Being penalized in search engines is the hardest part in SEO. Despite all the efforts, times and money that you spent building thousands of links in a short or long period of time, your website still finds it hard to rank in search and yet a manual or algorithmic penalty might hit your website regardless of your dedication to increase the link popularity for your website. It hurts right?
Perhaps something is wrong with your strategy? Something is wrong with your approach? Or you are just doing it the wrong way? To figure out what’s causing your website not to rank in search, let’s dig deeper to your link profile to discover your mistakes!
But before you go into that, make sure that you are aware of algorithm change particularly about Google, and read their quality guidelines.
These are the common types of links that search engines call unnatural and can affect your website performance negatively. And they are:
Paid links
One of the obvious samples of unnatural link is paid links. Any kind of method in exchange for link is considered as paid. Although this has never been approved as an ethical SEO approach and lots of websites had been penalized because of this, it is still being applied in SEO to manipulate their website rankings which is really unacceptable. Although not all paid links are easy to spot, there are still some that you can easily say to yourself, “Aha! This is a paid link!”
Paid Links
Directory links
Everyone is aware that links from directory sites are negative signals/votes to a website and may affect your website performance in SERP. But this does not mean that when you link in a directory site, you will be penalized. It does not go that way. This means that when you aggressively build links in low quality directory sites with exact match anchor text, you will then surely have problems in terms of traffic and rankings.
Directory Links
Article links
Similar to directory links, Google is considering that links from article sites is a sign of link manipulation and it is a violation to Google guidelines. Links from article sites are literally abused by many SEOs, resulting in violating the quality guideline of Google. Since it is easy to manipulate the anchor text in article sites, massive article submissions have always been the main source of links of SEO, which is not ethical. So if your link profile is mostly from article sites, be prepared for Google Penguin to hit your website.
Article Links
Author bio links
Guest blogging for links is something that is new to SEOs, since guest blogging was not really popular back in 2011 and it was when the focus of many SEOs was to build artificial links in directory, social bookmarking and article sites. But when all of these methods became dangerous, majority have moved forward and got insane in guest blogging which eventually became another source of large scale of links. Few guest blogging is fine but if it is done in a large scale with over- optimized anchor text, you should expect a penalty coming in to your GWT message section asking you to remove your guest blogging links.
Author Bio Link
Blog comment links
This is not supposed to be part of unnatural links but since this type of link method has been widely abused, there is no reason for search engines not to exclude this to their “what to look at” when manually inspecting a website. Sample of blog spam comment:
Car insurance: Thank you for this excellent post! This will help me grow in my chosen career! Please visit car insurance
Low quality social bookmarking sites
Another obvious unnatural link is links from social bookmarking sites. This type of easy-to-gain link has been widely abused by many SEOs. By using keyword based anchor text and building thousands of artificial social bookmark links, you now have a list of live links pointing to your website for the keywords you are targeting to rank for.
Press release
Same approach with article sites, links coming from press release sites are not considered natural and they tend to manipulate search ranking as well. So if your links are coming from press release sites with exact match keywords, you will probably sooner or later have to deal with those links. Either disavowing or removing them from your link profile once you receive a message from Google spam team.
Widget links
This type of link is not actually a perfect example of unnatural link since not all widget links are unnatural in Google’s eyes. Some widget links are actually helpful to its audience but majority is only after link count.
Widget Link
Site-wide links
Another obvious unnatural link sample is site-wide links. This type of links are often external sites but always seen on each page of the linking site. A good example of a not-obvious-paid link that can pass domain authority to the linking page ,which is undoubtedly unethical.
Site-Wide Links
Footer links
This is still not 100% sure that your website will be penalized if you link to other websites related to yours. But if you do it in a large scale and it comes to the point that your link profile is 50% from footer links with exact match anchor text, manual penalty will likely to send you a message accompanied by penalty.
Conclusion:
Now that we mentioned the most common recent obvious manipulative links, didn’t you notice that Google is killing link building methods? Artificial links, manufactured links or any kind that the main goal is to manipulate their SERPs? Certainly not! What Google want from SEOs is to create a website where their target audience would be happy to reference to, promote on their free will and visit it as often as they can to learn more information. I know it is easier said than done but as an online marketer, this must be done.
