Unnatural Backlinks

[Andy Miller]

I have been hit by latest Penguin update and I think it is due to my backlinks not looking natural ( I did not get any email fro Google ) .

If this is the case what is the best course of action

Remove or
Add more natural links
or a mixture of both

Is Penguin now in the algorithm or must I wait until for next update to see results?'

Thanks

 

[Normansmith]

This all depends on a number of things; how many back links are pointing to your website, what percentage is your anchor text split, what is the average in your sector, are you within this average. Are any websites pointing to you that have been penalised, is your website hosted in a good neighbourhood ?
If your position or traffic have dropped on the date of the release of either P1 or P2 then one or more of the above have probably caused it. Without removing the bad apples no amount of good apples will change that !

 

[JonathanSEO]

If you didn't get an unnatural links message then it's tricky.

Depending how bad your link profile is I would start trying to clean links up as Penguin is only going to get more prevalent over time.

You then need to replace them with actual genuine links.

 

[Andy Miller]

Thanks, anyway to find out if websites pointing to me been penalised. It is strange it seems to have been selective ie some terms did not drop whilst others did.

 

[Shelly Watson]

I have been hit by latest Penguin update and I think it is due to my backlinks not looking natural ( I did not get any email fro Google ) .

If this is the case what is the best course of action

Remove or
Add more natural links
or a mixture of both

Is Penguin now in the algorithm or must I wait until for next update to see results?'

Thanks

I suggest you to remove unnatural links first. There are some tools to check out the back links to your site. Such as Majestic Site Explorer

 

[webgeek]

If you run the Cemper LinkDetox tool, look for the obvious Toxic1 / Toxic2.

Then, look at sites with a decent number of inbound links but which are now PR0. If they have PR and lost it, good odds they're penalised.

There's a lot of rules for evaluating sites/links, plus a bit of intuition. Knowing which link directories and article directories are considered poison can be easy for the obvious spam, hard for the ones that appear human edited and well cared for, and darned near impossible for that tier of sites just below the business.com/yhaoo directory/dmoz upper tier.

A lot of sites owned by the same person, on the same SEOHosting account, same IP, domain registration, DNS - there's clues that you're seeing site networks.

Google is getting better at spotting these, and more thorough in penalising with each iteration of Penguin.

Dunno what everyone else commits to for a disavow, but figure multiple data sources, deduped, then 25 to 100 checks run against them. It takes me a day of time and several apps to accomplish.

These are no trivial matter.