2 replies to this topic

[suzstephens]

I noticed the message below regarding one of the sites I designed on GWT this morning. The SEO guy who has been working on this site is out of touch this week. (He has worked on lots of my sites for years and does link-building VERY slowly. I've never seen a problem like this before.) Traffic to the site hasn't dropped.

Is there anything specific that I can do to identify links that Google considers to be "bad" or "unnatural"?

I've researched this for hours in Google's help files and by searching Google and haven't been able to locate any info on how to indentify the links that need to be deleted.

________________
December 17, 2011

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.xxxxxxx.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

[Jill]

I would imagine that whomever they paid to get the bad links would likely know how to find them.

[piskie]

Another possibility is that they have extensively linked (at many levels) between most or all of their clients.
Try looking at their client portfolio if they publish one. Then choose a couple of likely candidates and do a laborious search.
Remember, they may have if not hidden these clinks, but somehow obscured them.

I fixed one of these situations once and the complexity of the tangled web was quite extraordinary.
That one didn't feature a Google warning, but took almost 6 months to recover decent SERPs.