Unnatural Links Message from Google No Longer Means

[SteveGerencser]

you are actually penalized. They are now sending it to anyone that has links that they think may be unnatural. Even if it's only a couple links and means absolutely nothing to you or your website and it's ranking.

https://plus.google.com/109412257237...ts/gik49G9c5LU

If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.

So now you can really freak out when you get that message because you have no idea if it means oh shit or if it means hey, watch it. Same message regardless of what is going on. Imagine the wasted money in resources and time trying to decide if you were really penalized or not when you get this message.

This is what happens when you let college kids that have never ever tried to feed their family with a small business run the internet.

[ozsubasi]

I can't see how this relates to transparency, it seems opaque to me. You may or may not have a problem by your receiving this message, but either way we aren't going to tell you which links we are looking at. Even if you do work out which ones could be a problem, we haven't got around yet to providing the tool to let you disown them.
So don't panic and have a happy weekend not worrying whether our warning means anything or not, because there isn't much you can do about it either way.

[indeed97]

This is honestly absurd...gets worse and worse. When something negatively impacts my site or a ban is placed, it literally drives me nuts because I don't have a clue on what it's about. It's all about generic speculation on what others are saying and then the questioning starts going off in my mind, is it this or that or these things, or all of these things, etc etc grr

[keyon]

This is what happens when you let college kids that have never ever tried to feed their family with a small business run the internet.

I've noticed that the immaturity of the Google staff always reveals itself best whenever something new has to be addressed. Sometimes I think it's just a matter of coders getting handed the job of responding to an issue, before the marketing dept. has had a chance to convert a technician's poor writing into something that is coherent (I see this all the time).

[kgun]

https://plus.google.com/109412257237...ts/gik49G9c5LU

I found these

So really, every site with a few million links should be getting this notice. That's more transparent, and now more confusing that ever. Don't worry about it, unless you need to worry about it? Now we have to spend hours digging through analytics and correlate a traffic drop to that instead of say, a news cycle, or some other problem.

Oh for crying out loud. There's absolutely no excuse for using the SAME MESSAGE in every situation. You need flags for "needs action" and "notification" I can't even begin to relate the amount of lost productivity amongst the civilians (small businesses, yo) over these messages. I've had clients come out of the woodwork after years, terrified because they've received an unnatural link message and have no idea why or what they're supposed to do. And now - maybe nothing? Do you seriously think people have nothing better to do?

The e-mail clearly state that e reinclusion request must be send when the unnatural links are removed.

good comments.

Article spinning, unnatural links, SERP data mining. May be Google should study their algorithms better. As a link collector, I am more and more sceptical to articles without:

1. An author.
2. A first publication date.
3. A potential update date.

Personally I will prefer a search engine that zero out (that is delete the edges in the Giant Global Graph) of suspect sites including suspect link profiles. The sistes / articles are invisible to the search engine. Then no harm aside from a zeroed out link can be done in case of an erroneous (algorithmical) conclusion / identification.

I posted my own comment in that thread.

[kgun]

In case my comment drowns, here it is:

Why not eliminate suspect sites and pages from Tim Berner Lees Giant Global Graph? In addtion, there may be flaws in the adaptive inverted link matrix model of the web used by Google and other search engines. Nobody can require inclusion in a search engines index or archive so the best solution to suspect link profiles, SERP data mining sites, article spinning etc. is to zero them out.

By zeroing out suspect sites you avoid cases similar to the

McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit

Google:

McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit

in the case it is unknown to you.

As far as I have understood you can be sued for nearly anything in the USA.

I have written in red what I mean is most important in my comment.