What is an Unnatural Link about?

In a few words, as it is presented in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, any link that intends to manipulate the PageRank, or the search engine results, no matter if there is a link to your site or an outgoing link from your site, is considered an unnatural link. Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of the Google Guidelines.

From their statements, we deduce that Google’s main concern is to keep users away from bad search experiences, providing them with the most relevant results.

The “naturalness” of a link can be seen as an editorial choice.

The “naturalness” of a link is, up to a point, an editorial choice. It all boils down to your ability to link to a site from your site based on usefulness. For instance, you are a fan of British Airways and you choose to talk about this company on your blog, your site or on forums because you really had a good experience with this brand. You really want to tell the world what a great company they are and how their services helped you a lot in a certain situation. Doing this is not considered to be a violation of Google’s Guidelines. However, if you write about British Airways because this company promises you free flight tickets or saves you from paying taxes for your extra luggage, then this is an unnatural link we are talking about.(unless you mark the link with the rel=nofollow HTML attribute)

Unnatural Link Synonyms

Some people refer to unnatural links with the following synonyms:

• inorganic links
• toxic links
• low quality links
• artificial links
• manually created links
• deceptive links
• manipulative links
• impact links

Where is the end of “natural” and the beginning of “unnatural” ?

If you find it hard to make a delimitation between natural and unnatural in terms of links, here is a thing that you can do. You need to ask yourself:

“Would I still be linking to that site if the SERPs didn’t exist?

Would I still be recommending this site/blog/company/etc. if search engines didn’t exist? If the answer to this question is yes, then it is an organic or natural link we are talking about. If the answer to this question is no, then that link is most likely a violation of Google’s guidelines and, therefore, is considered to be unnatural.

Long story short, unnatural links comes down to link selling. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about money, gifts, a massage :), a 6 Pack or any sort of material compensation. It is still a sort of transaction. The same situation applies when we’re talking about excessive link exchange. It is still a sort of unnatural transaction that does not occur naturally but is artificially generated with the purpose to influence the ranking in Google.

The war against link selling is meant to maintain the competition on a level playing field, offering equal chances to all websites. You wouldn’t want somebody who just has more money to automatically be able to rank better on the search engines.

I know that as nice as this “equal chance” story may sound , AdWords still exists and, like it or not, is a kind of link selling with the distinction that you get an invoice for the transaction. Without getting into ethical issues, at the end of the day, AdWords remains a Google accepted form of selling links that often brings results for those with deep pockets.

The most common unnatural link examples

Much like the law, the “naturalness” of a link can be can be interpreted in our favor. For instance, excessive link exchanges or linking to low quality sites are practices that are in disagreement with Google’s guidelines. But how much is excessive? How low should the quality of a site be? In order to avoid these kind of ambiguities, we will give some examples of common links that have an unnatural flavor, according to Google’s Guidelines:

• Any link that is generated due to a payment in money

On the surface, things seem pretty clear here: if you offer money in exchange for placing your link on a site, that link will be considered unnatural. However, things are a little more complicated than this. Let’s say you organize a charity event and you want to link to a company that donated an amount of money to help you out with the event. Is it considered to be an unnatural link? Well, it depends. If that company gives donations in exchange for links and uses these actions as a link building strategy, then it is surely a violation of the “Guidelines”. If the donor company has just a couple of links thanks to some sponsorship campaign it did, then is very likely they are organically generated.

• Any link that is generated due to an exchange of goods and services

If you receive or give any good or service in return for a link, then that link is considered to be unnatural. Let’s say that a company that is selling frying pans sends one of their products to 100 cooking bloggers, encouraging them to write about the frying pan received as a gift. Will Google consider the links that the bloggers will generate as being unnatural? It will surely do. But, if the frying pans company wants to stay on Google’s good side, they have to prove that they didn’t have the intention of manipulating the PageRank. Thereby, they should ask the bloggers to mark the links as nofollow so they cannot pass PageRank.

