>>Matt: Hey everybody.
This is Matt.
>>Alex: And I'm Alex.
>>Matt: And if you're watching this video, you've basically gotten a message that talks
about unnatural links to your site.
And so, we wanted to give you a little bit of guidance about what the message means.
How to correct the problem.
And to learn a little bit more about it.
To give you more context.
So, if you've gotten this message, it basically means that we have seen enough low-quality
or spammy links to your site that it's a affected our opinion of your entire site.
So it is something that's worth taking action on.
And trying to address.
We don't like to take action on sites.
We prefer not to.
But we have to protect users.
Users come first and search quality comes first.
And so, as a result.
When we see site that might have high quality content but is doing something like link spam
or something like that.
We do take action on that.
So we have a bunch of algorithms that also operate, of course.
But in this particular case, if you're reading this, if you're watching this video.
Or are on this particular help page, it means that you probably have gotten a message.
Or you're trying to learn more about this particular message.
Which means that we've taken manual action on your links.
OK.
So how do you fix this?
Well, step into Google's shoes for just a minute . And think about what goals, Google's
goals are.
We wanna protect the user experience.
And so we basically got two things that we look for in a reconsideration request.
First, we wanna know that the issue has been corrected.
We wanna know that the link spam has been taken down.
Or made sure that it doesn't pass page-rank.
And second, we want some assurance or some idea that it's not gonna come up again.
That it's not gonna be an issue in the future.
So to start out with, how do you fix the issue?
Alex, do you wanna go through a little bit how you would sort of tackle this?
>>Alex: Yeah.
Sure.
So, as a webmaster, your primary goal here is to just reach out to sites that you've
either explicitly purchased links from, or maybe any services that you've used to automatically
generate backlinks to your site.
When you reach out to these webmasters or these websites, there are a couple things
you can tell them to do.
You can either have them remove those links.
You can have them use a 'REL=nofollow' attribute to ensure that they no longer pass page rank.
Or you can also have them redirect your links through a URL on their site that's blocked
by the robots.txt file.
And this also ensures that page rank is no longer passed.
And Google will no longer consider it, when generating our search algorithms.
>>Matt: Mm-hm.
Now this is a message that you get for just general link spam.
So it can be paid links, right?
In theory, it could be leaving spammy blog comments.
You know, it could be, directories where you're paying for it.
Link exchanges where you've gone really excessive.
Article marketing where you've gone too far.
You've got way too many keyword rich anchor text links.
All that sort of stuff, right?
Basically if you're getting this message then we think you've got a lot of spammy or low-quality
links that either you did or someone on your behalf basically gathered for you.
Right?
OK.
So basically you wanna clean that up as much as possible.
So, it can be frustrating to try to take links down off the web.
I know that that can be an effort . At the same time, we wanna put people on a level
playing field.
And so we want site that rank to rank based on their merit.
Not based on link spam or something like that.
So if you've gotten this message, the first and foremost thing I would do is try to clean
up those link as much as possible.
You might be able to get whoever was building the links, if it was an SEO.
Or an agency to help you.
You might have to do it yourself.
In theory, you could hire someone else to help you try to get those links down.
But you really wanna get as much down as possible.
Now, it's almost as important to try to help Google understand that you've really sort
of tried to correct things.
So talk a little bit about documentation, you know.
>>Alex: Sure.
So great documentation is extremely important for a reconsideration request.
It's indicative of the amount of effort that you've put in to clean up your site.
And because the purpose of a reconsideration request is to enable or reinstate trust with
your site with Google, the more documentation you provide us, it's the easier for us to
reconsider.
And see the progress that you've made on your site.
>>Matt: Yeah.
Absolutely.
So the mental model we want you to have is this.
We'd like to see as much of the link spam to go away.
As much as possible.
And so that's your first goal.
To try to get as much down.
And then we need to know that ideally, we're not gonna see this sort of link spam in the
future.
And so that's where the documentation comes into effect.
You know, whether you're tracking things in a spreadsheet.
Or you're just doing a good job of monitoring.
How many sites you've asked to take things down.
Essentially we just wanna know you've done a prolonged, sustained effort to try to clean
things up as much as possible.
And helping them, us, understand that.
With a good reconsideration request, is in many cases as helpful as you know, it's important
to get the links down.
But it's also important that we understand that you are trying to get the links down
and you're trying not to do link spam in the future.
Now, one last resort that you can do if, imagine you've done someone on your behalf has done
blog spam.
Like leaving a bunch of spammy blog comments or something like that.
That might not be the sort of thing where you can get every single link down.
We do encourage you to get as much as possible down off the web.
Just because you don't want people to jump to conclusions.
Right?
If someone else looks at your backlinks and they look really spammy, they're gonna think,
"Oh, this is a bad sign."
In general.
So it's best to get all those links off the web.
As much as possible.
But, if you've done all the work that you can.
You've written everybody twice.
You've contacted as many sites as you can and there's still a few links that you can't
get down, you can use a tool that we've recently released that lets you disavow links.
It basically says "OK, Google, I'd like you to ignore certain links to my site."
So again, we want you to do the effort to remove as much as possible off the web itself.
But there is another tool that you can use to sort of say "OK, we would also like you
to disavow or ignore these particular links."
And we'll try to make a special dedicated video about that, and have its own help page.
But I don't wanna get into all of that right now.
Basically just wanna communicate, try to make sure that you get as many of the links down
as possible.
And then have good documentation to let us know that "Yes, OK, we've turned a corner.
We're not gonna be doing this sort of thing in the future."
Anything else we should mention?
Or have we covered the higher bits?
>>Alex: I think we covered most of it.
Again, the purpose of a reconsideration request, especially with links pointing to your site,
is to reinstate trust.
And the more documentation you provide, and the more effort that you put in to clean up
your backlinks, that'll help us a lot in that process.
>>Matt: OK, so if you're watching this video.
You probably started very frustrated perhaps angry.
But I hope this gives you at least a little bit of context about what we're looking for.
So that in an ideal world you can move forward and figure out the best way to sort of solve
the situation and be in good shape going forward.
So I hope that helps.