Unnatural links are a big issue. A lot of sites were already penalized by Google for excessive unnatural linking. More will follow probably. Webmasters struggle to find the best means to identify the rotten apples in their garden while Google sharpens its weapons to catch “the enemy”. With Google Penguin 3.0 (based on the Matt Cutts’ numerotation … others would call it Google Penguin 6.0 )  lurking around the corner and the well-known search engine’s volatility, we are trying to always be one step ahead. We think that it is better to prevent than to treat and this is why we want to proudly announce some major improvements that we’ve made to our tool.

1. Simpler. Yet More In-Depth Unnatural Link Detection

The interface was simplified and all the functionality that could be found previously here is found in the Link Navigator, the tool that allows you to review all of the links and prepare the disavow of link removal campaign as quickly as possible.

2. The Most Common Unnatural Link Issues

Identifying the unnatural links is great but wouldn’t be greater if you had the means to see in a well-organized list what are the most common issues of those unnatural links? Now, you have this possibility. We’ve created a great chart that indicates what are the most common unnatural link issues of yours or your competitor’s site. This great list give you the possibility to make an overall idea about a site’s main issues but also comes in hand when trying to find a “clean-up” strategy for your site.

3. The Most Common Unnatural Anchor Text

Over-optimization of targeted anchor text has been given a lot of importance, specially in a bid to avoid getting slapped by Google’s Penguin update. The Penguin update’s effects have been visible on many websites that have unnatural anchor text distribution. In a competitive market it is crucial to know what unnatural anchor text a site has. This is why we’ve created for you a chart of the Most Common Unnatural Anchor Text. This list offers you great hints about what your next moves should be and gives you a great overview of your site’s main issues.

4. Top Unnatural Linked Pages

It’s never been easier to find out what are the top pages on a site the are most linked by unnatural or suspect links. We’ve created the Top Unnatural Linked Pages chart that helps you to find out in a flash the main domains or pages that might cause you the dreaded Google Penalty.

5. Unnatural Links History

Any site has, in different ratios, unnatural, suspect and ok links. It’s highly important to know which one are which but it is as important to have an overview about the historical evolution of the unnatural, suspect and ok links. Now, you can check this out in a blink, just by getting a glimpse of the weekly historical evolution of the unnatural, suspect and ok links.

6. Quickly Setup Unnatural Links E-mail Alerts

A highly recommended feature is the Unnatural Links E-mail Alerts, which sends you e-mail the moment it finds new unnatural links for your site ( or competitors’ site). This feature allows you to stay up to date with the evolution of the Google Penalty Risk without the needs to constantly check your cognitiveSEO account. You will receive only the most important mails that matter to your business.

7. PDF Report to Pitch New Clients and Amaze The Current Ones

Whether you want to present the data and statistics to your clients or you want to present amazing pitches in order to get new clients, you can create a very comprehensive unnatural links PDF report with the most important information. The generated report can be white labeled with your own logo, if you need it.

8. In-Depth Documentation Guide on How to Best Use the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

Even if the tool is simple to use, there are a few things that you should know before using it in order to have the best experience and recover your site faster. We have wrote a very in-depth guide that includes both video tutorials and written documentation of each of the functionalities of the tool. You can access the unnatural links guide documentation here. You can also find a full documentation for the entire cognitiveSEO toolset on the support.cognitiveseo.com site.

Conclusion

Even though you may see yourself as a true white hat SEO and you do everything by the book, you never know when you’re going to be under a negative SEO campaign siege or get hit by the dreaded Google Penguin 3.0 (or another unnatural links update). As Google constantly improves its algorithm you may never know when you end up on the wrong side of its Guidelines. That’s why you always have to be prepared by monitoring your link profile constantly. As the scout motto says “Be Prepared”, which means to always stay in a state of readiness so you can better react in troublesome situations. The Unnatural Link Detection Tool transforms the  assiduous workload of monitoring link profiles and identifying unnatural links into a simple task.

The post Google Penguin 3.0 – Prevent / Protect / Recover Your Ranks Before it Hits appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Will this technique of removing a page that has toxic links pointing to it solve a problem that would otherwise lead to a penalty ? In a nutshell, if you’re keen on getting rid of those unnatural links, you might as well remove the linked page. As a result, it will return a 404 HTTP response code.

