Webmaster Tools Warning Email - Unnatural inbound links!!

[360interactive]

This morning I received an email from Google -

Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google'sWebmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to (link removed). There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

It goes further, but obviously it was a shock. I've logged into webmaster tools and was expecting to see a lot of spam links, but to my surprise it all looks ok. The biggest shock is 5,277 links from a client of mine(a university). I host a page for them and they obviously have this link on too many pages. Obviously I'm going to get in touch and rectify it, but can anyone share any experiences of this? I've checked and it isn't a site wide problem, it says it just targets the problem pages. My rankings appear to be the same.

From what I've read online it isn't all bad, in that google are effectively just not counting those links rather than penalising the whole site. Any views welcome though.

 

[360interactive]

On closer inspection I have 450+ links from GitHub.com which originates from a Kickstarter campaign I helped fund, one if the rewards was for a link on the software developers page, which was a github page. This seems to have been copied many times for some reason, I suspect that may also be a problem. The thing is these links have all been going on for the past 6-8 months. I only joined webmaster tools a few weeks ago so is this why I am only getting the warning now? There are no other new links listed in webmaster rooks that I can see as spam.

 

[DotMedia]

Hi 360,

Going on just what you've written here I am more likely to lean more towards the university being the issue.

PM if you'd like me to have a look.

 

[lynxus]

This morning I received an email from Google -



It goes further, but obviously it was a shock. I've logged into webmaster tools and was expecting to see a lot of spam links, but to my surprise it all looks ok. The biggest shock is 5,277 links from a client of mine(a university). I host a page for them and they obviously have this link on too many pages. Obviously I'm going to get in touch and rectify it, but can anyone share any experiences of this? I've checked and it isn't a site wide problem, it says it just targets the problem pages. My rankings appear to be the same.

From what I've read online it isn't all bad, in that google are effectively just not counting those links rather than penalising the whole site. Any views welcome though.

Strange,
I only say this because one of my clients has a link to me on 7,694 pages.

Others also have many 1000's of pages linking back... Makes me wonder if something else happened to make your links look unnatural?

Could it be because generally you only have a few links back from each domain?

 

[Sergiy]

There was a similar problem at http://www.technavio.com. Back in October we were penilized for referring pages and unnatural links. We saw a drop in back links from 11 thousand to 8 and a drop of referring pages from 17.5K to 8.5 k, but our rankings weren't directly affected. Impressions remained the same I think.