How to Remove Unnatural Links From Your Site

For many years, SEO professionals and marketers relied on a numbers game when it comes to ranking higher on search results. Because links are seen as votes for your site, the site with the most votes typically wins. Not anymore.

If you are a webmaster using Google’s Webmaster Tools, chances are you might have gotten that unusual links warning from the search giant itself. The warnings tell webmasters that bogus sites are linking to them and it might hurt their search rankings. The warning reminds them to stay within their Webmaster Guidelines.

The warnings also encourage Webmasters to make changes to their own sites to ensure that these adhere to the guidelines and suggest that they remove these unnatural links.

Many webmasters were alarmed by such warnings, and even if Matt Cutts came out with a pronouncement that webmasters should not panic, it still begs the question “How do you remove unnatural links?”

But First, What Are Unnatural Links?

Unnatural links are those links that were set up or created to manipulate your page’s ranking. These are links that you get from black hat linking strategies, including listing from thousands of free directories, social media profile linking, blog comment spamming, forum spamming, link farming, link exchanges and other similar methods.

Unnatural links, therefore, are links coming from sites or pages that are considered to be in a bad neighborhood, or have no relevance at all to what you offer.

With the recent Penguin update, Google is now able to detect unnatural links coming into your site and it seems that they are bent on punishing those who have tried to manipulate their rankings using this method.

As a result, you could be delisted from Google’s search results until you have corrected the unnatural links problem. Either that or your ranking sinks down to the bottom.

How to Cut Down Your Unnatural Links

Get a list of incoming links. You can get this list from Google’s Webmaster Tools, under the Traffic section of the left navigational bar and then the Links to Your Site link.You can download a spreadsheet listing all the links to your site. You would need to go over which of these links are unnatural and irrelevant to your site. A good way to start is by checking Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to find out which links are considered bad and which ones are not.

Also be on the lookout for the following:

1)Commercial link networks. If you have been using Build My Rank and other similar link building services, then it is time to get rid of links from these sites. Already, Google has not been indexing these sites and the sites that get links from them.
2)Sidebar links.
3)Links from low-quality sites. Article directories, blogs, and websites that sell links are prime target for devaluation.
4)SEO agency links. Some SEO agencies put up links to your site if you hire them. These are also being downgraded.

A good feature of this spreadsheet is that it also allows you to sort the entries by date. This will allow you to start off from a particular date if you need to.

DIY Removal. Once you have identified the links that you want out, you will have to communicate with the site’s webmaster in order to have these links removed.

You should also take care to have a balanced link profile. What this means is that you should have links from every kind of site on the Internet. For example, if you have too many links coming from blogs and a few of everything else, this might be considered as unnatural. Always remember that your site should have a balance of links from different sources.Furthermore, you should also take a look at the number of links going out from a page or site linking to you. As a rule, the more links coming out from the source, the more likely that it is a paid placement site or a link exchange site.

Disavow the link. If you are working on your rankings on Bing, you should also work to disavow an unnatural link. This will ensure that links from low quality sites would not be counted towards your link profile. Unfortunately, Google has yet to come up with a similar system, but it says that it is working on a similar disavow tool for its search engine.

Use tools. If you are having a hard time cleaning up your incoming links, there are some services and sites that could help. There are sites that you pay for to help you remove these unnatural links to your site, like deletebacklinks.com and removeem.com. Ironic that we should now have services that remove links whereas before you concentrated on hoarding a lot of backlinks to your site.

Tag as NoFollow. If you are sponsoring a blog post or are getting ads from another site, be sure to specify that the ad should include the nofollow attribute if you do not want it to be seen as a way of manipulating rankings. You could also use the nofollow attribute on some sites that give you good traffic referrals, but may be considered as low-quality sites.