Member Article

Google Issues New Warning on Unnatural Links

Google How to Stay on their Good Side

Google has long made it known that it will have little truck with webmasters who buy or sell links to pass page rank, and this is a stance it’s keen to reaffirm in 2013.

In a recent post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog entitled ‘A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank’ (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html) the search giant issued a renewed warning that buying and selling links in this way would be penalised.

Aside from triggering a broad notion of foul play, its reasons for taking a zero tolerance approach towards such activities are rooted in its quest to bring relevance to its users. For one thing, paid links interfere with the intent of Google’s algorithms – to select for searchers those websites which are most popular, authoritative and relevant. Secondly, to allow buying and selling links to curry favour in search results would lead to a situation in which only those with the biggest banks accounts could reach the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages).

In the blog post, Google’s distinguished engineer Matt Cutts said: “We recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower PageRank in the Google Toolbar, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google’s search results.”

What to do if you’re affected

The simplest way to avoid falling foul of Google’s wrath is of course to do as it says and avoid such activities. If you do receive a warning from Google about possible artificial links then you should immediately review your link strategy and remove any offending links.

But how can you generate the kind of good, natural links that Google does like? By creating high quality original content and populating your site with it. Try to create the kind of content that people will really want to read and share with others and you can’t go far wrong. As well as generating incoming links, high quality content will also pass further muster with Google’s algorithms, and make it more likely that visitors to your site will be converted into customers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .