In order to make sure you use the Google Disavow Tool right, you must first know when you are actually allowed to use it. This advanced Google feature should only be used in specific scenarios.

If you’re interested in finding out when you should use the Google Disavow Tool, keep reading, because you’ll get all your answers in this article.

1. What Exactly Is the Google Disavow Tool?
2. When to Use The Disavow Tool
   1. When there’s a dramatic drop in traffic & rankings
   2. When your site has been spammed with Negative SEO backlinks
   3. When you know your SEO Agency built spammy links to your website
   4. When you have a manual action applied on your site
   5. Other cases
3. When NOT to Use the Disavow Tool
   1. When there’s no drastic drop in rankings
   2. When you’re not sure if it is a penalty
   3. When there’s a small drop in rankings
   4. For testing purposes
4. How to Easily Disavow Links
5. Is the Disavow Tool Actually Helpful? (READ THIS)

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though generally  the objective of the Disavow Links tool was to be used as a resort to resolve link problems, it is not as simple as it seems.

What Exactly Is the Google Disavow Tool?

Long story short, the Google Disavow Tool is a feature in the Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools) in which you can submit a list of backlinks that you want Google to disconsider. It was launched in late 2012 and was a pretty big deal back in the day.

The Google Disavow tool became a very popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. The changes made to the algorithm “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process seems simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard.

However, later on, people found out that the tool is actually much more than that. Through this very tool, Google collects information about spammy links across the web as users submit them. This way, it can improve its database of types of backlinks to better identify spammy and shady ones in the future.

For this very reason, the Black Hat SEO community doesn’t like the Disavow Tool. Many advised people not to use it, because it will help Google get stronger and catch their tactics quicker. But fearful webmasters rushed in to submit their spammy link profiles, in hope that they will be spared or forgiven.

Today, as of the new version of GSC, there’s no actual way of accessing the Disavow Tool from the Search Console. Although Google sends you to the new version, the tool can’t be found there either. 

The Google Disavow Tool can be however directly accessed from the web by searching for it, or by accessing the Disavow Links Main Page.

In order to use the tool, you need to have a verified property in GSC. This means you can disavow backlinks only for websites that you own. The process is pretty simple once you have the proper list.

Getting that Google Disavow links list right, however, is another story. I’ll explain it soon.

When to Use the Disavow Tool

Short answer is that there are only a few isolated cases in which you should use the Google Disavow Tool. If you’re not sure you should use it, then the answer is probably don’t.

When deciding to use it, you should take into consideration a couple of things:

First of all, you need to make a quick link audit and see which are the links that are harming your site the most. You need to carefully determine the bad and the good and see which links could influence your site’s ranking drop. If you’re not careful, you might end up loosing some valid links that would otherwise pour some of that precious “link juice”.

Then, you have to take into account the fact that, before appealing to the disavow tool, you could try to remove the bad links manually by contacting the owners of the websites that point to you. Before panicking and running straight for the disavow solution, you should carefully try to clean up your mess the old fashion way. It may sound like a laborious task but you can make use of third-party tools that can help you speed up with the unnatural link detection and outreach.

You may want to use this tool if you stumble upon the following problems:

1. When there’s a dramatic drop in traffic & rankings

Obviously, a dramatic drop in traffic and rankings indicates an issue with your website. However, you should not rush in to disavow your links. First, make sure that that is the issue and try to exclude everything else before you decide on doing it.

The whole concept of disavowing unnatural links must be taken very seriously as it may also harm your ranking. This process should not be done on a haste.

You should take your time weeding out the bad and you should submit a list to be disavowed only if you’re 100% sure of the links that you send. You should also remember to try to manually remove the harmful links, not only to show Google your good intentions but also because you don’t know how long the disavow process could take.

2. When your site has been spammed with Negative SEO backlinks

If your website has been subject to a large scale Negative SEO attack, then you can consider disavowing those bad links.

But how do you know when your site was attacked? And how do you know which links are good and which links are bad?

Well, you can always use the CognitiveSEO Tool to monitor your backlinks and see if your link profile suffers major changes in a short amount of time. You can also use the tool to determine which links are natural and which links fit the patterns of spammy links by using our Unnatural Link Detection feature.

I’ll tell you more about how to exactly identify the bad links in a bit, so keep reading. First, let’s take a look at some other scenarios where you should consider using the Disavow Tool.

3.When you know your SEO Agency built spammy links to your website

Many times, webmasters hire companies to do SEO work for them. If you don’t choose your SEO agency right, you risk ending up with an SEO that will use BlackHat link building tactics to try and boost your site.

This might end up in a manual action penalty for your website, which are usually pretty hard to recover from.

If you find out that your SEO agency has been building unnatural links to your website instead of using techniques accepted by Google’s Guidelines, then you should consider using the Disavow Tool.

However, keep in mind that you should never disavow links massively if your website has not yet been penalized!

4. When you have a manual action applied on your site

Manual actions aren’t something you will often see. They are rare, isolated cases. However, they do exist and, if your website is one of them, you can consider using the disavow tool.

There are multiple types of manual actions, so make sure you start disavowing links only if you see the “Unnatural Links” warning. 

Other types of actions are related to Thin Content or User Generated Spam. These problems are fixed in other ways, without using the Disavow Tool.

To see if any manual actions have been applied to your website, go to the Google Search Console and find the Manual Actions section in the left menu.

Hopefully, you’ll see something like this:

If you see any warnings here, make sure you fix them and then submit your site for reconsideration (also done in the GSC under Manual Actions).

5. Other cases

Now of course, there are some other certain situations when you might want to Disavow some links that you’re sure provide no value, for example when the linking sites have viruses or malicious software.

However, if these links take 1% or less of your total links, then you probably shouldn’t bother (except if that 1% means thousands of links, which looks more like an attack).

John Mueller said that it’s also possible to disavow links in order to prevent future penalties and achieve ‘peace of mind’. That’s a sneaky way of threatening webmasters that they will get penalized if they don’t submit their links.

However, Gary Illyes later said that he would not bother to disavow some spammy links.

I have a site that gets 100,000 visits every two weeks. I haven’t looked at the links to it for two years, even though I’ve been told that it has some porn site links. I’m fine with that. I don’t use the disavow file. Don’t overuse it. It is a big gun. Overusing it can destroy your rankings in a matter of hours. Don’t be afraid of sites that you don’t know. There’s no way you can know them all. If they have content, and they are not spammy, why would you disavow them? Sites like this are very unlikely to hurt you, and they may help you. I personally trust Google filters.
	Gary Illyes
	Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google / @methode

Our recommendation is to ignore these links unless there’s a visible penalty on your website, such as a manual action in GSC or a massive drop in traffic/rankings which can’t be attributed to anything else (HTTPS migration, redesign or some other major modifications to the site).

If you think your site is suffering from some bad links and you really want to remove the links you suspect, start slow, by disavowing only 5-10 links at a time. Wait for a couple of weeks to spot any effects and then expand by updating the disavow file with some new spammy links.

Track your rankings carefully to spot any differences and if you see massive negative impacts, remove the disavow files and stop messing with the tool immediately.

When NOT to Use the Disavow Tool

Usually, the answer is to never use the disavow tool except for the cases mentioned above. Some people think that it’s a good idea to use the Disavow Tool from time to time to make sure they clean their link profile, but they end up messing things up very badly!

To get a better understanding, here are some specific scenarios when you should not disavow the links:

1. When there’s no drastic drop in rankings

The reasons for which you may experience a drastic Google ranking drop may vary from website to website and in generally there is a serious guideline violation. But if you don’t experience that, you shouldn’t be panicking.

You may just be outranked by a competitor. As a consequence, there is no need to rush and get the disavow tool from your link survival kit.

You should try to analyze and track your competitor and see what is their SEO and content strategy. Also, you should maybe step up and improve your own approaches.

