Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site

JohnDee

Hi guys, just popped my cherry today Just received this on a 2 year domain that had an ok, mostly manual link profile.

The interesting part is that the campaign started only 3 days ago and I haven't done any SER linkbuilding before this. Campaign is the standard 3 tiered contextual, dofollow + kitchen sinks on all tiers, no filters, links capped at 20 per day. So even though I have like 1000 crap links from some autoblogs I bought before, it got 60 T1 links from "GSA sites" to trigger the flag. Pretty interesting.

The message says that the action isn't against my site, but "so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.". So they're basically devaluing the sites that I built links from.

My traffic is at the same level, in fact I've seen some raises in the keyword tracker since I started the campaign. I will keep building links since stopping any links the moment you receive a warning is even worse or so I heard. What do you think? Should I worry? Should I change something to make my links different?

PeterParker

I often wonder why ive never got one of these. probably cos i dont put my sites on webmaster tools . i certainly get alot of penalties! anyhow just make new sites.

2Take2

I doubt that it was the links from SER that triggered the notification.

Most likely to do with the autoblogs. Apparently google are cracking down on them at the moment.

JohnDee

@2Take2, I am 99% it was the SER links. The autoblog links were built almost a year ago and almost all of the blogs died since then (not to mention deindexed), so my ahrefs curve looks like it's been losing links at a steady pace, until I started building 3 days ago. It would have been too much of a coincidence to get the message just as I start linkbuilding.

The site is still ranking though, so we'll see where that goes.

gooner

I would be surprised if it was the SER links too. How many of the 60 T1 links are even indexed?
It could be the autoblogs, maybe Google just "noticed" them... Maybe a manual review or something like that.

coneh34d

Three days seems next to impossible for this to occur. I have been through a reconsideration request and this just doesn't sound right. They are not that fast... unless you are Expedia or something high profile.

JohnDee

Just checked, only 20 of the T1 links are indexed. Here's a screen of my results so far. Could the kitchen sinks be at fault, since it might seem a bit unnatural to have 20 links on first tier and 2K+ all-types pointing to them and so on with the rest of the tiers? Should I cap them?

JudderMan

The Kitchen Sinks aren't at fault nor the setup you have is at fault - it looks fine to me. There has to be another reason. Are you in a competitive niche? Maybe you've been Neg'd through 301s so it's not showing up on Ahrefs properly?

coneh34d

JohnDee Once you see a message like that it is time to think of moving the base URL. If you want link juice to pass, be crafty with it, and only take some of it with you. They are Google, not God.

JohnDee

@JudderMan, the niche isn't competitive as "weight loss" but main sites I have "competing" are heavy weights like WebMD and the like. Except for the #1 spot which is powered by spam and hacked sites up the wazoo. Which is weird because you'd think if anyone would get a notice it would be them. But hey, that's the game we're playing, right?

@coneh34d I'm still waiting for traffic levels to either rise or drop as confirmation. As I said, the GWT message says that my site is A-OK but the links that are pointing to it aren't, so we're devaluing those instead of your whole site. Also, <philosoraptor>Is Google not God, to a SEOer?</philosoraptor>

coneh34d

JohnDee Another option is you wish to keep the domain intact is to rip that Tier One out with GSA SER Avtive (Remove Links). After that (Reverify) and start over.

gooner

You should look closely at the comment @2take2 made about autoblogs, there was a news release recently stating that G would be penalising these type of sites.

Before you do anything i would remove those remaining links, if possible.

2Take2

JohnDee - From what you've said, I would say that your site was manually reviewed either because;

1. Google was looking at the autoblogs to see if they added any value to the index, and noticed that they were linking to your site.

2. A competitor filed a spam report because they were keeping an eye on your site/link profile and noticed what you were up to.

3. You were very, very unlucky, and a google engineer just happened to single out your site for a spot check.

Manual reviews are normally reserved for people using blog networks etc.

davbel

@2Take2 I might be wrong, but I don't think that's a manual review message. 

My suspicion is that these messages now are more likely to be as result of others using the disavow tool, mainly because they are devaluing the links rather than taking action on @johndee's site.

coneh34d

For those that ever have to, I have included what a "winning" reconsideration request looks like here"

If you need to file a recosideration request, do so in the following format. I have won these:

Next we detail the process and the actions performed on the site http://domain.com, with the objective of optimizing the quality of it and following strictly and in comply with Google Quality Guidelines. We try to describe in detail what has been done for you to have a clear and specific statement of what happened and the actions we have taken to comply with your guidelines.

> Symptoms:

- Drastic reduction of the organic traffic site, consequence of lower rankings at Google search results.
- Drastic reduction of Google´s activity on the site:
   - "Pages crawled per day": High: 60188 - Average: 4,738 - Low: 29
   - "Kilobytes downloaded per day": High: 1,530,234 - Average: 127,542 - Low: 485


> Diagnose:

We proceeded to conduct a full audit of the site and identified two potential situations, according to your guidelines, which could adversely affect the performance of the site:

1) +40000 Landing Pages created from the same content, generating a big structure of duplicate content.

2)  Backlinks from sites structures created for the sole purpose of positioning the site (unnatural links).