• Links that are widely distributed in the Footer of a page or on the Blogroll

If for blogrolls things are pretty clear, when it comes to links that appear in footers, things get a bit complicated. Let’s start with blogrolls: If in your blogroll you are linking to pages relevant for your content, then those links are considered to be natural. But if you are having 100 links on your page and more than half of them can be found in the blogroll, then it is clear that the situation is not “natural”.

When in comes to links distributed in footers, Google is being a bit ambivalent. Let’s say you are a web design company and you place in the footer of the designed sites a link to your webpage. Google might consider this action as ok but might also considered it as unnatural, claiming that it is a self-made link or it’s a link that is generated due to an exchange of service. How does Google decide whether these kind of links are natural or unnatural? Depending on the intent. It should be clear for Google that the webmaster is linking to a site on purpose and not because it was required to. Ok, you’ll say. And how can Google accurately identify the intent? Well, I think that’s a thing that only Google knows.

• Any link that is a result of a “link to me and I’ll link to you” campaign

Let’s say that you are the webmaster of a financial audit site. On your page you have a section where you recommend several accounts, attorneys and tax experts. Maybe some of the ones you recommended also linked to our page. Is this considered “excessive link exchanges”? Most likely no. But if on your website you have a list with hundreds of recommendation from a wide geographical area, and most of your “recommendations” also link to your page, then it is very likely that you’ll receive an penalty from the “Google Penguin”.

• Links on Low-Quality Web-directories or Bookmark sites

This looks quite clear also, doesn’t it? If you have many links on low-quality webdirectories, they are most likely to be considered as unnatural. But then again, the question arises:

Who draws the line between low and high quality? Google, of course. We are playing in its yard.

And how does the big “G” decide the quality of a web directory? Most likely, a web directory is considered to have a high quality if it has some sort of human interaction, such as an editorial process. In this case not all sites can auto-submit their links and there is a whole process whereby the web-directory decides the relevancy of a certain site in list with links.

• Links with optimized anchor text (articles, press releases etc)

These kinds of links are very common, and the digital world is full of articles stuffed with anchor text. I’ll go back to the frying pan company to give an example on this line. Let’s say that our company writes an article on a cooking blog and it contains passages such as the following:

It is great to cook using good frying pans. Depending on the frying pan you are using, you can prepare tasty food in no time. Frying pans add value to the quality of your food and make cooking a pleasant experience.

Doesn’t look very natural, does it? I bet Google agrees on this one too.

You’ve got mail! The mail…

The story is clear: if you’re selling links to influence page rank or you violate in some way the “guidelines”, you may get the unwanted Google Penalty message. After you update your Facebook status with sad faces and get out in the street screaming that life is unfair, you have to put yourself together and find the way to get back on track.

Now, you need to remove just the unnatural links. You can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you could use a smart tool that outlines the links that may have caused the penalty.

Let’s say you’ve come clean and you ask Google to take a look at your site to see that your redemption is real. When checking the situation, what the big “G” wants to see is that the issue is fixed and that this violation won’t be happening again. So, how can you convince the search engine that the situation is indeed like this? After removing the unnatural links you should do a well documented reconsideration request. Do you know the saying “ a sin confessed is half forgiven?” Surely Google does. In the request you are sending you don’t have to speak only about the improved current situation and about how you are going to do things from now on. You have to give details about the “dirty job” that you’ve done and how you got rid of it.

Other Unnatural Link Resources you should read

• Matt Cutts about  Paid Links
• How to Detect Unnatural Links
• An Unnatural Link Recovery Story
• Unnatural Links – The NO.BS. Guide [preso]
• Various “Unnatural” Problems reported on the Google Product Forums
• How Google Broke the Bank – The Famous Halifax Penalty [case study]

Conclusion

Can we dance waltz on a minefield?

With all the guidelines and restrictions, it feels like Google is asking us to dance waltz on a minefield. Some restrictions are needed in order to maintain a healthy climate among the link building strategies.

The question that’s probably on your lips now is: are there chances to follow Google’s guidelines religiously and still rank high for the keywords you want to rank?