2. When you’re not sure if it is a penalty

When you receive a manual penalty the situation is pretty clear. Especially if you make use of Google Webmaster Tools ( which we strongly recommend). You will receive a message in which they warn you about the actions taken against you.

While this is easy and straight forward, an algorithmic penalty is not that obvious. You’ll have to make a personal assessment to see if it’s a penalty or it’s just the fact that the links are low quality. And if it is indeed an algorithmic penalty, what is harming your site’s ranking?

3. When there’s a small drop in rankings

It may just be a quick road bump in the road. You may always experience a flux in ranking that is unpredictable. As a golden rule, if you don’t have an explicit message from Google that you’ve been penalized or if you know you have an unnatural link profile, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Your ranking could just recover on its own after a day or two. Moreover, a small drop in search engine ranking may just be influenced by the fact that you have many low quality links pointing to your site.

The solution here isn’t to remove those links, but to focus on building higher quality ones.

Usually, an algorithmic penalty will take place after an algorithm update. Sure, sometimes you might get penalized much later after the update, but usually, if that’s the case, chances are that it’s rather a manual penalty than an algorithmic one.

If you’re not sure whether there’s been an update on Google’s algorithm, you can check the CognitiveSEO Signals Tool.

You also have to check what the algorithm was about. Google doesn’t say much, but sometimes it says things like “this update will affect website that are not optimized for mobile”. If you can correlate what Google says with your website, then you have an issue.

4. For testing purposes

The final advice on when not to use the Google disavow tool would be to not just use it so you can see how it works. Cyrus Shepard made such an experiment and here are his “sad” findings.

DON’T DO THIS AS HOME!!! – Just don’t toy around with this tool, you may get fried!

The saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is very much true in this case. This is one of those tools that you just don’t want to learn at your own cost. It’s too powerful and the damage it may do if misused may be irreversible.

The Disavow Tool is an advanced feature and should not be used unless one actually knows what they’re doing. It’s risky and shouldn’t be played with.

Unless it’s one of the scenarios mentioned above, which are pretty critical if you ask me, it should be avoided.

Don’t disavow links or domains with low performance. Low DA links are part of a natural link profile. In the end, disavowing them might do more harm than good.

Maybe a new, small website with low domain performance writes about your website and links to it. Should you disavow these types of links? Definitely not.

Someday, that low domain performance website might become really popular and have a great deal of domain authority. Not only this, but the link might already be contributing to your site’s well being.

How To Easily Disavow Links

As stated above, you usually have to disavow links in severe cases of web spam and negative SEO attacks or manual actions. In case your site was massively spammed or already penalized and you have no way of removing those links, then you can use the Disavow Tool without any limitations to try and fix things.

Remember that you’re doing this at your own risk. Don’t rush Disavowing links if you’re not penalized yet. 

The truth is that disavowing links is a very difficult and time consuming process. In the end, it sounds as simple as uploading a text file on the web, but generating that text file correctly can be a bummer.

You’ll have to differentiate the bad links from the good ones and Google doesn’t actually help you do that. It will just tell you that your site has been penalized for spammy links.

Luckily, there is an easy way of dealing with unnatural links. By using the CognitiveSEO Unnatural Link Detection Tool. The tool makes it very easy to identify those links using an algorithm. The links that fit spammy links patterns will be marked as unnatural.

It is not, however, 100% automated. Before the tool can actually determine which links are good and which links are bad, you’ll have to sort out your anchor texts. This is usually done quickly in the tool via the anchor text classifier.

The graphic above has been modified for privacy purposes. It is just an example.

The tool will automatically identify most branded keywords. However, the ones only containing keywords your site wants to target will be Misc by default. You can use the search filter on the left and bulk classify. The more diverse your anchor text distribution, the better for SEO, but the longer it will take to classify.

After that, you will get to see the unnatural links:

Once you have your list of unnatural links, you can mark them for disavow. You can also choose to reclassify the links as natural (OK) if you want. We highly advise you to take a look over your unnatural links (if you don’t have thousands). Mark any links that aren’t obviously spammy as Suspect and decide later if they really need to be disavowed.

After that, from the Unnatural Link Detection menu you can Export Google Disavow which will result in the Browser downloading a text file containing all the links/domains in the proper format for uploading it to the Disavow Tool.

It’s best if you try the tool yourself. You can sign up for a free trial and also get a live demo in which one of the cognitiveSEO team members will showcase the tool for you.

Remember, if there’s no penalty yet, those links might be the ones keeping your website near the top. Disavowing links can also result in a drop in rankings, so be very careful how you play with it!

It’s always a better idea to try to completely remove any spammy links to your website from the web. It’s time consuming, but it’s the more efficient way and it’s also what Google recommends.

If you want a step-by-step approach, you can take a look at this more in-depth guide on using the disavow tool.

Is the Disavow Tool Actually Helpful?

There’s a lot of controversy around the Google Disavow Tool. Is it actually useful? Will it prevent a penalty? Does it actually work?

The truth is that for each of the successful penalty recovery stories documented by us, there are indefinitely more out there that have not seen any success, even when using the Disavow Tool as recommended by Google.

In 2016, Google introduced Penguin 4.0 which supposedly made Google capable of ignoring spammy links altogether, as they were posted. In other words, the Disavow Tool worked and the spammy links database has improved the algorithm by making it able to run real-time.

But in this case, is disavowing the links needed anymore?

This question has been asked many times around different events, on social media and throughout Webmaster Hangouts. Some answers came up to help us draw some conclusions:

Gary Illyes said on social media that:

For penguin specifically there’s less need, yes, but if you see the crap, you can help us help you by using it.
	Gary Illyes
	Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google / @methode

Also, John Mueller said this about keeping or removing the disavow files:

If you’ve cleaned up the links & they’ve been reprocessed, you can remove those URLs from the disavow file.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 28, 2016

The question wasn’t really about cleaning the links, but about the necessity of keeping the disavow file post Penguin 4.0. However, John’s answer instead reminds us that the spammy links should still be removed from the internet, which is something Google mentioned when they first launched the Google Disavow Tool.

Eric Kuan from Google said that “Google may not process them (disavowed links) if they don’t see you making a serious manual attempt at removing those links.” If you’ve spammed the website yourself, that makes sense. However, if you’re the victim of a negative SEO attack, it’s kind of unfair, don’t you think?

The truth is, there’s no guarantee that using the disavow tool and submitting your site for reconsideration will remove a penalty. The best way to not get penalized is to not do anything that will get you penalized. However, it’s worth a shot in critical situations.

In the end, you have to consider that the Disavow Tool:

• Takes time: If you want to do things the right way, you’ll have to spend a lot of time researching your link profile and making sure that you’re not disavowing any useful links (remember, the CognitiveSEO Tool can help you speed up this process)
• Can mess things up: Remember, the Disavow Tool is an advanced feature and should only be used in specific cases. You shouldn’t waste your time with it if you’re not 100% sure it’s the right way to go.

• Has actual guarantee it will work: Even if you know what you’re doing, there’s no guarantee it will help. Who knows, it might actually make things worse.

Conclusion

The main point that you should remember is that this tool shouldn’t be used if you’re not 100 percent sure how it works. Disavowing links is a powerful and irreversible process that may resolve your ranking drops or may throw your site into search engine oblivion.

Even though the Google Disavow Tool proves to be an invaluable asset to use in times of need, it can very well be misunderstood and easily used for the wrong purpose.

If you couldn’t prevail at removing unnatural links through traditional methods, you should obviously try disavowing them. But the tool should be used only in specific situations, such as a Manual Penalty. If you’re unsure how to use it and what it’s capable of doing, you should avoid it. However, if you think you’ve tried everything else, it’s worth a shot.

By adding smaller amounts of links at a time to the disavow file, you can avoid messing things up very badly, although this process is more time consuming.

What are your experiences with the Disavow Tool? Have you successfully recovered from a penalty? Did it not do anything at all? Have you used it to try prevent any future penalties? Let us know in the comments!

The post When You Should and Shouldn’t Use the Google Disavow Tool appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

What is an Unnatural Link about?

In a few words, as it is presented in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, any link that intends to manipulate the PageRank, or the search engine results, no matter if there is a link to your site or an outgoing link from your site, is considered an unnatural link. Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of the Google Guidelines.

From their statements, we deduce that Google’s main concern is to keep users away from bad search experiences, providing them with the most relevant results.

The “naturalness” of a link can be seen as an editorial choice.

The “naturalness” of a link is, up to a point, an editorial choice. It all boils down to your ability to link to a site from your site based on usefulness. For instance, you are a fan of British Airways and you choose to talk about this company on your blog, your site or on forums because you really had a good experience with this brand. You really want to tell the world what a great company they are and how their services helped you a lot in a certain situation. Doing this is not considered to be a violation of Google’s Guidelines. However, if you write about British Airways because this company promises you free flight tickets or saves you from paying taxes for your extra luggage, then this is an unnatural link we are talking about.(unless you mark the link with the rel=nofollow HTML attribute)

Unnatural Link Synonyms

Some people refer to unnatural links with the following synonyms:

• inorganic links
• toxic links
• low quality links
• artificial links
• manually created links
• deceptive links
• manipulative links
• impact links

Where is the end of “natural” and the beginning of “unnatural” ?

If you find it hard to make a delimitation between natural and unnatural in terms of links, here is a thing that you can do. You need to ask yourself:

“Would I still be linking to that site if the SERPs didn’t exist?

Would I still be recommending this site/blog/company/etc. if search engines didn’t exist? If the answer to this question is yes, then it is an organic or natural link we are talking about. If the answer to this question is no, then that link is most likely a violation of Google’s guidelines and, therefore, is considered to be unnatural.

Long story short, unnatural links comes down to link selling. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about money, gifts, a massage :), a 6 Pack or any sort of material compensation. It is still a sort of transaction. The same situation applies when we’re talking about excessive link exchange. It is still a sort of unnatural transaction that does not occur naturally but is artificially generated with the purpose to influence the ranking in Google.

The war against link selling is meant to maintain the competition on a level playing field, offering equal chances to all websites. You wouldn’t want somebody who just has more money to automatically be able to rank better on the search engines.

I know that as nice as this “equal chance” story may sound , AdWords still exists and, like it or not, is a kind of link selling with the distinction that you get an invoice for the transaction. Without getting into ethical issues, at the end of the day, AdWords remains a Google accepted form of selling links that often brings results for those with deep pockets.

The most common unnatural link examples

Much like the law, the “naturalness” of a link can be can be interpreted in our favor. For instance, excessive link exchanges or linking to low quality sites are practices that are in disagreement with Google’s guidelines. But how much is excessive? How low should the quality of a site be? In order to avoid these kind of ambiguities, we will give some examples of common links that have an unnatural flavor, according to Google’s Guidelines:

• Any link that is generated due to a payment in money

On the surface, things seem pretty clear here: if you offer money in exchange for placing your link on a site, that link will be considered unnatural. However, things are a little more complicated than this. Let’s say you organize a charity event and you want to link to a company that donated an amount of money to help you out with the event. Is it considered to be an unnatural link? Well, it depends. If that company gives donations in exchange for links and uses these actions as a link building strategy, then it is surely a violation of the “Guidelines”. If the donor company has just a couple of links thanks to some sponsorship campaign it did, then is very likely they are organically generated.

• Any link that is generated due to an exchange of goods and services

If you receive or give any good or service in return for a link, then that link is considered to be unnatural. Let’s say that a company that is selling frying pans sends one of their products to 100 cooking bloggers, encouraging them to write about the frying pan received as a gift. Will Google consider the links that the bloggers will generate as being unnatural? It will surely do. But, if the frying pans company wants to stay on Google’s good side, they have to prove that they didn’t have the intention of manipulating the PageRank. Thereby, they should ask the bloggers to mark the links as nofollow so they cannot pass PageRank.

