Received Google unnatural links message?

During the last few weeks, Google sent many webmaster notification messages about unnatural links. If you have received such a message, here's what you have to do to make sure that your website doesn't get penalized.

What is this Google unnatural links message?

Google has sent the following message to many webmasters:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of example.com.
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"

What will happen when you get such a message?

Webmasters who received such a message observed that many sites were penalized 3-4 weeks after the message. The penalty is for the keywords that are included in the unnatural links.
If most of the links that point to the website are unnatural links then the whole website might be penalized.

What are unnatural links?

There are several backlink types that Google finds unnatural:

1. Public backlink networks: Google doesn't like fully automated or paid backlink networks. If you participate in a backlink network that can be joined by anyone (even for a fee) then it is very likely that Google has already penalized the network or that the network is a target for the near future.
   
   If you can find the backlink network, Google's engineers can find it, too.
2. Private backlink networks: some SEO agencies have private backlink networks. Google probably has the technology to detect these networks without creating accounts.
3. Paid sidebar links: if your website has too many backlinks from the sidebars of other websites, Google might find them unnatural.
4. Over-optimized anchor text: if the links to your website all use exactly the same anchor text, it is likely that Google might reconsider the rankings of the linked pages.
5. Fake forum and social media links: some tools create fake forum and social media site accounts to get backlinks to your website. Chances are that Google can detect that type of link.

What should you do?

If you used one of the methods above to get backlinks to your website, try to get rid of these links as quickly as possible.
The formula to high rankings on Google is very easy:
Good content + good backlinks + no spam = high rankings
Optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that Google and other search engines know what your website is about. Then get good backlinks to show search engines that your website can be trusted.

Google has become more aggressive regarding spammy backlinks. In the past, a website might get high rankings for several months until Google detected the site. Now it seems that the it takes a maximum of 3 months until Google detects the spammers.

Do not fall for SEO solutions that promise quick and easy backlinks. It doesn't make sense to get high rankings for 2-3 months just to get penalized after that time. If you are serious about your business, you have to use strategies that deliver high rankings that will stay, even if it takes longer to get these rankings in the short term.

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Remove your paid links ASAP!

Google: Go As Far Back As Possible To Remove Paid Links

Google's John Mueller responded in a Google Webmaster Help thread to a webmaster who received one of those unnatural links warnings.

He made a few points that I wanted to highlight for SEOs:

Do Not Wait Out Penalties

Google said not to wait out penalties because they can take a long time to be reversed. Instead, submit a reconsideration request to help expedite it. John said, "- If you're serious about your site's standing in our search results, then I'd strongly advise not to try to wait the penalty out. These are generally not issues that expire after a few days, they can affect your site's standing for quite some time."

Remove All Paid Links Going Back As Far As You Paid Links

Google said that if you have been paying for links for two years, go back two years and remove those paid links. If it is five year, go back five years. Google wants to see a serious attempt to remove all the paid links you acquired over the years.

John said, "Regarding the age of the unnatural links, I'd work to have them all removed, regardless of the age. For instance, in the general case where a site has been buying links for 2 years, it would be a good idea to go back that far."

Getting A Notification Now Doesn't Mean It Is A New Penalty

Google stepped up their notifications, so if you get a notification today, it doesn't mean it is a new penalty. Google is sending notifications out for old penalties. John explained, "while we have just recently started sending out these messages, they may apply to issues that were already known (and affecting your site's standing in our search results) for a while."

John added a few more points we covered here a few times but feel free to check out the Google Webmaster Help thread.

40+ Google Search Quality Updates in March

This week, Google announced 40+ changes they made to search over the past month or so. Prior to this, 40 changes in February, then 17 changes in January of this year.

Matt McGee summarized the most important changes, as he sees fit, which include anchor text changes, image search changes, indexing symbols, navigation query changes and more.