With the hope that I brought some light in the dark world of unnatural links, I’d be more than pleased to hear your opinion on this matter.

The post Unnatural Links – Quick & Dirty Definition + Examples appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Oui. Ja. Si. Ja. Da. Ken. Hai. 是 [Shi]. Já. Haan. Да. Evet. Nai. Tak. Taip. Kyllä. Ja. Ya.

They are actually killing you site and business, that is if you are building a sustainable medium to long-term online business as most people do. If you are into the “trickery” business (like short term  with no brand attachments … ) then unnatural links may still do it for you. (read about it at the end of the article).

Here are a few things on what this article is/isn’t:

• This is not SEO propaganda – just a catchy title 😉
• This is a Serious SEO Case Study.
• This is about link building strategies that work/[or don’t] in 2013.
• This is about real sites with real problems.
• This is about Google.
• This is for every SEO Pro! (penalized or not)

How good is Google at spotting shady links you might ask yourself?

This case study analyzes the ranking trends on a set of sites and correlates this information with their unnatural link profiles.

We took 4 sites in the “birthday invitations, cards and more” niche that were ranking top 10 on a set of keywords representative for the niche. One of these sites stands out with a steady SEO visibility growth in the last year.

This is the SEO visibility of the CardStore.com site for the last 2 years. Looking at the SEO visibility trend, it seems that they also had SERP volatility in the past due to some Google Penalties or Algorithms updates. Even so, they recovered and are increasing their SEO visibility more and more.

Looking good! Their link profile is Green and Orange.  This means that the site is having a healthy link profile. Healthy link profiles may have a small amount of suspicious links. Nothing to worry about!

On the other hand, some of their competitors don’t have such a great SEO visibility.

Correlating the ranking data with the linking data, it is almost obvious why some sites are struggling in Google while others are winning.

Looking at the correlation between the unnatural links and SEO visibility, we can easily see that Google pushes up the sites with more natural looking link profiles. The sites with shady link profiles are steadily declining.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the story of each individual site.

1. CardStore.com

Let’s look at what CardStore is doing, in terms of link building strategies.

By checking the competitive link analysis area we can easily spot a very low amount of commercial anchor text compared to the other sites. This usually indicates a site that is doing either smart SEO or isn’t doing SEO at all. The other sites seem to be a bit more aggressive in terms of SEO.

Another important fact that dictates a steady growth would be a consistent monthly link acquisition.

This chart only tells you that the CardStore site has a constant link acquisition trend, with numbers that are above their competitors’. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the links. If we look at the link velocity we see that this is trend started in 2009 and goes on since then. This single fact increases the chances of something “good” actually going on, leading to a link profile with a much higher number of referring domains.

Trying to discover some of their major link building strategies, I noticed what link building strategies they did not use. I refer to Web Directories and Article Directories Link Building.

Looking at some of the other competitors, we see 2 of them being quite active on Webdirectory link acquisitions, while others have a similar and more natural link acquisition pattern.

Overall this site’s main characteristic is that

No External Backlink Over-optimization!

 2. Paperculture.com

Their webmaster confirmed that the site received unnatural link warnings from Google and also said that they did not see a decrease in search traffic.

In the PaperCulture case we see an increasing SEO visibility trend, even though the site has been sent unnatural link warnings. Taking a look at the naturalness of their link profile we can see that they have a small amount of unnatural links.

Their main problem seems to be the struggle to grow their SEO visibility.

It is important to know that unnatural link warnings do not necessarily mean a decrease in traffic they might also mean an SEO growth blockage. Removing the unnatural links might enable the site to grow faster, only if they increase the link acquisition trend in a natural way.

3. SimplytoImpress.com

With the high level of toxic links this site has, this only indicates the certainty of a Google Penalty or Unnatural Links Warning. This is also confirmed also by the SEO visibility trend. The latest major SEO visibility fall is on the Google Penguin 2.0 date.

