Why do these links violate Google's Quality Guideline?

[pianomother]

My reconsideration request was declined by Google.  Google said that some of the links to my site (www.pianomother.com) are still outside its quality guidelines.  We provide piano lessons and sheet music on the site. Three samples are given.

1. http://www.willbeavis.com/links.htm

2. http://vivienzone.blogspot.com/2009/06/learning-how-to-play-piano.html

3. http://interiorpianoservice.com/links/

The first one is obvious because it is a link exchange page.  I don't understand why the 2nd and 3rd ones are considered "inorganic links" by Google. The 2nd link is a blog that covers various topics including music, health, computer, etc.  The 3rd one is a page of the site that provides piano related services.  Other resources related to piano including my website are listed on the page.

Please help.

Thanks.

John

[SEO5Team]

Hi John,

A quick check of your backlinks IN OSE shows some other questionnable links like submityoursite.org , freeadddirectory.com, addurlshopping.com, txtlinks.com

Did you submit them for non inclusion as well. Perhaps Google is referring to those links not the relevant ones.

Cheers,

SEO5..

[LesleyPaone]

For those links I would say that #1 and #3 are link exchanges, which are a no-no now. #2 is a paid advertisement, but it is not a no follow, which makes it a paid link. I think all of them can really be considered paid links, so I would either contact the people and have them removed or disavow them all.

[Travis_Bailey]

I'll go over the examples and give you some reasons why these links, in particular, were highlighted.

No. 1:

This one is pretty standard in regard to link exchanges. The page might have been okay-ish when you found it, but it's just a standard link exchange page without any sort of theme. Aside from the exact match anchor text for every link, you'll find exact match anchors for Cuban Cigars and Jennifer Aniston News - among others. Seriously, there's anchor text for 'Mentalist'. Men-tal-ist.

No. 2:

Never mind the date, I seldom trust those, but this is classic blog spam. A whole lot of unrelated topics on everyone's favorite spam site, Blogspot. Again, there's exact match anchor text. Finally, the writing style is pretty consistent with typical blog spam.

No. 3:

More exact match anchor text. I see a theme emerging. A lot of the sites in this page are either gone, or suffered some pretty major penalties a while ago. All in all, the houses may be brown stone - but this is a bad neighborhood.

As a general overview, the site does have a lot of exact match anchor text pointing at it. Another thing is I wouldn't send my credit card information to the site, ever. It doesn't give me the impression that it's a good idea to do so.

From what I can see, the site has been caught in just about every filter and algo update since Panda. You should really consider starting over.

[JaneCopland]

Hi John,

As the others have said, there are issues with all three types of links. Number 1 is obvious.

Number 2 comes from a site that appears to blog about absolutely anything, as long as they're paid to do so. The site has posts about buying a car in Philadelphia, passport photos, saving money on gas, business protection... and piano lessons. It's pretty obviously a source of income for the blog owner, with these posts placed in between personal updates.

Number three is from a piano website, but they even list "reciprocal links", which was an outdated link building technique in 2006

I would say that Google is well within its own guidelines to suggest that these links are bad.