One thing that really stands out is this one:

Improvements to processing for detection of site quality. [launch codename "Curlup"] We’ve made some improvements to a longstanding system we have to detect site quality. This improvement allows us to get greater confidence in our classifications.

Here is the full list for the most recent updates:

1. Autocomplete with math symbols.

2. Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing.

3. Better scoring of news groupings.

4. Sitelinks data refresh.

5. Improvements to autocomplete backends, coverage.

6. Better handling of password changes.

7. Better indexing of profile pages.

8. UI refresh for News Universal.

9. Improvements to results for navigational queries.

10. High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements.

11. Live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL.

12. Tennis search feature.

13. More relevant image search results.

14. Fresher image predictions in all languages.

15. SafeSearch algorithm tuning.

16. Tweaks to handling of anchor text.

17. Simplifications to Images Universal codebase.

18. Better application ranking and UI on mobile.

19. Improvements to freshness in Video Universal.

20. Fewer undesired synonyms.

21. Better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent.

22. Improvements to freshness.

23. Improvements to processing for detection of site quality.

24. Better interpretation and use of anchor text.

25. Better local results and sources in Google News.

26. Deprecating signal related to ranking in a news cluster.

27. Fewer "sibling" synonyms.

28. Better synonym accuracy and performance.

29. Retrieval system tuning.

30. Less aggressive synonyms.

31. Update to systems relying on geographic data.

32. Improvements to name detection.

33. Updates to personalization signals.

34. Improvements to Image Search relevance.

35. Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals.

36. More precise detection of old pages.

37. Tweaks to language detection in autocomplete.

38. Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages.

39. More predictions in autocomplete by live rewriting of query prefixes.

40. Expanded sitelinks on mobile.

41. More accurate short answers.

42. Migration of video advanced search backends.

43. +1 button in search for more countries and domains.

44. Local result UI refresh on tablet.

There are several places this is being discussed such as at Google on Google+, Matt Cutts on Google+, HackerNews and WebmasterWorld.

Lots of things here, some of them we covered previous in our April Google Webmaster report.

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Your Backlink profile and its importance

Last week, another large blog link network was penalized by Google. Having a good backlink profile has become more important than ever. How do you check your backlink profile, and are your rankings at risk?

What exactly happened?
Google's engineers are working hard on eliminating spam from the search results. Last week, they penalized websites that participated in a paid blog network with the name BuildMyRank. Another blog network was also affected by that penalty.

If you used one of these networks to get backlinks to your website, chances are that your Google rankings will be affected by this penalty.

Link diversity is the key to rankings that last
People who use automated tools to get backlinks to their websites create backlink profiles with a particular pattern. It is relatively easy to detect these pattern.

For example, if you participated in these blog networks or if you use tools that automatically submit your link to forums and social media sites, then it is easy to find out that these links are unnatural.

If your web site has a good backlink profile, your website won't be affected by algorithm changes.


What is a good backlink profile?
Link building is more than getting a few nofollow backlinks from good websites. It's about networking. A good backlink profile shows search engines that your website is liked by many different people. That means that your website should also have links from many different website types.

How to check the backlink profile of your website
You can check the backlink profile of any website with the backlink intelligence tools in SEOprofiler. For example, you can quickly see which website types link to a site:

You will quickly see if the majority of the links comes from blogs, forums, press release sites, directories, etc. You will also see which anchor texts are used to link to the site:

Geo variation and different top level domains also contribute to the diversity of a backlink profile. This information is also available in the reports:

In addition, you will get further information about the backlinks: are the links nofollowed, are they image or text links, what is the ratio of same site/external links on the linking sites, which keywords are used on the linking sites etc.

Having a diversified backlink profile is very important if you want to make sure that your Google rankings will last. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket. Analyze your backlinks now and check the backlink profile of your website.


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Which Factor Did Google Turn Off For Link Evaluation?

As part of some of the 40 Google changes announced last night, Google said they made a change to how they evaluate links.