At a more in-depth look, we spot the main problem in their link building strategy:

Webdirectories …

From my point of view, this “ancient” link building strategy, that once worked extremely well, slaps all the sites that abused it quite hard now. My recommendation for link profiles such as this is to start diluting them by doing “natural” link building and steadily removing the web directory links that were built in the past.

4. Finestationery.com

Their naturalness level is at the lower end limit. This means that they are on “moving ground” and that they are at risk to be hit by Google because of unnatural links.

SEO visibility has a rather big decline! My opinion is that this big decrease is not related to unnatural links but more to a Google Update in January 2013, a possible Google Panda as reported on several sites for that particular timeframe.

Having identified their biggest drop and looking at the rest of the visibility we see a linear visibility with a very small increase trend. It is important to notice that Google Penguin 2.0 did not have any impact on this site, even if they have a link profile with 19% to 25% unnatural and suspect links. I have seen these numbers on a lot of other sites that have problems with their link profile and have not been penalized yet. Looking at how Google’s algorithms have evolved in terms of spotting unnatural links, I would say that it is only a matter of time until these kind of link profiles take a big hit and loose any SEO visibility that they might still have.

In this particular case their brand vs commercial anchor text distribution is looking pretty natural. The “anchor text distribution” is also used by Google, in order to determine the overall naturalness of a site’s link profile.

Conclusion & Advice

With several in-house studies we did, similar to this one, I would “dare” to say that sites that haven’t been over SEO-ed have a very good chance of continuing with steady rankings and growth, while sites that move over the 15-20% unnatural links limit, have a very high chance of being penalized by Google for unnatural links.

Sites with Orange + Green Link Profiles are considered safe sites, in terms of unnatural link penalties. Unfortunately not many sites fit in this category and for the ones that don’t, I highly recommend starting to actively build links by not building links :).

That means forget about SEO for a moment (at least the way you did it before) and try to recover that lost authority that you once had. In order to do that you just need to prove to Google that your site is trustworthy of being top ranked in their index. You can only do this by following their guidelines and not by trying to bend the “law” in order to get a better ranking. Re-build your business model by focusing on SEO as an integrated marketing activity and not by trying to trick Google in thinking that your site is “the site” that should be ranked in the top spot.

And remember … all this makes sense, only if you care about Google’s traffic.

Good luck and I hope this case study helped you understand link naturalness, toxicity and SEO volatility better.

Unnatural Link Detection Tool Used

The unnatural link analysis was done using the automatic unnatural link detection Widget in the cognitiveSEO platform. You can try it yourself, if you have’t already, using the free 14 day trial.

A new feature that was silently added last week, is the Unnatural Link Comparison widget in the Competitive Link Analysis Area. This case study already highlights some of use cases for this chart. The major use case is the ability to compare multiple sites from a backlink profile naturalness point of view.

Always open to questions and discussions … so if you have any, ask them in the comments.

14 day Free Trial!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

PS: If your business model is short term, you should be reading this.

<em>Photo <a href="http://pierrecolletderby.blogspot.ro/2011_11_01_archive.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">*</a> </em>

The post [Unnatural] Links are DEAD – A Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

1. User Oriented Concept

The Unnatural Links subject generates a lot of confusion among website owners, webmasters and even SEO professionals. I can tell you that the unnatural link concept is a hard to grasp concept for the majority of the people. You can easily “feel” the confusion that most people have if you read the Google Product Forums, where a lot of people talk about their unnatural link warnings and Google Penguin penalties.

Some other techniques that classify links are based on a certain “toxicity” level or “potential” risk. We consider these techniques generate a poor user experience and are only adding complexity to an already complex formula.

The route we took is to simplify the unnatural link understanding and disavowing process.

We developed the system in such a way that it will split the links in

• Unnatural Links.
• Suspect Links.
• OK Links.

As simple as that!

2. False Positive Ratio

It is important to have a really low incorrect detection ratio. To put it simple you would not want a system that detects only 10% of your unnatural backlinks or misclassifies the good links as being unnatural.

This was hard to achieve. No automatic detection system provides 100% certainty (Google misclassifies site links also … it is all about the final False Positive ratio).