How to Spot the Pages With the Most Unnatural Links?

When you run an unnatural link detection report, in cognitiveSEO, you have the very cool Visual Link Explorer visualization that will plot all the detected unnatural links based on the pages of the site.

Each cluster represents a page on the site and the red and yellow dots represent the distribution of the unnatural and suspect links.

So it is as simple as looking at the chart and spotting the pages that have the most unnatural links.

When Should You Apply This Unnatural Link Removal Strategy?

While this tactic can be used for any page on your website at any time, you won’t be able to do so with the homepage. You need to take this fact into consideration. The pages from your site that have a great deal of toxic links can be removed and declared 404 in order to quickly recover from a Google penalty. You’ll also have to think at all the natural links and at the content that you’re going to get rid off. So you’ll need to figure out if you want to keep the page and try to handpick and remove every unnatural link from the page or just solve the problem right from the start.

You should also know, that in order for this strategy to work, you need to delete the page that has the toxic links and that might have triggered the Unnatural Links Penalty. You won’t be able to dodge that bullet in any kind of way. The following will not solve your problem:

• Generating a robots. txt file that blocks that page from being indexed. This method won’t solve your problem as Google will simply not crawl the page but it will still be taken into consideration for your site.
• Using redirect to another page. You will still have those unnatural links pointing to your site.
• Using the same content on a newly created and canonicalized page – After GoogleBot crawls your site it will find the duplicate content. The toxic links that were assigned to the deleted page will now be assigned to the canonicalized page.
• Tagging the page as nofollow or noindex. The same as the case with robots.txt. Rendering a page with nofollow won’t make it’s links obsolete.

Does Google Recommend to 404 the Target Page in case of an Unnatural Links Penalty?

This also hides another question that comes into mind “Do 404 pages hurt my site’s ranking ?”. You shouldn’t be scared if one day you stumble upon a couple of these errors reported in Webmaster Tools. Google is aware that the Internet is very volatile and changes happen on a daily basis. Everyone deals with broken pages that return 404 as a status code. It’s also the decent way to deal with a page that was removed from the site. You should be aware that Google’s crawlers can’t see the updated 404 HTTP response code if you block it with robots.txt. But overall, the fact that you have a page that shows a 404 message doesn’t affect other pages from your site and their links.

It’s something that many people pondered upon and finally John Muller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google responded during a Webmaster Central Hangout. He was asked:

“Does removing a page that has unnatural links pointing to it accomplish the same thing when it comes to removing a link when it comes to the Penguin algorithm? If a site has all of its links pointing to one page and removes the page is the issue solved?”

He  responded “Yes, essentially that’s pretty much the same thing”. All the links that are pointing to a 404 page are dropped because there’s nothing to be linked anymore. But there might still be some differences between removing the links and removing the page that has those links. Some of them may be picked up faster by Google than the other, but he didn’t mentioned something specific.

How Should I do it?

To make sure this strategy serves it’s purpose you have to be careful on how you approach this. Only if you create the 404 page and then remove the page that has links pointing to it, you’re going to make Google disregard those links from your profile. Google’s John Muller also stated that you should make absolutely sure that accessing the URL should give you a 404 (Not Found) or a 410 ( Gone ) HTTP response code. Google reads into those messages and ignores the links.

The main flaw of this strategy is that you can’t use it when all those unnatural links are pointing to your homepage. You clearly can’t delete this general page of your site. In this situation you’re only option is to change the address of your site, but only if you’re sure those unnatural links are causing your site to lose ranking. You also need to make sure you have an informative 404 page ready to replace the deleted one.

Should I Disavow the Unnatural Links pointing to a 404 page?

Taking in consideration every advantage and disadvantage of using both these methods of dissolving unnatural links, there are some similarities and differences worth taking into consideration They share the same fate as an ultimate resort and both are irreversible processes. And, last but not least, 404ing the page has the same results as using the disavow tool. But given all the drama and uncertainty that surrounds the disavow tool, removing the linked page and replacing it with one that offers a 404 HTTP code becomes a pretty viable option.

What is the Difference Between HTTP Status Code 404 and 410?

