Hot SEO news is that the unnatural link notifications that Google has been sending out to some webmasters may, possibly, maybe, ignored.
This is what has caused a stir;
Matt Cutts – 12:13 (edited) – Mobile – Public“If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.
If we’ve taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it.”
So, this suggests that if you get a notice and no drop in rankings, then it is OK, Google has just spotted some odd going ons but it does not really impact your site. If you lose Google search referrals then you may well have a penalty and the only resolution is to attempt to remove the unnatural links and then file a reconsideration request.
Of course, there are a lot of people who seem to be getting these notices and then denying any wrongdoing at all.
I have seen a few people moan about these notices in the Google forums, say that they have never bought links etc. and when you look at the links to their sites you find a lot spammy links in footers and all sorts. One guy had links with the test “privacy notice” in the footer of websites linking to his privacy page – as if he (or his SEO) thought nobody would think to look at those links. Maybe he really did not know they were there.
Anyway, the problem seems to be that some people are either in total denial of what they have done in the past, or do not know what they (or an SEO company) have done in the past, or simply think that if they deny any wrongdoing enough times Google will make a special case for them.
I know this may sound harsh and that there are truly innocent “victims” of these messages – but at least now Google have said that in some cases the links that have been found are not causing a penalty – it is more of a “we know what you have been doing and have switched the juice off“.
And does this also mean that the whole negative seo thing was nonsense?
In short – if you get these notices then the best thing to do is analyse your backlinks and if you find anything that is obviously spammy attempt to get it removed and file a reconsideration request.
If you do not know how to properly analyse your back links and hunt for spam, get in touch.
