How to Fix Unnatural Links from your Site?

You might be well aware of the act, Google penalizing guest blogging networks in the earlier quarter of this year. Some sites have lost forever in the search engine results pages while some lost their PRs. If you are sure that PR drop is not because of your mistake, it might be definitely because of violating Google webmaster guidelines.

Google basically relies on algorithm updates in evaluating and improving the search quality constantly. Also, Google is willing to take actions on web spamming sites manually that is demoting them from the search results or removing them entirely from their index. Websites using unnatural link building schemes (which is a metric Google algorithms uses in ranking a websites) are taken by Google so far and so on. If you wanted to know if your site is penalized or not, check messages in the webmaster tools account. Google notifies the reason why they are taking action on your site, through webmaster tools.

There are several safest link building techniques that you can practice and implement on your site to get genuine inbound links. Optimizing your website to get found on search engine results page is not that difficult. Natural inbound linking facilities like ‘link to this post’ links under each post would serve you genuine backlinks.

If your site is taken by Google, it is not the end of the world. They will reconsider your site if applied after removing the unnatural links. If the site while reconsideration request performs well, it might get ranked lower or higher than it used to be. Apply for reconsideration only after making sure that your site follows webmaster guidelines in every aspect, because you would get only one chance of requesting so.

You can review your site directly from Manual Actions in webmaster tools.

1. Sign in to your Webmaster Tools Account dashboard.
2. Click on Search Traffic.
3. Click on Manual Actions.
4. Review any manual actions specified. Optimize your site to follow webmaster guidelines and click Request a review to apply for reconsideration.

Fixing Unnatural Links

1. Download a list of links to your site from Webmaster Tools. You can download your links arranged either by hostname (Links to Your Site > Who links the most > Download more sample links) or in chronological order (Links to Your Site > Who links the most > Download latest links).
2. Check this list for any links that violate webmaster guidelines on linking. If the list is large, start by looking at the sites that link to you the most, or links that were created recently (in the last few months).
3. For any links that violate our guidelines, contact the webmaster of that site and ask that they either remove the links or prevent them from passing PageRank, such as by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute.
4. Use the Disavow links tool in Webmaster Tools to disavow any links you were unable to get removed.

Once you have removed or disavowed the unnatural links to your website, apply for reconsideration. Try to give clear documentation of the removed links and any neat explanation of non-removable links. The more detail you provide, the more it helps you and Google in getting your site out of the black hole. Once you sent the request, wait and watch for the reply in your Webmaster tools account.

Once the reviewing is done, Google will let you know the status. If they think that your site is no longer violating their guidelines, they will revoke the action.

Comment your recovered site’s textual URL(example.com) below and share the happiness of recovery. All the best! (Don’t give direct URLs in the following forms:

www.example.com or http://www.example.com or http://example.com as this kind of comment spamming violates webmaster guidelines)

See what Matt and Sandy say about unnatural links: