subject: Seo Tips In Removing Unnatural Links [print this page] For over the past couple of months, unnatural linking issues have been causing chaos among the SEO community.
With Google sending out batch after batch of unnatural links notices to many webmasters and Search Engine Optimisation experts, via Google Webmaster Tools, nowadays, it has become a necessary SEO task to be alert of the presence of unnatural links and be ready to remove them from your site.
As unnatural links are artificial links pointing to your site that use techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines such as doing link spams, paid linking, comment spam, among others which is mainly intended to manipulate a pages ranking, here are some SEO TIPS to how to remove unnatural links if you dont want to be penalized.
1. Get Data of all your InBound Links
Make an inventory of all of your inbound links. You can make use of some reliable SEO Tools recommended by most professional SEOs like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to gather all your backlinks and export them to an Excel spreadsheet file. Then categorize the data according to:
Site Name
Link Location / Page (where your link is placed)
Page Title
Anchor Text
Page Authority
Domain Authority
Content of the Link Page (rate it high-quality, good or poor content)
How Difficult to Remove the Link
How Harmful the Link Is
Priority
2. Assess all your Backlinks
Manually evaluate each of the sites to determine just how unnatural or harmful the links are. Though there is no specific formula determining how terrible a link actually is, here are some red flags to look out for:
With Unreadable or Poor Content
Duplicate content: To check if the site has duplicate content, you can copy and paste the first sentence into Google search and see if it shows up across 100s of other sites.
No contact information.
Having links to casinos or adult sites.
links that are randomly inserted into the content with no value to your targeted audience
Links are with others under a section called Friends, Partners, or Sponsors. This is an indication to Google that it was paid.
3. Remove Only What You Need
Factoring in those red flags, its really important to categorize the links based on how difficult to remove the links and how harmful they are. This will give you a priority of what links you need to tackle first. Sort out the links from high to low. Target the top 5-10 links (based off priority) each month that you will try to remove. This is because Google is vague about what specific links they note as unnatural, so removing hundreds of links at once could end up causing you more harm than good.
4. Send an Email to Webmasters
To make it easier for you to send an email to webmasters, its recommended to create a template email giving them details such as who you are, the link you want to be removed from their site, and where your link is placed. Then make a follow up every 4 days or so if you dont receive any reply from them.
