Thousands of Links from mrwhatis.net

[pianomother]

Google WMT shows that there are thousands of links pointing to the pages of my website from mrwhatis.net. Among the links, hundreds of them have the same anchor text.  Here are some examples.

http://mrwhatis.net/a-canon-in-music-for-kid.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-chords-piano-in-c.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-chord.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-mp3-free-downloa.html
http://mrwhatis.net/canon-d-major-piano-sheet-fre.html

and more....

The links pointing to my site on the above pages share the same link title "Canon In D Sheet Music | Canon In D Music Score".

My question is - are these links considered unnatural links by Google based on your experience?  Why and why not?  I want to get some ideas before I ask Google to disavow these links.

Thanks.

John

[AlanMosley]

We all have them, no don't worry, google would have ignored them long ago.

[JaneCopland]

Hi John,

This looks like a aggregation website that links to a wide range of relevant sites, including Yahoo, Merriam-Webster, YouTube, etc. Unless you are receiving unnatural link warnings in Webmaster Tools, I would definitely not do anything like disavowal submissions (you should never do this until you have received a warning / penalty or are sure that you are a victim of an attack anyway), as is documented here:

http://moz.com/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath

http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664

A year or so ago, I had a client decide of their own accord that they were going to disavow "one link, to test impact". This is most certainly not what the tool is meant for - definitely save it for a last-resort when you are in trouble, not just because there are some directory links or similar out there

I would not be concerned about these unless you see a big drop in rankings or receive warnings, at which point the idea is to clean up every link that you don't consider high quality. Until then, Alan is correct - many many sites have this sort of site linking to them and Google understands that they have not been built for malicious purposes. When Google messes up and decides that these _are _malicious, disavowal is at your disposal.

If they still bother you because they take up a large portion of your backlink profile or you suspect ranking issues, try contacting the site to have your links removed before using disavowal. Not only does it make any future submissions or reconsideration requests more likely to succeed, but it can mean you take the care of the issue without having to involve the Webspam team at Google at all.

Cheers,

Jane

[pianomother]

Hi Jane,

We did receive a warning from Google.  Here is the message.

"Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole."

Matt Cutts said that some bad link examples will be provided along with the warning.  But I could not find the examples.  Where can I find the examples in WMT?  It makes it much harder to figure out which links should be removed or disavowed without the example links.

Thank you very much for your reply and information.  They are very helpful.

John

[JaneCopland]

Hi John,

In the case where you did receive a warning, feel free to aggressively try to remove the links and / or make a disavowal submission. For generic warnings, I don't believe example links are given - I have seen example links provided in follow-up emails to the webspam team though.

If the rest of your profile is, to your knowledge, clean then I would start with these links. It's disappointing on Google's part because they used to be quite adept at ignoring links like this that should be discounted - their spam trigger finger is a lot itchier now than in days past and a lot of legitimate sites are getting caught in the mix.

[MarieHaynes]

I ignore these links when I'm doing a backlink audit.  If you've got a penalty, I would look elsewhere for culprits.  There's no harm in disavowing mrwhatis, but my guess is that Google knows that these are not self made links and just ignores them too.