Google often gets criticised by people on the webmaster forums for not giving enough information out when it hands our a Link Spam Penalty.
An example of the warning you get from these sites can be seen below:
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
As you can see, Google hardly gives you fair warning on what to look for with the only advice being to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure your website is within them. There are a lot of Guidelines Google has and this can be particularly baffling if you’ve been keeping within them to the best of your knowledge.
There was a raft of these warnings before the impending Penguin 2.0 update which certainly gave a lot of people and SEOs a sleepless night.
But today Google have made a promise to be more transparent with their warnings and include examples of the links that Google deems bad/inorganic/unnatural etc. The best thing is that Google say that the links won’t be generic sample links, but an actual link to your website that Google sees as unnatural.
What are your thoughts on this matter? Will this make it easier for Black Hat spammers to gain insight into what Google considers bad, or will it genuinely help Webmasters get better at their SEO?
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
