Got an 'unnatural outbund links' penalty

[Rostick]

In the past half year or so my rankings took a big hit. Now I just saw this message from Google, from the 5th of October.




- I sold about 6-7 links since the website was born 3 years ago. Just 2 in the last 2 years and I think only 4 of those links are still in place

- I have about 15 link exchanges, all off them created 2-3 years ago

- I have a ton of nofollow bookmaker links, of course

Aside from the above, I see absolutely no reason for this penalty and honestly I really doubt the above points warrant any kind of penalty. I run a clean website, which focuses on quality and I never overdid SEO or did any kind of spam.

I tried the MonitorBacklinks free trial, checked Webmaster tools, but did not find anything. My skill level regarding this kind of issues is average at best.

Any advice or some recommended tool to help me out? Could this be just a case of Google screwing me up for no reason at all?

[baldidiot]

I'm guessing it's to do with the links in the footer.

[Sherlock]

Could this be just a case of Google screwing me up for no reason at all?

No, you answered to yourself already.

Aside from the above, I see absolutely no reason for this penalty and honestly I really doubt the above points warrant any kind of penalty. I run a clean website, which focuses on quality and I never overdid SEO or did any kind of spam.

This is SEO spam:

- I sold about 6-7 links since the website was born 3 years ago. Just 2 in the last 2 years and I think only 4 of those links are still in place

- I have about 15 link exchanges, all off them created 2-3 years ago

You do not care where you link to via useless exchange or where you sold links to. Some footers of those sites look even more awful than yours (xxxp://tennis-predictions.com/).

[Rostick]

Thanks for the input guys. I`m happy that the cause seems to be easily identified. I will clean things up and hope for the best.

You do not care where you link to via useless exchange or where you sold links to. Some footers of those sites look even more awful than yours (xxxp://tennis-predictions.com/).

I remember using opensiteexplorer back then to check for rankings of those websites, it was the best I knew how to evaluate them.

I did all those things when I launched the website 3 years ago. These 'techniques' were not used intentionally - I didn`t know better. I didn`t bother to clean it up as I thought the number of the links was too low to be relevant. Should have cleaned it up anyway, as it looks unprofessional.

[Sherlock]

Well you never can care enough. The site where you link to can always do something tricky. And the issue is that the sites which are interested in dangerous things like link exchange have higher probability to **** something up. Like their admins can buy some even worse SEO than this and then whole footer network can be doomed and marked as linkfarm.

It is really obvious here. Get rid of the footer, link exchanges and paid links. Ask for re-evaluation. Mention only that you deleted footer and links from exchanges, rather do not admit the paid links and hopefully you will be fine.

[Rostick]

Well you never can care enough. The site where you link to can always do something tricky. And the issue is that the sites which are interested in dangerous things like link exchange have higher probability to **** something up. Like their admins can buy some even worse SEO than this and then whole footer network can be doomed and marked as linkfarm.

It is really obvious here. Get rid of the footer, link exchanges and paid links. Ask for re-evaluation. Mention only that you deleted footer and links from exchanges, rather do not admit the paid links and hopefully you will be fine.

Really appreciate the advice. I`m surprised and disappointed at how naive I have been, but hopefully it will all be fine and I`d had learned a valuable lesson.

PS: Do you think if all there`s left is 1 or 2 sold links, it would still count? I`m sure I did it once or twice in the last year (I thought it`s no big deal doing it once per year) so technically I have to keep those 1 or 2 links for a few more months. Seems to me I`d have to delete that as well and refund those guys if I want to be certain the re-evaluation will be Ok.

[floris]

Why not cloack all your outgoing links?

[sweetbet]

A good free tool to check your links with is
http://www.backlinkwatch.com

[RacingJim]

I would just say never sell backlinks full stop. Clearly you've been unlucky, I've seen plenty of sites getting away with it. But the point is you've triggered some kind of filter and now you need it removing and as others have said I'd just delete that bottom bar completely and definitely any articles where you might have sold in-article contextual links.

[Rostick]

Why not cloack all your outgoing links?

I do that with 90% of my aff. links. With other links I didn`t think it was necessary, especially as I mostly link to reputable websites aside from that footer and 4-5 other links.

[floris]

I hear you. How about non footer links, and create valuable pages on the website itself and then link to them.

[RacingJim]

I would say as an affiliate site we are on the back foot already. The tolerance line will be lower in Google already (for what we can get away with) as soon as it categorises our sites as 'gambling affiliate'.

I'm not at all interested in £50, £100, whatever, for someone to have an outbound link on my site, it's not worth it, I'm a gambling affiliate site and that's how I make my money. I'm also not at all interested in link swaps - Google really doesn't like this stuff - it's very bad SEO.

Any stuff like footer links, blog roll links, paid article links, link swaps/exchanges etc, is just dodgy territory for a fairly low authority gambling affiliate site to be playing around with.

I just looked at your best, most high authority link. Then realised it's a link swap. If this is a hint of the things you've been doing to gain links then there's definitely a bit of an SEO clean up job to be done here.