Google wrote:
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

As you can read, Google decided to turn off one of the many analysis methods they use for their link evaluation. It was a method or factor they used for "several years" and decided to turn it off in the past 30 days.

A WebmasterWorld thread is asking, which method do you think they turned off?

WebmasterWorld link building moderator gave his ideas:

Title Tag
The title tag is a signal of what a web page is generally about. The title tag has been used to help identify the meaning of a linked page from the general theme of the page linking to it. The title tag is a signal of the general theme of a web page. The topic of a link can vary from a side topic to a more granular or a completely off topic meaning.

Surrounding Text
This establishes the context of a link, thus helping to define what the linked web page is about. This also helps identify if a link is paid for or is associated with a donation.

Position of a link
Where a link is located is an important signal. A link in the footer is presumed to be less important than a link within the body of a web page. Navigational links are presumed to be depreciated according to a set amount, perhaps more than outbound links but just a fraction of a normal non-depreciated link.

HTML signals
These include Heading Tags [w3.org], bold, italics, capitalization and font size [webmasterworld.com]. Font size is an interesting candidate for deprecation.

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40 More Google Search Quality Updates From Google

Here is Google's full list:

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.

• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.

• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.

• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.

• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.

• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.

• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.

• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.

• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.

• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.

• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.

• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.

• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.

• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.

• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).

• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an "IME", or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.

• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you've visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.

• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.

• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.

• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.

• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.

• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.

• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.

• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.

• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.

• Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

Google Friendly Page Layout Algorithm & Penalty

Google announced a new algorithm change that looks at your page layout and if the ads above the fold are excessive, your site can be penalized and downgraded in the search results. This comes with no surprise to me and others, because 10 weeks ago, Matt Cutts announced that this is something Google is working towards. Google wrote: We've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don't have much content "above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward. Google released a special tool at browsersize.googlelabs.com to help you visualize if your site may or was impacted by this. Here is how this site looks:

We seem to be okay, but what about Google's own search results. Well, Google won't let you plug in their own URLs into the tool, so it is hard to tell but I doubt they would pass the test.

Danny Sullivan, as well as many others, go through the hypocrisy with this new penalty and how Google is doing the exact opposite. Not only that, they recommend to their AdSense customers to place ads top heavy so users click on them. Here is their ad map:

That being said, the algorithm is out, if you were hit, you would probably know by now. To fix it, remove some of those ads, and wait and wait until Google pushes out an update. It can takes weeks. If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site. Who is affected? Google said 1 in every 100 searches are. If you read the forums, almost every thread talks about how Google is doing one thing and saying the other. Get your website designed in a best Google friendly layout by our Affordable Website Design Services India. Source

Google is not showing title tags in the search results properly

There are often complaints in the forum that Google is not showing your title tags in the search results properly.

Yesterday, Google wrote a blog post named Better page titles in search results. Here, Pierre Far, explains why Google may pick a different title tag.

In a Google+ post he gives the short version:
Our algorithms generate thee alternative titles so that your page is no longer constrained with having just the one title for all the different queries your page ranks for. This has the nice side effect of making the result look more relevant to our searchers and...

On average, the alternative titles increase the clickthrough rate on the results, i.e. more traffic for you.

The < title > tag is still a primary source for titles we show so all our advice about make them concise and useful and enticing still very much apply. Keep an eye on the HTML Suggestions page in the Diagnostics section in Webmaster Tools for title suggestions.

For a more detailed walk through of this, see the Google Help document on this topic.

Get your title tags optimized best with our On-page SEO Services.

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Google’s New Advanced Search Page

Google’s New Advanced Search Page

New Google Advanced Search Page Drops Links to Page & Removes top 100 options.

Google has updated their advanced search page with the new design, cleaned up some search options and removed some page specific search tools.
The removed tools include the ability to:

(1) Find pages similar to the page
(2) Find pages that link to the page

They have also renamed some of the search options like show top 100 results, but most of the other search features remained.

Here are before and after screen shots:
Old: