Unnatural Links: Have You Read Your Google Webmaster Mail?

Last month some people started receiving warnings from Google about Unnatural Links and many of those sites have seen their search result plummet, if not entirely disappear from SERP’s meaning that their sites have been de-indexed and no longer showing up in Google searches.

All this has to do with links that lead to your site from other websites (AKA backlinks).

What seems to be a gross contradiction is anything but that. We have come to know that backlinks, or Citations, are a key signal for search engines in helping them determine a site’s popularity. For a clearer perspective on how citations work let’s look at the scientific community and how they publish their research whereby one individual or body cites someone else’s work in order to support their findings. Second to being published, citations are highly desirable – that’s when somebody cites your work to support their work – because it’s an acknowledgement of your authority in the field – and perhaps above all else, one of the most powerful search engine optimization (SEO) factors determining how high a web page will rank in search engine results pages.

It didn’t take long before Crap Hat SEO practitioners figured out how to create their own citation bank (link farms) by building linking pyramids, but with the Unnatural Links update, Google has made it clear that backlink quality is of vital importance. The Google algorithm has been modified to detect – and devalue – low-quality links, or links that are determined to be spammy low grade, paid for, or impostures to the real thing. If successful, Google will be able to determine if a link is natural – links that people create to other sites because they believe the content is relevant to their own content or links created solely to boost a site’s rankings.

In addition to de-indexing, Google may be going one step further by actually penalizing sites with links that are determined to be unnatural, this is based on webmaster chatter that their sites while still appearing is SERP’s, have suffered demotions in their rankings.

How is the Unnatural Link update going to affect sites like Amazon who purchases text links on external blogs? We’ll have to see how the leading brands fair, but if the JC Penney incident, which didn’t go without refute, is an indication on the action that Google will take then we’ll most likely see and hear plenty of complaints in the weeks to come. How Google will respond to the complaints, will it stand firm or flinch?

To the SEO consumer, beware of “Too Good To Be True” SEO offers, those that promise front page placement, next day placement, results without touching your site, etc.

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