Unnatural links are often used in black hat SEO as a shortcut to trick Google’s rules and artificially push a website higher in search rankings.
If we asked Google to define an unnatural link, it would probably point us to its latest Search Quality Rater Guidelines (March 5, 2024). In these guidelines, unnatural links are indirectly describing as a sign of ‘Lowest Quality Pages’ under section 4.0.
In section 4.6 of the same guidelines, Google suggests that unnatural links often fall under spammy WebPages, which are created mainly to manipulate search rankings. These include
What are Unnatural Links & Meaning?
Unnatural links made to cheat the system and push a website higher in search results. Instead of being earned naturally, they are usually going to create just to fool search engines into thinking a site is more important than it really is.
Also Read: What is URL Slug? Best Practices for SEO with Example
There are two types of unnatural links:
Outbound links are the links on your website that take users to another site. Generally, this are fine if they provide value. But if they are links to be creating manipulate search rankings or in exchange for money, products, or favors, then consider them as unnatural links. For example, if another offers to pay you to add a link in your blog post that point to their website that can be treating as an unnatural link.
Inbound links are another websites links that point to your site. Generally, they help build trust and improve rankings. But if these links earn just to manipulate search results, so considered them as unnatural. For example, if you pay another website to place a link to your site in one of their blog posts, that would be an unnatural link.
Impact of Unnatural Links on SEO
Unnatural links can hurt your website’s visibility in search results. Since they try to trick the system, Google’s algorithms are built to detect them and may penalize your site for using them.
Bad Impact on Rankings
Google sees link quality as an important ranking factor. If your sites are too many unnatural links, Google may flag it for trying to cheat the system.
This affects your website to lose a lot of its search rankings, or in the worst case, be completely removing from Google’s index.
Degrade Traffic
If your search rankings go down, so, your organic traffic will also drop. Since your site appears lower on Google’s results, fewer people will find and visit it.
Lost Your Reputation
Unnatural links can also hurt your site’s reputation. Both Google and visitors may see your site as untrustworthy if it’s linked to spammy or irrelevant websites.
Once your site’s reputation damaged, it can be very difficult to regain Google’s trust.
Penalties from Google
The biggest risk of unnatural links is getting a penalty from Google. If you ignore a ‘unnatural links warning’ and don’t fix the issue, Google can take manual action, maybe lower your site’s visibility or even remove it from search results completely.
Considering this consequences, it’s clear how important it is to avoid unnatural links and follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to keep your SEO strong and effective.
How to Find Unnatural Links to Your Site?
Here, our team does apply the systematic approach to identifying these potentially harmful links:
Use Search Console
Google’s Search Console, once called Webmaster Tools, is a good place to begin. It lists all the sites linking to your pages under ‘Links to Your Site. Even though it does not mark bad or unnatural links, it lets you see your entire backlink profile so you can spot any links that seem suspicious.
Manual Audit
Manually reviewing your backlinks few time, but it is very worthwhile. It means going through each backlink from Google’s Search Console or other SEO tools, check if the link is relevant, if the source website is trustworthy, and they are link fits naturally. Be careful of warning signs like links from unrelated sites, overly optimized anchor text, or links in low-quality directories or link farms that do not add any real value.
Check for Paid and Reciprocal Links
Check your links for signs they might be paid or part of a link exchange. This includes links marked as sponsored but not properly tagged, or links from sites that have nothing to do with your content but still have a backlink from your site.
Seek Outdated, Irrelevant, and Low-Quality Content
Links placed in low-quality, outdated, or irrelevant content can be seeing a unnatural. Even if you do not buy, it is worth reviewing links that no longer match your site’s quality or focus.
Use Google’s Disavow Tool with Caution
After spotting unnatural links, you can use Google’s Disavow Tool to tell Google to ignore them. But be careful using it incorrectly can hurt your site’s search rankings. It’s better to try removing the links by contacting the site owners first. In fact, it is a survey by Editorial. Link found that 69% of SEO experts do not use the Disavow Tool at all.
What Should You Do With Unnatural Links?
After spotting unnatural links to your website, it is important to act fast to reduce any negative impact on your SEO. Here’s simple step-by-step guide on how to deal with this links:
Eliminate to all these Links
The first step is to try removing the unnatural links. Reach out to the webmasters or site owners of the sites linking to you and politely to ask remove the links. Even through can be take in time and maybe not always work, this is considering best practice and shows search engines that your actively working to clean up your back links.
Also Read: UGC Link Attribute in SEO and Importance for Backlinks
Continuously track of your outreach by noting the emails you send and any replies you get. This are helpful if you later use Google’s Disavow Tool or need to show proof that you took steps to clean up your links.
Resort to the Disavow Tool, When You Need
When you see that too many links do exist then not possible to remove them as manually. And, you can use the Google’s Disavow Tool to fix it. This tool lets you give signal Google to keep ignore specific links.
Use the Disavow Tool with caution, since using it wrong can damage your SEO.
In which, you can make a Disavow file listing the URLs or domains of the unnatural links that you proceed to Google to ignore. Ensure to follow Google’s guidelines for formatting the file correctly
Monitor Your Backlink Profile Regularly
Regularly monitor your backlinks to catch any new unnatural links fast. Use Google Search Console and other SEO tools to hold track. Staying alert helps you respond quickly to links that maybe harm your site.
Always Focus on Making High-Quality Links
For this, you always do concentrate on building high-quality, natural backlinks to your website. You are this by producing value able content, interacting with your audience, and following good SEO practices. Strong backlinks not only offset any leftover harmful links but also improve your overall SEO.
Improve Your Site’s Overall SEO Health
Unnatural links, focus on improving your websites overall SEO. This means; optimizing your content, enhancing user experience, and ensure your site is fast and mobile friendly. A strong, well rounded SEO strategy reduces the impact of any single negative factor.
Unnatural Link Examples
Now, let’s look at some examples of unnatural backlinks; including:
Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are backlinks exchanged between websites.
Here’s an example of a low-quality, mass-sent link exchange email we received.
Guest Post Links with Too Many Keyword-Rich Anchors
Guest posting is a legitimate, white-hat way to build links.
But if your guest posts have too many links, and all the anchors use exact-match keywords, the links can become unnatural.
To keep them natural, use a reasonable number of links and mostly partial-match keywords in the anchors.
In this case, the sender didn’t even BCC recipients, so we could see the full list of others emailed.
Automatic (Bot) Links
To Be Clear: You can use link building outreach software to automate the boring parts of white-hat link building. But you shouldn’t have a bot posting your links automatically on forums, blog posts, or social media.
PBNs
PBN stands for private blog networks. These are networks of websites owned by the same organization, created just to link to other sites, often for profit. PBN links used to be popular, but after Google’s link spam updates, they are now considered illegal.
Misleading Redirects
Redirects are normally a legitimate SEO practice, helping preserve traffic to moved pages and keeping the user experience smooth. However, if redirects are used to trick users sending them to a different page than expected based on the link’s anchor text they can be considered unnatural links.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
How Can You Distinguish between Natural and Unnatural Link Spikes?
Natural spikes usually happen after big events, such as launching a new product, getting mentioned by a major publication, or owning content go viral. Unnatural spikes, on the other hand, do not any clear reason and are mostly made up of low quality or irrelevant backlinks.
What is The Google Unnatural Links Penalty?
A Google unnatural links penalty happens when a site gets spammy or manipulative backlinks to boost rankings. This penalty, triggered by Google review or algorithms, lowers your search visibility. To recover, you need to audit your backlinks, remove or disavow the bad, and then review submit a Excellent request to Google to regain trust and rankings.
What Should You Do, if Notice Any Unnatural Link Spike?
Start by auditing your backlink profile to find where the links are coming from. Tools like Alli AI can help you check their quality. If you spot links that could hurt your site’s reputation with search engines, consider disavowing.
Final Thoughts
Handling unnatural link spikes is important for protecting your website’s SEO healthy. During the time give a short term boost, in the long run hurt your rankings and reputation.
Also Read: What is Sponsored Links? Benefits, Risks, and Examples
So, you can protect your site from Google penalties and organic growth with focusing on building natural.