Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Edit, set nofollow or remove if necessary
Google isn’t exactly a fan of paid, followed links Paid links that pass on PageRank .
The reason for this is clear: anyone can just go out and spend some cash to inauthentically increase their rankings and visibility in search engines.
Paid links can take the form of sponsored blog posts, text ads, banner ads, or advertorials.
Often they have no real value for the user and are obviously spam.
The best thing you can do here, since you’ve already paid for the links, is to ask the publishers to add a nofollow attribute to your links. This will ensure you continue to receive traffic from the backlinks, but they won’t pass on any PageRank.
If the links were over-optimized, you should also ask to edit them so that they flow naturally with the text and overall content of the website.
If you don’t have luck with these steps, you will need to remove/disassociate the links.
7. Links from private blog networks (PBNs)
Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Remove or set nofollow
Private blog networks (PBNs) may sound like a good idea.
Interconnected sites that link to each other, for the benefit of users and SEO benefits! That’ll make things much easier than constantly having to network and build links, right?
However, not everything that glitters is gold. PBN backlinks rarely provide any value to the user (because if that were the idea, Google wouldn’t be against the practice).
But let’s see how this can work in real life:
Dan Hollister of CanIRank was working with a client who experienced a significant drop in organic traffic following a Google update.
When analyzing the client’s backlink profile, the results were astonishing.
Dan says the URLs and anchor text seemed to exactly match many of the high-value keywords in the client’s industry. Ultimately, they discovered that these were a series of PBN backlinks built by the previous company owners, making the site’s backlink profile appear unbalanced and artificial.
It was time to act and repair!
Dan told me how:
” We developed a plan to address the network in links, taking care not to move too quickly. “
We worked through the list, taking down sites we could still access and rejecting the obvious culprits.
For those links we were unsure about, we handled things on a case-by-case basis, depending on the ranking factors of the linking page and the content that included the keywords.
In just a few weeks, our client’s website saw an increase in organic traffic and improvements in rankings across all categories. ”
8. Spammy Followed Links in Comment Sections
Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Remove or set nofollow
Once again we have a case of over-optimization and abuse by spammers exploiting the comment sections of blogs and news sites.
I have received a penalty for “Unnatural Links to Your Site” twice in seven years due to spammy links in blog comments.
They spammed my blog comment form and then used the comment links they created to link back from spammy forum threads.
You can try to remove these links or set them to “nofollow” by contacting the webmaster, but sometimes this can simply be too much if the number of spammy links is high.
Disavowing is the best option here if you want to maintain your sanity.
9. Spammy links from blog posts and product pages
Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Remove or set nofollow
Ah, these are a joy to handle (a little more sarcasm today).
They could be paid links, over-optimized links, or the result of a naive SEO or influencer campaign.
Justin McIntyre, Director of SEO & Content at Perfect Search Media , told me about working with a travel company that bought thousands of spammy pharmaceutical links.
“We detected this after the website received a manual penalty.”
The links came from a variety of spammy referring domains, and the anchor text was typically some kind of prescription drug.
We catalogued the 20 most common variations of anchor text and then checked the entire backlink profile for instances of that anchor text only.
The goal was to fix the spammy backlinks as quickly as possible to remove the manual penalty, and then return to review the rest of the backlink profile at a later date.”
The penalty was lifted after the referring (spammy) domains were rejected.
10. Spammy links from forum posts, profiles and signatures
Type: Unnatural links to your linkedin database website
Fix: Remove or set nofollow
Anyone who has ever visited or created a forum will know this well.
You know those user profiles that never post anything and were only created to use the backlink field and stuff the profile bio with keywords?
And then they might go ahead and publish unreadable posts with gibberish text (probably automated).
And don’t forget the signatures: what better place to put your optimized links that scare away both users and search engines?
If you have already done so, I recommend removing all the links you can and contacting the forum administrators to remove any you cannot.
If you can’t do that, or the mess was caused by a spammer or a negative SEO attack, just go ahead and disavow the links.
11. Spammy links from guest posts and sponsored content
Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Edit, remove or set nofollow if necessary
Matt Cutts has written extensively about the problems of guest posting solely for SEO and how unhelpful it can be for search engines.
If you write guest posts just for SEO, you miss out on sharing a message with readers and using relevant links that will help them.
All you’re doing is repeating something everyone facilities safety manager brandon kirk already knows just to add a backlink or two.
And this is spam, not advertising.
Unfortunately, this is typical of what you get when you hire cheap writers to write your guest posts.
Sponsored content is the same. High-quality sponsored content is nothing like paid links—it’s more like affiliate marketing done well.
But spam is never useful in any context.
Set “nofollow” on these links, remove them if possible, or reject them.
However, if you are getting good traffic from the posts, work with the bloggers and webmasters to improve the content and replace the spammy links with new links.
12. Spammy Service Sites Paid links that pass on PageRank
Type: Unnatural links to/from your website
Fix: Remove or set nofollow
You know those downloadable SEO tools betting email list , wallpapers, or icons—the internet is full of them.
And there’s often a lot of link spam associated with these services. They sell ads that pass PageRank, ask users to link back to them, or engage in off-topic link exchanges.
If you want to use their stuff, you often have no editorial influence on the backlink.
It’s probably difficult to remove these links, so the best thing you can do is disavow them.
And if you own one of these sites, please remove anything spammy as soon as possible Paid links that pass on PageRank.