had enough bad links to notify you, your overall best practices profile beyond the link profile is not very strong.

Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to evaluate the links and see which ones are a situation where many links come from one site - that's the sites I'd start with.

Keep a spreadsheet of all your efforts and only after you've made some progress in getting some removed, file a reconsideration request detailing the effort, however that may not be enough - you may need to wait until after you've made significant headway for the next Penguin update to then take place.

All of this info I'm providing, however, is based on only a few case studies of site losses and subsequent recovery others are relating to Penguin. Whether it's Penguin or another anchor change they made in April isn't as relevant as the fact that sites are starting to see a bounce back with those efforts.

[TakeshiYoung]

He didn't receive an official notice, he saw his rankings drop for a handful of terms, and filed a reconsideration request (a no-no if you've engaged in greyhat tactics), and then received the response.

This isn't a sitewide penalty, he simply took a hit on a handful of keywords with overoptimized anchor text from low quality article sites.  If you run a link analysis, he isn't receiving a huge number of links from these, it should be possible to build his way out it.

[ButlerRaines]

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I will take this into consideration and keep a log so I can work my way out of it.

It is weird to say this but my intent was to never "game" google. I was trying to develop a site for my students and friend's students. I didn't have time to do, what I then knew little about, "SEO" so I hired someone.

That is to not blame them. They did exactly what was needed and worked under those algorithms.

I just hate seeing a site like mine that helps kids fall underneath sites that are just Adsense farms.

They should just devalue links completely over time instead of penalizing. Some of those links are 5 years old.

[ButlerRaines]

Quick question though. Using SEOMoz metrics some article directories have near 100 authority.

Should I use authority in determining which directories to try and remove my links from.

This is really great info thank you so much!

[jim_cetin]

No, not really.

Do what Google tells you to do, and try to do more then that to get your trust back.

As Alan already said before: "And if that's true, you cannot easily work your way out of it by building good links"....

Here's my tip:

make a list of the lowest authority pages and their links. set your robots.txt for those pages where you get the traffic to (your page) and set that page to disallow or even delete that/those pages and create new ones and build up from there.

Create a from scratch campaign for your site! Build trust!.. and good customer content.

here's the official Google view:

Paid links

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a>tag</a>
  <a>* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file</a>

<a></a>

<a>Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such as excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank,</a> let us know. We'll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.

[dlpressley]

I'm interested in your analysis here, Takeshi Young.  Doe you believe that, because Butler Raines has only a small number of undesirable links, that it will take only a small number to dilute them?  If so, where is the tipping point?  That is, at what point does it stop being feasible to build one's way out of trouble?

Thanks

DP