When it comes to your SEO, the consequences of fraud can be far more damaging and lasting. Google targets unnatural links—links created or acquired in a way it perceives as ” gameing the system .”
If Google finds unnatural links in your backlink profile, your website will be penalized 15 types of unnatural links and what to do about themC .
Not a smart move for long-term success.
In this post, I’ve discovered 15 types of unnatural links that Google can penalize you for—and I’ll tell you exactly how to fix them before they permanently damage your rankings!
What are unnatural links and why does Google hate them?
Google’s vision of unnatural links is essentially this:
Any link that has been artificially acquired solely to gambling database japan manipulate PageRank directly harms the integrity of Google’s SERPs because it presents users with content that may not benefit them at all.
Put that way, how can you blame Google?
The reality is that unnatural links would not exist in a Google-free world and are rarely helpful to the user.
In fact, most are built just to exploit the system and achieve higher rankings without offering any real added value.
Because of this impact on the integrity of the SERPs, Google has manually penalized websites for unnatural links since its inception.
Google penalties for unnatural links
Unnatural links can be inbound (someone links to you) or or sign in using your credentials outbound (you link to someone).
When you are given a manual action in your Search Console, Google will clearly indicate whether the unnatural links are “to” or “from” your site.
Receiving a penalty for unnatural links can mean anything from a drop in the SERPs for certain search terms to partial deindexing of your site.
How to find unnatural links
Before we dive into the realm of unnatural links and how to fix them, it’s a good idea to first clarify how to find these links in your backlink profile so you know exactly where to take action.
To do this, I recommend using SEOptimer to track and analyze your inbound links
Simply log in to your account and navigate to the ” Backlink Research ” tab in the left menu.
Then enter the URL of your website and then click on “ Research ”.
Here you can see your website’s entire backlink profile, including the number of dofollow vs nofollow links pointing to any page you want to investigate, popular anchor texts, and more.
How to fix unnatural links
If you find unnatural links, Charlie Worral of Imaginaire Digital has some simple advice:
The best way to fix an unnatural link is to first determine if it’s worth using. See if you can make the link more natural. Try contacting the webmaster of the site or even the journalist who wrote the story that linked to you and asking them to link from a different part of the article or change the anchor text to something that makes sense.
Unfortunately, unnatural links can’t always be fixed or improved. Sometimes the best solution is to remove the link in question or set it to “nofollow.”
In the next sections, I’ll show you 15 specific types of unnatural links that Google is known to penalize, as well as the best method for fixing each one.
How to avoid unnatural links
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to burkina faso business directory avoid unnatural links to your website because spam is everywhere.
Negative SEO is also a reality, and then there are those bad SEO decisions that you just have to deal with.
But one thing you have more control over is the outbound links on your own website.
You can choose your guest authors, advertisers, and any link exchanges with partners or friends. You also have complete editorial control over the links on your website.
When it comes to unnatural inbound links, you can help avoid them (or at least minimize their impact) by monitoring all new backlinks you receive and taking quick action when you receive a manual action. Google gives us examples of link schemes that include paid links, excessive link exchanges, and over-optimized content links.
However, the real-world experience of SEOs and webmasters shows that there are more cases where Google penalizes for “unnatural links.”
Here are 15 of them you should know about and what you can do to fix them:
1. Circular link schemes
Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Remove or set nofollow
You may have heard of this type of scheme before—they’ve been around since the early 2000s.
The scheme is “circular” because you have:
- Site A links to Site B
- Site B links to Site C
- Site C links to Site A
Basically, this is the minimal topology of a link farm.