Un-natural links is the hot topic and new challenge for SEO world. In the past we SEO people use everything we could use to build link when Google told us that link is important for ranking. Unfortunately we didn’t listen carefully that actually Google was referring to natural links but to be honest in the past Google itself didn’t pay that much attention to what it preached. Due to this 1000s of websites enjoyed huge success just based on building 1000s of automated links.
I also remember my very first company which had huge success just because of its doorway pages, approach of putting 100s of hidden links in footer, and traditional link building. This company increased from 6 people to 75 people in 4 years and then unfortunately liquidated at the end when Google penalised its product. It’s past now.
Now during recent months Google has started putting lots of emphasis on natural links and changed the context of link building.. Actually Link building is dead and now it called link earning. Next question is what you should do to repair previously built un-natural links.
If you have been using directories, lots of text links in articles, spam blog comments or other links you built purely for SEO then you can take the following steps to clean all those links.
Get in touch with your SEO agency, link builder or whoever managed it for you. Ask the person to remove those links or edit it. Make sure you put all the links that you edit or remove in one document that later you can use. I am sure Google understands that it will not be possible for you to remove or edit all those unnatural links as it will be difficult to find the login or access for everything. But Google recommends you that you try hard to remove as many un-natural links you can.
Once you remove the links it’s also important that you try to communicate and help Google realise that you have tried to correct things. For this as I suggested above put everything in one document regarding the links you removed or have intention to remove. Google calls this doc as a great document. Great document is an indicative of the amount of effort that you’ve put in to clean up your site. Put document of all the links you have taken down or you are going to remove and send it to Google through Request Consideration feature in Google Webmasters Tool. Find more detail here Reconsideration Requests – Google
Last and final step – It’s understandable that it will not possible for you to remove or edit all the un-natural links. For such links you can use Google’s Disavow links tool recently introduced. See the full detail about this tool here Webmaster Disallow Tool.
Caution: Google highly recommend that you remove the links manually than you use this tool.