• Links that are widely distributed in the Footer of a page or on the Blogroll

If for blogrolls things are pretty clear, when it comes to links that appear in footers, things get a bit complicated. Let’s start with blogrolls: If in your blogroll you are linking to pages relevant for your content, then those links are considered to be natural. But if you are having 100 links on your page and more than half of them can be found in the blogroll, then it is clear that the situation is not “natural”.

When in comes to links distributed in footers, Google is being a bit ambivalent. Let’s say you are a web design company and you place in the footer of the designed sites a link to your webpage. Google might consider this action as ok but might also considered it as unnatural, claiming that it is a self-made link or it’s a link that is generated due to an exchange of service. How does Google decide whether these kind of links are natural or unnatural? Depending on the intent. It should be clear for Google that the webmaster is linking to a site on purpose and not because it was required to. Ok, you’ll say. And how can Google accurately identify the intent? Well, I think that’s a thing that only Google knows.

• Any link that is a result of a “link to me and I’ll link to you” campaign

Let’s say that you are the webmaster of a financial audit site. On your page you have a section where you recommend several accounts, attorneys and tax experts. Maybe some of the ones you recommended also linked to our page. Is this considered “excessive link exchanges”? Most likely no. But if on your website you have a list with hundreds of recommendation from a wide geographical area, and most of your “recommendations” also link to your page, then it is very likely that you’ll receive an penalty from the “Google Penguin”.

• Links on Low-Quality Web-directories or Bookmark sites

This looks quite clear also, doesn’t it? If you have many links on low-quality webdirectories, they are most likely to be considered as unnatural. But then again, the question arises:

Who draws the line between low and high quality? Google, of course. We are playing in its yard.

And how does the big “G” decide the quality of a web directory? Most likely, a web directory is considered to have a high quality if it has some sort of human interaction, such as an editorial process. In this case not all sites can auto-submit their links and there is a whole process whereby the web-directory decides the relevancy of a certain site in list with links.

• Links with optimized anchor text (articles, press releases etc)

These kinds of links are very common, and the digital world is full of articles stuffed with anchor text. I’ll go back to the frying pan company to give an example on this line. Let’s say that our company writes an article on a cooking blog and it contains passages such as the following:

It is great to cook using good frying pans. Depending on the frying pan you are using, you can prepare tasty food in no time. Frying pans add value to the quality of your food and make cooking a pleasant experience.

Doesn’t look very natural, does it? I bet Google agrees on this one too.

You’ve got mail! The mail…

The story is clear: if you’re selling links to influence page rank or you violate in some way the “guidelines”, you may get the unwanted Google Penalty message. After you update your Facebook status with sad faces and get out in the street screaming that life is unfair, you have to put yourself together and find the way to get back on track.

Now, you need to remove just the unnatural links. You can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you could use a smart tool that outlines the links that may have caused the penalty.

Let’s say you’ve come clean and you ask Google to take a look at your site to see that your redemption is real. When checking the situation, what the big “G” wants to see is that the issue is fixed and that this violation won’t be happening again. So, how can you convince the search engine that the situation is indeed like this? After removing the unnatural links you should do a well documented reconsideration request. Do you know the saying “ a sin confessed is half forgiven?” Surely Google does. In the request you are sending you don’t have to speak only about the improved current situation and about how you are going to do things from now on. You have to give details about the “dirty job” that you’ve done and how you got rid of it.

Other Unnatural Link Resources you should read

• Matt Cutts about  Paid Links
• How to Detect Unnatural Links
• An Unnatural Link Recovery Story
• Unnatural Links – The NO.BS. Guide [preso]
• Various “Unnatural” Problems reported on the Google Product Forums
• How Google Broke the Bank – The Famous Halifax Penalty [case study]

Conclusion

Can we dance waltz on a minefield?

With all the guidelines and restrictions, it feels like Google is asking us to dance waltz on a minefield. Some restrictions are needed in order to maintain a healthy climate among the link building strategies.

