Unnatural Outbound Links Penalty Removal- A Case Study

April 29, 2014 Sarvesh Bagla 0

What is Unnatural Link Building Penalty?

According to the Google Quality Guidelines an actual Unnatural Links definition is “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 our guidelines.”

What are Paid Links in Google’s point of view?

Paid Links are links which have been put in a blog post or an article, because cash or kind had been exchanged for it, according to Matt Cutts are unethical and liable to Penalty.

What Happens if Your Website Gets Penalized for Unnatural Outgoing Links?

If you do not take necessary steps put up in Google Guidelines, as mentioned by Matt Cutts.

Page Rank will disappear.
In a case that we had received, their penalty hadn’t affected Google SERP Ranking. Neither did it put a negative impact on the organic traffic but then, its case specific.
The website took action immediately. If they would have delayed in responding and taking action, it might have resulted in a great damage to the reputation and rankings of their website. They would penalize the website for 6 months to say the least.

One of our clients received following message on April 3rd 2014

Unnatural Outbound Links

The fact was that our client hadn’t allowed any advertisements on their blog/site. They used their blog, for online-promotion of third party products. We had found a total of 349 outbound links or simply outgoing links on their website and blog. On their main website, which had 180 pages were created in a Joomla CMS. We had checked outbound links because we hadn’t found any suitable free tool for external links checker.

In case you have small website. We had tried some tools with some websites, like http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/outbound-links.html, which, if you have a small website, might be useful to you as well:

We had divided the site in small chunks and checked it thoroughly, starting from Menu Bar, we had moved to the body, widgets and finally to the site wide footer.

The site owner had the blog created on WordPress. Thanks to the creators of WordPress plug-ins, we didn’t find any problem working in the WordPress blog and in no time with help of the WordPress Plug-in Outbound Link Manager; we had the entire list of outbound links mapped in our admin panel.

[Example only – we have found numerous links here]

Below the example of Excel sheet that we had created-

Source URL	Destination URL	Anchor Text	Previous Status	Action Taken?
xyz.com/1.html	http://www.example.com	Example	do follow	Converted to “no follow”
Xyz.com	http://www.facebook.com	Image	“do follow”	No Action Taken

We had prepared an excel sheet with the “do follow” links that we had changed to “no follow” and the “do follow” links which we had kept intact.

On April 4^th 2014, we had sent a reconsideration request to Google, on our clients’ behalf, with following message:

Hello,

I had received an email from you on April 03 2014 about unnatural outbound links penalty. We have reviewed the website and found a total of [430] outbound links. Of these only [180] were do-follow links. We have applied no-follow tag on most of these except outgoing links to our social media profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and G+.

Please review the list of all outbound links and the corrective action we have taken by clicking here. [a link to the file on Google Doc. was put]

We believe we are now strictly following the prescribed guidelines for outbound links. We request you to remove the penalty.

It there’s something we still need to fix, please do let us know.

Thanks and regards,

XXXXXX

XXXXXXX.com/XXXXX

On April 10th 2014, we received following message –

Reconsideration request for http://www.XXXXXXX.com/XXXXX: Manual spam action revoked –

In the next 2 or 3 days our Page Rank was reinstated. Hence, taking the right steps on time helped us save our client.

Hope this article was helpful.

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Sarvesh Bagla

Sarvesh Bagla is an SEO expert and the Founder & CEO of Techmagnate, a leading SEO Company in India. Sarvesh can often be found reviewing seo strategies for client sites with the SEO team and is actively involved in the SEO for Techmagnate.com. He regularly consults, trains and speaks on SEO, PPC and local search techniques.