Most people know that Google penalizes to websites that have unnatural links from other sites. A few weeks ago, many webmasters were surprised because their websites were penalized by Google due to links to other unnatural sites.
What exactly has happened?
Webmasters with unnatural links received this message from Google:
“If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, Google may have detected a pattern of artificial, misleading, or manipulative links. Purchasing links or participating in link schemes for the purpose of manipulating PageRank is a violation of Google's webmaster guidelines.
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected parts of your site. Actions that affect your entire site are listed as site-wide. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some inbound links to your site are listed under partial matches.
In other words, the site was penalized because Google didn't like the links that were on the penalized pages.
Why does Google penalize these links?
Google's John Mueller explained that this sanction is for blogs that accept payment for reviews and links without being nofollow:
“There is absolutely no need to nofollow every link on your site! However, those who are there because of an exchange (e.g. a product or service for a review) should have a rel=nofollow on links to the product, to their sales pages, and to all social media profiles. that are linked because of the review.
Additionally, it's always a good idea to clearly label these types of posts to your readers as well.
Once you've cleaned up links like those, feel free to submit a reconsideration request through Search Console, so the web spam team can review the changes and manually remove the penalty."
What does this mean for your web positioning?
If you have a website that posts reviews and accepts money, do the following:
- Use rel= nofollow on all links that are directly related to payment
- It is not necessary to nofollow all the links on a page
- Clearly mark paid reviews as paid reviews
Access Google Search Console and view the messages to find out if your website has been penalized. Remove penalized links from your website (or put them on nofollow) and then files a request for reconsideration.
Source: Free Seo News