The question that’s probably on your lips now is: are there chances to follow Google’s guidelines religiously and still rank high for the keywords you want to rank?

With the hope that I brought some light in the dark world of unnatural links, I’d be more than pleased to hear your opinion on this matter.

The post Unnatural Links – Quick & Dirty Definition + Examples appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Oui. Ja. Si. Ja. Da. Ken. Hai. 是 [Shi]. Já. Haan. Да. Evet. Nai. Tak. Taip. Kyllä. Ja. Ya.

They are actually killing you site and business, that is if you are building a sustainable medium to long-term online business as most people do. If you are into the “trickery” business (like short term  with no brand attachments … ) then unnatural links may still do it for you. (read about it at the end of the article).

Here are a few things on what this article is/isn’t:

• This is not SEO propaganda – just a catchy title 😉
• This is a Serious SEO Case Study.
• This is about link building strategies that work/[or don’t] in 2013.
• This is about real sites with real problems.
• This is about Google.
• This is for every SEO Pro! (penalized or not)

How good is Google at spotting shady links you might ask yourself?

This case study analyzes the ranking trends on a set of sites and correlates this information with their unnatural link profiles.

We took 4 sites in the “birthday invitations, cards and more” niche that were ranking top 10 on a set of keywords representative for the niche. One of these sites stands out with a steady SEO visibility growth in the last year.

This is the SEO visibility of the CardStore.com site for the last 2 years. Looking at the SEO visibility trend, it seems that they also had SERP volatility in the past due to some Google Penalties or Algorithms updates. Even so, they recovered and are increasing their SEO visibility more and more.

Looking good! Their link profile is Green and Orange.  This means that the site is having a healthy link profile. Healthy link profiles may have a small amount of suspicious links. Nothing to worry about!

On the other hand, some of their competitors don’t have such a great SEO visibility.

Correlating the ranking data with the linking data, it is almost obvious why some sites are struggling in Google while others are winning.

Looking at the correlation between the unnatural links and SEO visibility, we can easily see that Google pushes up the sites with more natural looking link profiles. The sites with shady link profiles are steadily declining.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the story of each individual site.

1. CardStore.com

Let’s look at what CardStore is doing, in terms of link building strategies.

By checking the competitive link analysis area we can easily spot a very low amount of commercial anchor text compared to the other sites. This usually indicates a site that is doing either smart SEO or isn’t doing SEO at all. The other sites seem to be a bit more aggressive in terms of SEO.

Another important fact that dictates a steady growth would be a consistent monthly link acquisition.

This chart only tells you that the CardStore site has a constant link acquisition trend, with numbers that are above their competitors’. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the links. If we look at the link velocity we see that this is trend started in 2009 and goes on since then. This single fact increases the chances of something “good” actually going on, leading to a link profile with a much higher number of referring domains.

Trying to discover some of their major link building strategies, I noticed what link building strategies they did not use. I refer to Web Directories and Article Directories Link Building.

Looking at some of the other competitors, we see 2 of them being quite active on Webdirectory link acquisitions, while others have a similar and more natural link acquisition pattern.

Overall this site’s main characteristic is that

No External Backlink Over-optimization!

 2. Paperculture.com

Their webmaster confirmed that the site received unnatural link warnings from Google and also said that they did not see a decrease in search traffic.

In the PaperCulture case we see an increasing SEO visibility trend, even though the site has been sent unnatural link warnings. Taking a look at the naturalness of their link profile we can see that they have a small amount of unnatural links.

Their main problem seems to be the struggle to grow their SEO visibility.

It is important to know that unnatural link warnings do not necessarily mean a decrease in traffic they might also mean an SEO growth blockage. Removing the unnatural links might enable the site to grow faster, only if they increase the link acquisition trend in a natural way.

3. SimplytoImpress.com

With the high level of toxic links this site has, this only indicates the certainty of a Google Penalty or Unnatural Links Warning. This is also confirmed also by the SEO visibility trend. The latest major SEO visibility fall is on the Google Penguin 2.0 date.