> Performed Tasks:

1) SEO Site Audit, to detect Information Architecture issues, Usability issues, and LinkBuilding issues, etc. to fix and improve them.

2) The duplicate content structure was completely eliminated (+40000 pages).

3) All external links from sites like mentioned next, were deleted:
    domain:blah.com
    domain:blah.com
    domain:blah.com
    domain:blah.com

4) From what is mentioned in the previous point, the information architecture of the site was completely changed taking into account issues such as:

   a) Helping accessibility by search engines (sitemap xml, html sitemaps, robots.txt, breadcrumbs creation, optimization of internal links, 301 Redirections when was Necessary and optimization of 404 errors, etc).

   b) Analysis of site´s usability in order to improve users experience at it.


5) Original and dedicated and user oriented contents were created for each page of the site.


In conclusion, we want to let you know that we have carefully read your guidelines and used the information from your blog and forum in order to correct and optimize the quality of the site. We took the time and have worked hard to implement these improvements that complies with your search engine guidelines and turn into a better quality for our website.

Best Regards

Your Name Here

2Take2

@davbel - Interesting, thanks for pointing that out mate.

I'm a bit behind the times with webmaster tools (as I don't use it any more), but that would make perfect sense, and sounds exactly like the kind of scare tactics that google would use.

I guess it was only a matter of time until they started acting on all the disavow data?

JohnDee

Thanks for the input guys. If anyone's interested, I'll keep some updates on how this thing progresses. I'm inclined to agree with davbel, that it isn't a "manual action" but an automated message to discourage linkbuilding or links from known spammed sources...

gooner

You could be right, good thinking @davbel.

@Johndee - Are the autoblogs linked to this site in any way..., Same GWT account, GA account, hosting account, non-private domain all registered to you even?

Just as another possibility i was thinking that Google thinks you are building yourself a nice little link farm, but if they are not linked then that can be ruled out too.

JohnDee

@gooner, nope no linkage between any of those, I bought the autoblog posts from a guy back in August or so. I couldn't get them removed but they did die off and get deindexed (which worked out nicely because otherwise they would have killed me with some high % exact anchor texts). So I haven't built any links to this site since then, just let it coast nicely.

gooner

Ah ok that makes sense. In that case then i have to agree with @davbel

JohnDee

So a couple of days later, I can definitely say that it did take a run for the worse. Seeing a couple of -10s on some keywords and a couple have just plain disappeared from the index (not deindexed though). I've paused the campaign for now but it doesn't look very pretty. The SERPs have taken a beating and I'm seeing the same on competitor sites.

sweeppicker

Autoblogs = PURE SPAM. If your site isn't decimated by Google you may be able to restore it by getting some juicy homepage links.

It's worth noting that even if the autoblogs are de-indexed, Google can still see them linking to your site. You should try and figure out which keyword ranks dropped and where the corresponding inbound link for that keyword came from. That might give you a clearer picture of what's going on.

Heisenberg

Funny how gooner now agrees with davbel that the list of disavowed links can and is being used against us, but only a couple of weeks ago was in denial lol https://forum.gsa-online.de/discussion/8093/stop-don-t-use-gsa/p1

gooner

@heisenberg - You don't do that name justice.

Of course individual disavowed links can can be used - That's the point of them. But you seem to think that we shouldn't use SER because every link it creates will be on some kind of global database and will mass penalise sites. Which is possibly the single most stupid thing i have read on this forum.

Let it go brudda. let it go.

Heisenberg

That's exactly what the disavow list is though - A global database of known spam sources.

And no I dont think every link created by ser is on that list.. yet. But enough to trigger a penalty if they add up to x or xx% of a site / pages backlink profile? Most likely.

Anyway carry on pal.

gooner

If you say so, you know obviously. Anyone that has been in this business for any length of time will have contingency plans should something like that ever happen i'm sure.
Anyway, thanks for hijacking this thread to try and continue a long dead argument.

Heisenberg

No problem mate.. Not often here but couldn't resist when I saw you clearly contradicting yourself on what you said just a couple of weeks before.

And I think you'll find that the thread I linked to is clearly relevant to this thread so you might want to brush up on your understanding of the word hijacking.

All's well that ends well though pal

gooner

And you may want to brush up on your understanding of the word "contradict".

Look, many many people here are using SER to rank for many many months. So your theory is a nice theory but really it's just that, an unproven theory,

What more is there to say?

Heisenberg

Ok mate I tell ya what.. il let ya have the last word if that's what makes ya happy so this will be my last post on the matter and all that I say is just hocus pocus theory and nobody nowhere is being penalized and there's no problem whatsoever with the disavowed list being used like I said.. none whatsoever.

[/thread]

gooner

The last time you commented was the thread you referred to. The suspicious side of me would think you have been hanging around waiting and hoping you could somehow trip me up at some point.

And today you saw the chance for your moment in the sun, but hey i'm sure you're not that sad eh

Heisenberg

Lol don't be offended mate I was simply helping you out by pointing out your mistake. . No need to be so paranoid. I don't feel the need to comment often in this forum or any other forum.. so you're probably right, but great little chap for letting me know thanks