From Google Guidelines:
The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
• Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
• Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

What makes the footer bar worse is you're linking to other people on keywords rather than domain/brand terms and quite a few of these are affiliate to affiliate. It doesn't send good signals to Google.

[Rostick]

I hear you. How about non footer links, and create valuable pages on the website itself and then link to them.

Just simpler and better to delete them I guess, I don`t need them anymore (probably never did). I`ll keep 3-4 relevant ones like Oddsportal or Flashscore in the footer, I hope google won`t have a problem with that.

Just need to find the time to retrace the e-mails for all those partners and let them know I removed their link, I guess it`s the professional thing to do.

[Rostick]

I just looked at your best, most high authority link. Then realised it's a link swap. If this is a hint of the things you've been doing to gain links then there's definitely a bit of an SEO clean up job to be done here.

Very good points in your message.

As for the quote, I never tried anything dodgy and didn`t overdo anything, there`s no more than 25 links in total that come from link exchange / selling - almost all of them done years ago, when I didn`t know better. There`s that footer and ~5 sold links, everything else on my website should be as clean as possible.

Honestly it hurts me a bit that I`m coming across like some kind of spammer, it`s really not the case. I always focused on the content and a little bit of very normal, white hat on-page and on-site SEO.

I always resented seo spam and I just thought that 15-20 link exchanges and 5 sold links in 3 years really don`t matter. After all, most reputable website have link exchanges themselves. I have done zero or one link exchange in the last 2 years..

Anyway, thanks all, now I have a firm grasp on the problem and know what I need to do.

[RacingJim]

Very good points in your message.

As for the quote, I never tried anything dodgy and didn`t overdo anything, there`s no more than 25 links in total that come from link exchange / selling - almost all of them done years ago, when I didn`t know better. There`s that footer and ~5 sold links, everything else on my website should be as clean as possible.

Honestly it hurts me a bit that I`m coming across like some kind of spammer, it`s really not the case. I always focused on the content and a little bit of very normal, white hat on-page and on-site SEO.

I always resented seo spam and I just thought that 15-20 link exchanges and 5 sold links in 3 years really don`t matter. After all, most reputable website have link exchanges themselves. I have done zero or one link exchange in the last 2 years..

Anyway, thanks all, now I have a firm grasp on the problem and know what I need to do.

I think as a gambling affiliate you just need to assume that Google don't really like us, they are constantly on the look out for 'thin affiliates' and the tolerance line will be very low for those tactics you mentioned which you consider as not dodgy, but which are in the Google guidelines as link schemes.

I'm definitely not calling you a spammer, just pointing out that what you've done is not good for SEO. I hope you get the penalty removed.

[Rostick]

I think as a gambling affiliate you just need to assume that Google don't really like us, they are constantly on the look out for 'thin affiliates' and the tolerance line will be very low for those tactics you mentioned which you consider as not dodgy, but which are in the Google guidelines as link schemes. I'm definitely not calling you a spammer, just pointing out that what you've done is not good for SEO. I hope you get the penalty removed.

I fully understand and definitely appreciate the input you and the other guys provided!

[CasinoBonusMaster]

Hi Rostick,

On http://www.happybags.ro/ you are doing the same thing. Site-wide linking in the footer to two external domains. I would change it on that domain as well before you will receive another penalty.

Good luck with recovering!

[Mattbar]

Being honest I am quite happy to read that google is penalising this stuff, hopefully the rollout of the latest update is starting to work.

I think its no coincidence that at the same time I'm seeing super clean sites climbing at an unprecedented rate.

[Rostick]

Hi Rostick,

On http://www.happybags.ro/ you are doing the same thing. Site-wide linking in the footer to two external domains. I would change it on that domain as well before you will receive another penalty.

Good luck with recovering!

Hey,

I`m not. One is a governmental agency which I am obligated by law to link to, the other is a reputable romanian e-commerce website, where I am a partner. I honestly can`t believe that a single site-wide link to a reputable website is cause for penalty, but maybe I should change it so it`s not site-wide.

PS: That footer on Betdistrict is NOT sitewide, one of the reason for which I was surprised by the penalty.

[TravG]

I havent heard of a website getting hit for the out bound links before. Didn't know that could happen. Usually it is for websites that have bad links pointing to them.

I also think it is the footer links. I got hit with a penalty on my one website about 2 years ago. When you do your reconsideration request include as much info as you can. When you look at G's example of what it should look like follow that to the tee. It took me about 3 reconsideration requests before they finally removed the penalty, but unfortunately (and hopefully this wont happen to you) the website never fully recovered. They say it should but it hasn't.

There is nothing wrong with linking out to other websites but make sure the websites you are linking to are relevant to your website. It looks like most of yours are but just something to watch. For the links you have sold, I would contact the buyer and let them know what happened. They will probably just want you to delete the links so that shouldn't be an issue.

Good luck! And remember to give them plenty of info about every link. Do not just say you removed links in the footer, list each link separately and say you deleted it or if you are keeping it tell them why. Obviously do not say it was a paid link, but say why you think it adds value to your website and visitors. Also if you are creative enough, I would say why you had the link in the first place. If you can come up with a good reason why each link was there that will help.