What is an Unnatural Link? An in-depth Look at the Google Quality Guidelines

Do you know how to recognize an unnatural link? Sometimes unnatural links are easy to spot. But, other times they are not. In this article we will take an in depth look at the link schemes section of the Google Quality Guidelines and discuss what this document says in regards to unnatural links. Along the way I will share some of my experiences in dealing with websites who have been given unnatural links penalties.

You can find the link schemes portion of the Google Quality Guidelines here. The article gives us an actual definition of an unnatural link saying that “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

The first line of this article makes a bold statement about what is considered an unnatural link:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

Really! Any link that is created with the intention of improving your site’s ranking in the Google search engine results in considered unnatural to Google. To understand why this is the case, let’s look at why links are important in the first place.

If you are at all interested in how Google works, I would highly recommend reading Steven Levy’s book, In the Plex. In this book, the author describes how Google started and why it stood out as a much better search engine than others in existence at that time. Early search engines such as Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos and Excite used something called “Information Retrieval” algorithms to determine in what order they displayed their search results. They used metrics such as looking at how often a word appeared on a page and the presence of meta keywords (which is why keyword stuffing used to be very effective!) But, quite often, these early search results were very inaccurate. A young computer science student named Larry Page discovered a brilliant way to improve on this accuracy by using hyperlinks. The early web consisted of a large number of academic papers and they would often cite other articles in the form of a hyperlink. Larry realized that pages that were cited more often were likely the most important pages on the web. He developed a system where the importance of a page was determined by how many high quality pages linked to it. Each of these links acted as a vote for the site. A site with lots of votes, especially if those votes came from trusted pages, would rank well in the search engine results. He named this system after himself, calling it PageRank.

While the Google algorithm today is much more complicated than in its early days, links are still a vital component of the algorithm. But, have you noticed that links are not working as well as they used to to improve your site’s rankings? It appears that Google is getting better at determining when a link is a true editorial vote for a site and when it is simply a self-made link. My personal belief is that many self-made links that used to help improve rankings are now simply ignored by the algorithm.

So let’s go back to the first line of the link schemes section of the Quality Guidelines. We can now see why any link that was made with the intention of manipulating a site’s ranking would be considered unnatural. It is because a self-made link is not a true vote for your site and should not count towards your site’s PageRank.

The quality guidelines go on to give more specific examples of links that could be considered unnatural:

Exchanging Money for Links or Posts that Contain Links

Most of these links are obvious examples of unnatural links. If I contact a webmaster and offer them money in exchange for them placing a link on their site then that’s not a true vote for my site. But some are not so obvious. What about getting a link in exchange for a donation to an organization? The page pictured on the right is one where you can get a link on a high PageRank page by paying $5 to donate to a software developer. It is very obviously a paid link and unnatural. But what if your company has made a donation to your local little league team and they have thanked you and linked to your company’s website? This is where it becomes a matter of motive and also scale. If you have a couple of links like this, they are probably just fine. But, if you start to use it as a linking tactic, and donate to many places that are known to link to their sponsors then you can run into problems. At this point, the Penguin algorithm is not likely to affect links like this. But, if you ever get a manual review from a webspam team member, a large number of self-made links like this could contribute to an unnatural links penalty. (If you're not sure on the differences between algorithmic ranking drops and manual penalties, you may want to read this article on the difference between Penguin and Unnatural Links.)

Exchanging Goods or Services for Links Or Sending Someone “Free” Product in Exchange for Them Writing About it and Including a Link

Sending free product to a blogger and asking for a review is a technique that many businesses have used in the past in order to gain a link. This is a tough part of the quality guidelines for many people to truly grasp because really, if I send you a product and you write about it, aren’t you vouching for my website? Shouldn’t that link count as a natural vote? According to Google, it is not a naturally earned link as it was procured by offering an incentive. I have seen a few examples of this type of link scheme leading to an unnatural links penalty.