Google reacts differently depending on the different response codes you assign to your pages. While there may be cut from the same fabric, Google’s Matt Cutts decided to explain the difference between these two shades of “page not found”.

• 200 means everything went totally fine
• 404 means page not found
• 410 typically means gone, as in the page is not found and we do not expect it to come back

He explained that 410 is basically more than a 404, it just means that the page is gone forever. He further says that you shouldn’t worry for the most part – if a page is temporarily removed you should 404 it. If the page was deleted and there are no plans of getting it back, then you should serve a 410! Regardless of the 404 or 410 HTTP response code, GoogleBot will still come back and recrawl the site to see if those pages are really gone from your site. More details in the video below.

Conclusion

Most certainly, you can remove the unnatural links by removing the linked page from your site and then 404ing it. It’s an approved method that works just as well as using the Disavow Tool. As a result, Google will proceed to de-index and remove those pages and disavow their links. But again, you need to remember one golden rule of applying this strategy – the page you want to 404 shouldn’t be an important page from your website like the homepage. For those situations you need to do a Google Disavow.

What are your thoughts on using a 404/410 HTTP response code to remove pages that have lots of unnatural links ? Have you used this strategy or are you planning to use it in the future ?

The post Unnatural Links Penalty? 404 The Bad Pages and Recover! appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

“I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully.”

Read the full-disclosure at the end of the article.

Let me tell you my experience with CognitiveSEO and the Google Disavow Tool.

I’ll begin a few months back in time.

PENGUIN our worst enemy

Note by Razvan – You can find another traffic screenshot in the mail conversation I had with Manuel, at the bottom of this email.

One of the websites I manage SmartLipo.com had suffered considerable Google ranking + traffic impact with the release of PENGUIN back in April 2012. But the first releases of penguin did not kill us completely from Google’s Organic results. Google traffic kept dropping slowly over time. Until in May 22, 2013 the 4^th update of PENGUIN was released. After this release we dropped and dropped and dropped in rankings for our main two keywords. Traffic from Google was almost none soon after that.

Note by Razvan – This is SmartLipo, the site that recovered from the Google Penguin Algorithmic Penalty using Google Disavow

Here is the full history of the site on the WayBackMachine

We had been trying everything possible

• Removed links we could remove, and contacted webmasters to help us removing (suspicious links)
• Recreated the whole site, with a new backend, enhanced page speed
• Created new content (taking into account what users are and were looking for)
• De-optimized what we considered over-optimized SEO
• Tried to build new (clean and not black-hat) external links
• Improved our Social sites (facebook, twitter, opened a pinterest account)
• Corrected the errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools (as much as we could)
• Etc, and other things

Nothing seemed to have the slightest impact in our Google rankings (hence our Google traffic)

Discovering and getting to know CognitiveSEO

One day in May my boss tells me to try the disavow tool. I was very skeptical of using it, having read that it could be harmful if used wrong. But what else did we have to loose? Google de-indexing us perhaps?  He (my boss) pointed me to use this tool he saw that featured an Unnatural link detection option. I went and played a little in Cognitiveseo. I created a new campaign for the site, the report was ready after a few minutes. I decided to import links that I exported from webmaster tools. I just felt more secure adding some extra link data.

Using the ‘Unnatural Links Detection’ option

I decided to run the link classification, it takes a few minutes. I decided to go slow, and take my time. As I mentioned I am too skeptic and cautious (that can be sometimes a problem when you need to react fast). Anyway I decided to take a look at every domain and almost every link, I was not sure to trust the unnatural link report from the beginning. I went and checked with my own eyes almost every link and every domain (no matter if suspect, unnatural or ok). I found some unnatural links that I liked and some ok links that I did not trust. But in general I ended up agreeing with the report in a considerable percentage. Apart from the few links I manually readjusted from OK to unnatural and vice-versa I did not have much work to do on the report. I took a second look (took me some time), and decided to export the domains I marked as disavowed (well actually all suspicious and unnatural ones).

Once outside Cognitive I went and took a last look at the domain entries of the disavow file, making sure no good domains were in it (at least the ones I consider vital: e.g. Facebook,  twitter accounts, trusted customer sites linking back to us, some blogspots.com domains, etc., you get the idea of which site you can trust).

