If your website has been around for any length of time you’ve probably received an email from a concerned fellow site-owner letting you know that Google has penalized them for “unnatural linking” and so they are going through and purging all of their extraneous back links. Sometimes, they can even appear a little accusatory telling you that your site isn’t “high quality” and that by having a link to their site on your own, it’s hurting their rankings.
This can definitely be a startling message to receive, especially if you’ve been following the best practices we share here at AmpliFound. Is your site really “low quality?” What do they mean by Google “penalized” them? Are you doing anything wrong?
Don’t Panic
The first step is to not panic, don’t automatically assume that you’re doing anything wrong. Over the past few years, starting with Google’s Penguin update in 2012, Google has become keen to webmasters who attempt to manipulate rankings by building unnatural links to their website. This is strictly against Google’s terms of service and to, eliminate this, Google release an update to their algorithm that would identify these types of unnatural practices and penalize site owners for utilizing them.
More recently, Google updated their Webmaster Tools suite to include a notification if your website is being penalized by unnatural back links. Once a penalty is applied, a site will lose rankings that were being held up artificially from manipulated back links. As part of this notification process, Google presents these offenders with steps to take in order to get their penalty removed and the first step involves contacting sites that have unnatural links on them to attempt to get them removed. Following that, you can submit to a Google tool called the “disavow tool” in order to let Google know that you don’t approve of these links. The final step is to submit a written “Reconsideration Request” to Google outlining all of the efforts you took in order to get these unnatural links removed. It can be very difficult to get a penalty like this removed and Google really wants to see all proof and documentation of the site owner attempting to get links removed which includes communication with all site owners.
So does that mean my site is bad?
A site that is penalized often has a large volume of unnatural links that Google identifies, this can be in the thousands or sometimes tens of thousands of sites. As such, attempting to scrutinize every single site can be a daunting task. Since getting out of a penalty requires a lot of work in link removal, it’s often easier for a site owner to just attempt to remove as many links as possible they don’t identify as “high value.” As a catch-all, owners will often remove any links with any kind of “unnatural” anchor text or sites that fall into a certain category. When you receive an email from someone asking for link removal, it often says more about their linking practices than it does the quality of your own site.
What should I do?
Often times, it’s easiest just to remove the link for this person. If they don’t want it there, you can avoid a lot of controversy by just removing it for them. If this site owner is indeed doing unnatural or malicious linking, it’s best for your site not to be associated with them through a link anyway. While your site isn’t low quality, some of the other links they have built might very well be so it’s best to distance yourself from this as much as possible.
Above all, it’s important to remember that if you receive a message like this that it doesn’t mean your site is in any jeopardy (even if they tell you as much because, sometimes, they use mass canned emails). As long as you’ve follow good blogging and linking practices, your site will be fine. And by removing a link for this person, you are also distancing yourself from a website that Google potentially sees as low quality.