In one example, a large brand sent free product to about two hundred mommy bloggers. The bloggers were encouraged to write about the product and in most cases this resulted in a followed link that passed pagerank. Two hundred contextual mentions of your brand is definitely going to make a positive difference in your rankings. But, because those links were incentivized, Google does not view them as natural. This site received an unnatural links penalty and came to me to help them remove it. We started by removing some obviously spammy links from low quality directories and bookmarking sites, but the penalty was not lifted until we addressed the mommy blogger links. I must say that many of the bloggers whom I contacted were irate with the fact that they were being asked to remove or nofollow the link. Many stated that they had not acted illegally and felt that we were off our rockers to want to remove this type of link. Links like this are definitely not illegal. But, if you want to stay in Google’s good books then this type of link needs to be nofollowed so that it doesn’t pass PageRank. If this is a link that you wouldn’t want if it were nofollowed, then you know that the reason why the link was made in the first place was to gain more PageRank. And, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, links that are self-made with the intention of improving a site’s PageRank are unnatural in Google’s eyes.

Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.

The wording about partner pages is something that appeared in the Quality Guidelines in October of 2012. This part of the quality guidelines is hard to interpret as well. Let’s say that I am a real estate agent and I have a resource page on my site where I recommend real estate lawyers, home inspectors, mortgage brokers, and the like. And let’s say that some of those professionals also list me on their resource page. Is this against the quality guidelines? Probably not. But, let’s say that I see that this type of link is relatively easy to get. So, I decide to add a section of my site that recommends realtors around the world and I reach out to hundreds of realtors for link exchanges. I include them on my resource page and they also include me on theirs. And perhaps I also trade links with as many sites as I can that are even slightly related to real estate. Now it’s looking like a linking scheme.

The rule of thumb I would follow when creating a partner page on my site, and when getting links from other site’s resource pages is to only go after links that I would have wanted even if search engines didn’t exist. I’m ok with having some reciprocal links as long as they are relevant and provided that they are links that I would still want even if they were to be nofollowed.

Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

This line was only recently adding to the link schemes section of the quality guidelines. The previous version had the following wording:

“Links that are inserted into articles with little coherence, for example:

most people sleep at night. you can buy cheap blankets at shops. a blanket keeps you warm at night. you can also buy a wholesale heater. It produces more warmth and you can just turn it off in summer when you are going on france vacation.”

I think most of us would agree that links like in the above example are unnatural. However, a good number of sites that I work on for unnatural link penalty removal have many links that come from articles that are not quite as obviously spammy. If you have used a large number of article marketing sites as link sources in the past, you may be in trouble with the Penguin algorithm or with an unnatural links penalty should you get a manual review. But, did you notice that the guidelines don’t even say, low quality articles? They even include guest posts. Does this mean that all guest posting is against the quality guidelines? According to Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, some guest posting is ok:

“The challenge with guest posting is that people have different conceptions about what it means. And so for a lot of people, a guest post is something that a fantastic author has thought deeply about, labored over, polished, put a lot of work into and then publishes on a highly reputable domain name.

Posts like that can be a great way to get your name out there, to build your reputation, to make yourself more well-known, potentially build links or traffic or help with your SEO.

The problem is that if we look at the overall volume of guest posting we see a large number of people who are offering guest blogs or guest blog articles where they are writing the same article and producing multiple copies of it and emailing out of the blue and they will create the same low quality types of articles that people used to put on article directory or article bank sites. If people just move away from doing article banks or article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they don’t raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can cause problems. On one hand, it’s an opportunity. On the other hand, we don’t want people to think guest blogging is the panacea that will solve all their problems.”

Does this mean that high quality guest posting is ok? The quality guidelines don’t make a distinction between high and low quality guest posting. They simply say that links created by large scale guest posting campaigns with keyword rich anchor text can be considered unnatural. I recently wrote about a site I consulted with that I believed had been penalized for using a large number of high quality guest posts in order to gain backlinks. Since writing that article, the site has actually received an example of an unnatural link in their profile from Google. That link was a scraped copy of a very informative and detailed article that was written for a reputable source. The article linked out to several helpful sites and also linked back to their site with their brand as anchor text and not a keyword. This was a tactic that was used on a very large scale to build links to this site. It worked well until the site received a manual review accompanied by a penalty.

So, does this mean that you should not do any guest posting at all? Did you catch the irony of the fact that I linked to my own site when making the statement that links from guest posts could be penalized? It is very unlikely that Google will penalize me for doing so as this is not a tactic that I have used on a large scale. If you get the occasional article published on another person’s site and that article is informative and helpful to the reader then you are probably not going to raise the webspam team’s ire. The obvious question though is “How much is too much?” When does Google consider guest posting a large scale linkbuilding tactic? I don’t know that anyone outside of Google knows the answer to that question.

Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

These are obvious examples of unnatural links. I’m working with one client right now who got an unnatural links penalty as the result of spending $10 at fiverr.com. He paid for two separate gigs where someone promised to build hundreds of links to his site containing his main keyword as the anchor text. Most of these fiverr gigs will use automated software that finds sites where they can create links by doing things like submitting spam comments or creating fake forum profiles. If you’ve created links with automated software, or if you’ve purchased any sort of packages like, “100 directory submissions for $15” then you’ve got unnatural links.

Text advertisements that pass PageRank

This is very similar to a paid link. If you’ve purchased advertising on a site then to stay within the quality guidelines that advertising needs to have a nofollow tag attached to it. I’m puzzled as to why the guidelines specifically say “Text” advertisements. I would be surprised if Google considered a followed link from an image ad as a natural link. If you have thoughts on this, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank

This is another example of a paid link. According to dictionary.com an advertorial is “an extended newspaper or magazine text advertisement that promotes the advertiser's product or services or special point of view but resembles an editorial in style and layout.” Advertorial links used to work well to help improve a site’s ranking. Quite often advertorial links are placed on high PR news websites in exchange for payment. If you’ve got links like these, then they really should be either nofollowed or removed if you want to remain within the Google Quality Guidelines.

Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.

Here is the example that Google gives of this type of unnatural link:

"There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress."

Just recently, Google has stated that links in press releases can go against the quality guidelines. In this Webmaster Central Hangout, Google employee John Mueller speaks about press releases:

At the 5:40 mark he says that they are treated as advertisements and should have nofollowed links. Then, at the 8:04 mark, Barry Schwartz asks for clarification on what John said about press releases and John says, “It’s something that we’ve seen over the past several years...We want to really make it clear that we essentially see this as an unnatural link.”

Now, if your company has used press releases in the past, my thought is that these links will not cause your site to incur a penalty provided that you have linked back to your site with your brand or your url and not keyword rich anchor text.

Low-quality directory or bookmark site links

Many of these links are very obviously low quality. I have worked with sites that had thousands of horribly low quality directory and bookmark links. These links were obviously just made for the the sole reason of getting a link.

But sometimes it is hard to say where Google draws the line between low quality and high quality directories. Most people who do link audits will agree that a link in dmoz.org is an ok link because Dmoz is known as a directory with high editorial standards. A Yellow Pages directory link or a Better Business Bureau link is likely just fine as well. If my local newspaper has a business directory is that ok? What if there is a directory that is closely related to my niche? I have seen people suggest that a directory listing is acceptable to Google provided that the directory has an editorial process (i.e. submissions are not auto-approved, and the directory has their full contact info published on-site). But, Google does not tell us exactly what makes a directory low or high quality. When I am trying to decide whether Google could consider a directory an unnatural one I ask myself whether this a link that would have been made even if search engines didn’t exist. Is this link likely to bring you traffic to your site? Is this a link that actual people will find helpful? If you can honestly say that this is a link that was not made with the intention of increasing your PR then it’s probably an ok link. However, I find that it is very difficult for most webmasters to be objective about these decisions. I often see them making rationalizations for unnatural links by saying that the directory has high PR and is therefore a high quality one or that the directory has not been deindexed so Google must think it is ok.

Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites

Here is the example that Google gives:

Visitors to this page: 1,472

car insurance

The example that Google gives here is an obviously unnatural one. But, there are many examples of links embedded in widgets that are debatable. Google doesn’t make it clear in the quality guidelines whether some links from embedded widgets could be considered natural. What if I have created a mortgage calculator and I offer it to realtors and they embed it along with a link that says, “Mortgage calculator provided by example.com”? Here is what John Mueller says in a hangout about embeddable widget links. Start watching at 42:30:

He says, “If you are providing really useful widgets and you’re linking back to your website in a way that’s clear to the webmaster and maybe in a way that the webmaster can choose whether or not they want to link there then that’s something that might be a great service to those webmasters and might provide value on other websites and those webmasters may be happy enough that they say, ‘Oh this is a great service. I want to tell my friends about this great service that they are providing.’”