Submitting the disavow file to Google

On July 9th submitted the disavow file to Google (made the sign of the cross). I captured a screenshot to show later my boss that I did use the disavow tool as he suggested a few days back. I continued with my life. I kept checking rankings every other day, nothing seemed to change the first days, the first weeks.

The resurrection

Close to 3 weeks passed after the disavow submission, when all of a sudden one day when I run the rank check (using a VPN tool) from different IPs and different states in the US, I saw that our site was raking #3 and #2 from many different locations. At first I thought I was doing the rank check wrong, maybe the VPN is not working and I am doing a local search? Maybe the browser cache is holding onto my Google session? Are these results personalized? I did not want to get any false hope so I did not tell my boss about the news, I decided to track ranks for the next days, every morning. The ranks were consistent, #3, #2 and even #1 in some cities. I finally accepted it to be true as I saw the increase in traffic in Google Analytics. I did not want to celebrate, maybe its temporary, maybe google is playing a prank on us, maybe it’s all a dream. Well that dream has been going on for the last 5 weeks.

Conclusion

Although I have done many things to my site, I am pretty f***ing sure the disavow submission was the one that helped me back in rankings. I could have done it without the help CognitiveSeo.com, yeah but it would have taken me weeks if not months to find out by myself which links are bad and which not, and webmaster tools does not give me many links that Cognitive does. Cognitive is a perfect way to complement what webmaster tools shows you (external links). And now I know that Cognitive saves a mountain of time classifying bad from ok links.

Cognitive is not paying me to write this, I just want to acknowledge and share this story with the skeptical ones like me out there. Hope it works for you as it did for me. If you do it right, I am sure it will.

–

Manuel Porras – Webmaster – Smart Lipo Google+  https://plus.google.com/u/0/114452216971255669727/posts

Transparency Note and disclosure from Razvan Gavrilas(founder)

On September the 3rd I received the first mail from Manuel, (I did not know him until then).

I answered him that I would be interested in his story, but he never got back … until 17^th of September, when he mailed me the story that you just read.

I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this  isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully. Here is the full transcript of the mail discussion between me and Manuel (for the sake of full transparency).

As the founder of cognitiveSEO, I am extremly happy and proud when people connect with me and tell me their successful stories on how the tool made their life easier.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you all, our customers, for making this possible. It is YOU that give us the power to innovate & solve your problems faster & better.

The post Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool 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.

Important Update!

We released the automatic unnatural link classification tool to help you in your unnatural link recovery, after this post was published.

We recommend you check it for unnatural link analysis!

With the latest chit chat that Google is going to release the next version of Google Penguin soon, I think it is a good time to remember how you can easily detect unnatural links in your sites’ profile.

This detection technique can to be used for any site, even if it did not receive a penalty or unnatural link warning. It is a good technique that you can use to understand and manage the risk that you might be exposed to when the next unnatural link update comes.

Lovely site BitsofLace – Unfortunately Bad Linking Used …

This case study presents the story of a penalized site and how an unnatural links detection process should be approached. (mention – the site was brought to our attention by one of our customers asking for help in segmenting the unnatural links pointing to this site)

The site is operating in the “Lingerie” niche (BitsofLace.com) and has received several unnatural link warnings in the past. Their rankings have dropped significantly because of the unnatural links that were built in the past by several agencies or individual SEOs.

Let’s start with the conclusion so you can quickly understand what was wrong with the links of this site.

To put it simple, this site lost rankings because of an often seen, boring and un-creative link building strategy that combines a deadly mix of:

• Paid blog posts
• Web Directory links
• Forum & Article Directory links

So how did I find all this out? Here is the entire process described.  You can apply it to any site.

I started with a full link profile analysis. Looking for big distributions of links I notice the following:

• A high density of blog, article directory and web directory links
• A high number of commercial anchor texts versus brand related.

These signals guide me to look further at the webpage type distribution.

1. The story of the Paid Blog Links

Blog links are not unnatural usually, neither web directory or article directory links (or any other type of link … just to clear this out) … but it all comes to the distribution, volume and how they were acquired.

I check the deeper profile of these blog links.

We have them split in:

• Blog Post links
• Blog Comment Links
• Blogrolls and similar link types

Let’s dig deeper. The majority of the links are coming from blog posts. This could be a natural thing.  Content Marketing, customers writing about the service etc.