We took the performance up to 97% percent well-done classifications and a false positive ratio of only 3% on our testing dataset.

3. Incorrect Metrics

An important factor for a well-done classification, are the metrics that are used in order to draw any valid conclusion out of it.

For example using external metrics such as the Google PR or the indexation status of a link in Google are flowed ways of identifying an unnatural link. That is because you simply are able to identify this link only after Google has potentially marked it as unnatural and are looking at Google as the major sign of an unnatural link. This means that using such metrics in an automatic system makes the system rely on things that have been already flagged. These might only work for sites that have already been penalized.

We do not use any external metrics in our algorithm in order to detect unnatural backlinks. This made the development process harder but in the end more accurate and trustworthy.

4. Detection Algorithm

I am not going to share the algorithm that is used in order to classify links as natural or unnatural but I can tell you that this algorithm does not use external metrics and it relies on AI, in-depth content and link profile analysis in order to segment the so called “toxic” links from the natural ones. The rule set we use is based on the official Google Quality Guidelines.

Let me give you a quick example considering a web-directory link. In the context of a natural looking link profile that web-directory link will not be flagged as unnatural as it simply is not. The same link put in a unnatural link profile will be looked from a different POV and will be flagged as unnatural due to the high amount of unnatural link patterns found in the suspect link profile; patterns that falls into the black hat SEO category.

And the new tool is called:

Unnatural Link Detection

The tool that simplifies the “unnatural links” complexity!

Some of the most important features of the tool are:

• Automatic unnatural link classification.
• Transparency & detail on each classified link. (why it is unnatural)
• Google Disavow Export.
• Fast Double-Check using the Link Snapshots.
• Flag & Tag Links. (bulk actions available also)
• Advanced Link profile segmentation using unnatural filters.
• Can be used both on your site and the competitors.
• Ignore Links that are already disavowed, or unimportant to the analysis.

The Unnatural Links Detection widget is found in the inBound Link Analysis module, on any campaign that you run in cognitiveSEO.

Mixed with the Visual Link Explorer, this new set of data points will instantly give you the unnatural link profile of a site.

Who should use this new tool?

Everyone really, and here is why.

1. Penalized Sites Owners

This is the ideal tool if you’ve received an unnatural link warning or have been penalized by the “Google Penguin Updates”/ received a manual penalty.

The tool helps you find every link to your website and then analyse the potential risk they carry. Even if you have a lots of links, you can easily check the inbound links to disavow or remove is a breeze now with. You can easily check the links using the already generated screenshots . If we were wrong on the classification you can easily re-classify the link.

After you manually checked the entire list of links and disavow links just hit the Google Disavow Export and you have the file ready for the Google Import. If you see a link that uses links schemes you have the posibility to remove the link or apply other manual actions. 

For the links you want to manually remove just create To-dos that you will later review.

Links that pass the unnatural test are marked as OK because those are natural links. Keep those links and use them as an example of high quality backlinks. 

2. Non-Penalized Sites Owners

For sites that haven’t been penalized by any unnatural link warning or update, the tool helps to manage the link risk by monitoring your site and competitors on a weekly basis. 

You will stay ahead of the game by being able to:

• Make informed Link Building Decisions.
• Know your risk to be penalized and monitor it weekly.
• Monitor your competitors’ link toxicity and risk.
• Monitor your site for Negative-SEO campaigns.

Link Risk and toxic links or harmful links, as concepts, are only useful if you know your bad links before Google takes any action against your site. If you know it before they do, you are able to manage it.

Matt Cutt has recommends using the Disavow tool even if your site wasn’t penalized:

If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks like there’s some weird bot that’s building up a bunch of links to your site and you have no idea where it came from, that’s the perfect time to use disavow as well.  I wouldn’t worry about going ahead and disavowing links even if you don’t have a message in your webmaster console
	Matt Cutts
	Former head of the web spam team at Google

Recover Your Site Now!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post Automatic Unnatural Link Detection – A Simple Tool for a Complex Problem appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.