Before everyone takes this information and runs out to get a pile of widget links, I would advise caution. I have consulted with sites with unnatural links penalties that I believe have come from overuse of keyword rich anchor text in embeddable widgets. But to confuse matters, there are sites that use keywords as anchor text in their widgets and rank quite well with this technique. If you do searches for “free calorie counter” or “free hit counter” the sites that are ranking well are doing so on the power of links containing those keywords in embeddable widgets. My personal instinct is that Google thinks these links are acceptable because they are actually linking to a calorie counter or a hit counter. Now, if those same widgets linked back using the keywords, “best weight loss site” or “New York SEO Company” then they probably would not do well with a manual webspam review.

Added: Just after I wrote this, Matt Cutts released a video about the use of links in widgets:

When this video came out, many reported that Matt had released a video stating that widget links must be nofollowed, however, if you watch the video you will see that Matt said a nofollow may be a good idea depending on the scale of what you are doing.

Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites

A good example of this is a web design company that places “Seattle Web Design” as a followed link in the footer of each of their clients’ sites. There is nothing inherently wrong with footer links. It’s not as if they are at any more risk for invoking a penalty as a link placed somewhere else on the page. But, if they are self-made links then they are not truly a vote for your site but rather they should be considered an advertisement and Google says that this type of link should be nofollowed. Google is unclear as to whether it is acceptable to place a followed link containing your url in your footers (For example, “Web design by www.examplewebdesign.com”) or whether they are only concerned about links that contain anchor text. However, check out what John Mueller says at the 27:04 mark of this video:

When asked about whether or not it was ok to have a followed site-wide footer link containing the web design’s brand name as an anchor, he said, “It’s something where it really should be clear that the webmaster is linking to this site on purpose and not that it’s something that is required. One of the ways you can guess at that is to see if you can see if this is a link that is going directly to the domain more or less, or does it have some kind of keyword rich anchor text that starts to look really complicated. So if you are saying this site was designed by www.marketsharewebdesign.com or something like that then that’s something where generally we’d say that that’s ok.” He then goes on to backtrack a little and says that if you want to be absolutely sure you are not breaking the quality guidelines that you could use a nofollow tag. He also says, “If you’re doing this and this is essentially the ONLY kind of link that your website has then this is starting to look at little bit complicated from our point of view in the sense that it might appear that these links are essentially a requirement of actually having this website made rather than something that the webmaster is doing on their own free will.” He says that this type of link can look like a link in exchange for product (the website) which is not in keeping with the quality guidelines.

How Google decides that it is “clear that the webmaster is linking to this site on purpose” is a mystery to me. It’s possible that they take into account whether every link pointing to the site has exactly the same surrounding text and anchor text, or whether the site actually has other types of naturally earned links as well. I would love for you to leave your opinion on footer links in the comments section after this article.

Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature

Here is the example given:

Thanks, that’s great info!
- Paul
paul’s pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diego

These links are usually pretty obvious examples of unnatural links. Now, if you happen to have used your keyword as anchor text for a followed forum signature link in the past, you’re not likely to have the Google police knocking on your door. But, if this has been a linking tactic that was used on a wide scale then you have cause for concern.

Conclusions

PHEW. We made it through the list. Usually when I walk someone through the quality guidelines, the obvious question that is asked is, “If all of these links are unnatural, then what kind of links can I build?” If you want to remain completely within the guidelines of Google then the answer to this question is to focus on doing things that truly earn links rather than building them yourself. This is no easy task however. Right now, in some niches, I believe that it is almost impossible to compete without doing some form of unnatural linking. The sites that are ranking in competitive verticals, often are ones that are breaking the quality guidelines but doing so in ways that at this point Google cannot detect. Google recently launched an update that was specifically designed to reduce the effectiveness of unnatural links in high earning niches such as payday loans and porn. They are continually working on improving the algorithms, specifically the Penguin algorithm with the goal of completely reducing the effectiveness of self-made links. Gone are the days where you can easily rank a website well by creating a large volume of self-made links. I believe that we will see dramatic changes in our industry over the next few years. As Google gets even better at enforcing the quality guidelines, an SEO who has the intelligence and creative thinking to be able to find ways to naturally promote a website is going to be in very high demand. If you have these skills, there is definitely money to be made.

What do you think? Is it possible to stay completely within the Google Quality Guidelines and successfully rank a website? I’d love to hear your thoughts.