This isn’t the case unfortunately.

The first unnatural links signal is the low quality of the linking pages.

If I order by link quality, the most important link looks like a paid blog post. Natural links (expos, trade shows, real reviews etc) are also found but these are a tiny fraction (max 1%).

I should have looked at the commercial anchor text distribution for the blog links segment first of all.

A 55% commercial anchor text ratio is totally unnatural for sure.

I am looking at another 3-4 links and I can profile them all based on the similar footprint.

Here are some screenshots so that you can get the idea.

Content written around commercial anchor text posted on these blogs. All of these blog post links are unnatural from Google’s point of view. They were built with the sole purpose of influencing Google’s rankings. They do not provide any value to the user!

The same can be said about the other links coming from blogrolls and blog comments.

~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.

 2. The story of the “old and dirty” Web Directory linking technique.

How natural can Web Directory links be you should ask yourself? Last year Google even started de-indexing directories.

Let’s be frank for a moment, you put those links there with the sole purpose of increasing your rankings.

Rarely we see high quality web directories sending real traffic to your site via the link posted there.

With such a high distribution of 23% links coming from web directories I should mark all as unnatural without even looking at them. But let’s be accurate and methodical and make an informed decision.

Having such a high percentage of 93% links DoFollowed, highlights the intention of the people that “optimized” this link profile to have the site rank higher with Web Directory links.

I tried inspecting these links in various forms so that I could find a quality link from a web directory.

I couldn’t!

I checked the most powerful links ordered by Domain Trustworthiness and Link Trustworthiness. All the top links are low quality web directories (from the user’s experience point of view) by any metric you choose to filter.

Here’s a quick preview on some of these low quality unnatural web directory links.

~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.

 3. The story of the Forum “Personas”

Normally you get people talking in forums about your product. They might be mentioning your brand, talking about your service etc. When you have a high distribution of forum domains sending links to your site we can only have two options:

1. The site is a “super super” successful brand.
2. The site is promoted by a “super” proactive forum spammer.

Again we have a lot of DoFollow links. Raises a red flag!

In the forum links segment I searched for the word “profile” in the title or link and this is what we got as a visual link profile.

Why I searched for the word “profile” you might ask?

Because this represents the fingerprint for forum profile pages or “personas” as some SEOs call them.

Fake Forum profiles created with the sole purpose of generating unnatural links to the promoted site.

We do have some natural links generated by real people on the forums but these are like 10% out of the entire dataset. The rest are “personas” generating links both on profile pages and inside forum discussions.

~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.

4. Article Directory Thin Content can Sink your site.

As a link building strategy this is an old one, that once worked and now it doesn’t anymore. As with any other link building strategy, the more it is abused by SEOs worldwide, the less it is going to work on a long term, as it is something that is generated unnaturally with the purpose of influencing the search engine’s rankings.

Here is the type of thin content linking in with commercial anchor text that was used for this site.

Natural Link?

Not at all!

Human generated content posted on a mass scale on 95 article directories. Variation of the anchor text and content is found on all of these sites. The problem is that Google can fingerprint this as it has a big proportion of the link profile and it raises a red flag for Google to check.

~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Let’s recap:

• ~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.
• ~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.
• ~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.
• ~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Total 72% Unnatural Links Detected

And this is not all!

We can go even deeper and check the other type of pages, and I am sure we will find more unnatural links. I just wanted to showcase how easy it is to spot these unnatural links by segmenting the links by webpage type.

The website type segmentation gives you the macro view on the link building strategies used.

The analysis was done in 5 minutes + 10 minutes to have the cognitiveSEO system crawl and analyze the entire dataset of links so that we have fresh data on the links analyzed. It took me 5 hours to finalize this article though :). I hope you will enjoy it!

Here are some other articles that are of great help when it comes to identifying unnatural and low quality links:

• Identify Low Quality Links [how to]
• Surfacing Unnatural Links > Why You’re Doing it Wrong [how to]
• Backlinks Analysis Case Study
• Google Penguin Case Study
• Google Penguin Crashes Wedding Site’s Shady Link Building Strategy [case study]

What do you think about the unnatural link building strategy used by this site?

What other methods do you apply to segment unnatural links?

The post Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.