At a more in-depth look, we spot the main problem in their link building strategy:

Webdirectories …

From my point of view, this “ancient” link building strategy, that once worked extremely well, slaps all the sites that abused it quite hard now. My recommendation for link profiles such as this is to start diluting them by doing “natural” link building and steadily removing the web directory links that were built in the past.

4. Finestationery.com

Their naturalness level is at the lower end limit. This means that they are on “moving ground” and that they are at risk to be hit by Google because of unnatural links.

SEO visibility has a rather big decline! My opinion is that this big decrease is not related to unnatural links but more to a Google Update in January 2013, a possible Google Panda as reported on several sites for that particular timeframe.

Having identified their biggest drop and looking at the rest of the visibility we see a linear visibility with a very small increase trend. It is important to notice that Google Penguin 2.0 did not have any impact on this site, even if they have a link profile with 19% to 25% unnatural and suspect links. I have seen these numbers on a lot of other sites that have problems with their link profile and have not been penalized yet. Looking at how Google’s algorithms have evolved in terms of spotting unnatural links, I would say that it is only a matter of time until these kind of link profiles take a big hit and loose any SEO visibility that they might still have.

In this particular case their brand vs commercial anchor text distribution is looking pretty natural. The “anchor text distribution” is also used by Google, in order to determine the overall naturalness of a site’s link profile.

Conclusion & Advice

With several in-house studies we did, similar to this one, I would “dare” to say that sites that haven’t been over SEO-ed have a very good chance of continuing with steady rankings and growth, while sites that move over the 15-20% unnatural links limit, have a very high chance of being penalized by Google for unnatural links.

Sites with Orange + Green Link Profiles are considered safe sites, in terms of unnatural link penalties. Unfortunately not many sites fit in this category and for the ones that don’t, I highly recommend starting to actively build links by not building links :).

That means forget about SEO for a moment (at least the way you did it before) and try to recover that lost authority that you once had. In order to do that you just need to prove to Google that your site is trustworthy of being top ranked in their index. You can only do this by following their guidelines and not by trying to bend the “law” in order to get a better ranking. Re-build your business model by focusing on SEO as an integrated marketing activity and not by trying to trick Google in thinking that your site is “the site” that should be ranked in the top spot.

And remember … all this makes sense, only if you care about Google’s traffic.

Good luck and I hope this case study helped you understand link naturalness, toxicity and SEO volatility better.

Unnatural Link Detection Tool Used

The unnatural link analysis was done using the automatic unnatural link detection Widget in the cognitiveSEO platform. You can try it yourself, if you have’t already, using the free 14 day trial.

A new feature that was silently added last week, is the Unnatural Link Comparison widget in the Competitive Link Analysis Area. This case study already highlights some of use cases for this chart. The major use case is the ability to compare multiple sites from a backlink profile naturalness point of view.

Always open to questions and discussions … so if you have any, ask them in the comments.

14 day Free Trial!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

PS: If your business model is short term, you should be reading this.

<em>Photo <a href="http://pierrecolletderby.blogspot.ro/2011_11_01_archive.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">*</a> </em>

The post [Unnatural] Links are DEAD – A Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

This guide combined with our freshly launched automatic unnatural link detection system gives you super SEO powers to recover and prevent any unnatural link penalty.

I would like to personably thank Cezary Lech and the MaxRoy team for organizing SMD 2013. I was at the 2011 event also, and I can tell you that the folks in Poland are getting better and better at SEO ( either black or white, though they have a slight affinity for the black arts J).

Here are some photos from the event.

It was a pleasure talking to smart guys such as Dan Petrovic and Toni Anicic from DejanSEO. Josh Bachnisky from SENuke,  Dixon Jones  from MajesticSEO, Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics and all the others at SMD (sorry if I missed you here … there were just so many cool guys there)

Wishing you a quicker site recovery and a better link understanding for any future link building strategies you might implement!

The post Unnatural Links – The NO.BS Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.