Got an unnatural links penalty from Google and losing money because of that? Your site was PR7, but now it dropped to PR3? Sounds familiar? This post explains why it’s good that you got penalized, what other revenue streams to consider and how to have that penalty revoked so that you’re happy again. You’ll learn how it works in real life because I based this article on the case that I personally worked on. True story! As a matter of fact, it happened just a few weeks ago. It goes without saying that I won’t disclose the name of the site, but it’s a very well-known one. So, you can consider this article to be a practical guide as well. Now. let’s get the ball rolling.
Your Penalty is Good
For starters, every cloud has a silver lining. This penalty should help you reconsider how you earn money with your site. Google just detected that you sell paid links and you do it on a pretty large scale. Their algorithms are sophisticated enough nowadays to figure that out.
So, before you even take care of the issue with the penalty, start signing up for all sorts of affiliate programs because it’s a safe and sure-fire way to make money online. Google is OK with affiliate marketing as long as you add value to the products you sell.
Your unnatural outbound links penalty email message may look like this:
Why You Got Penalized
In a nutshell, you have lots of paid links that are not nofollowed and most likely irrelevant to your audience. The first thing that you need to do is set rel=“nofollow” to all your paid links. Make sure to create a Google doc with a list of the links that you nofollowed. You’ll need that list when you file a reconsideration request to Google. Keep in mind that it should be specifically a Google doc file because Google guys don’t open other file formats for security reasons (viruses and such).
Nofollow or Die Trying
Be sure to nofollow all your paid links on the homepage of your site. Pulling a fast one is not an option here. You can see which links are nofollowed either by looking through the HTML code of your page or just with the help of an add-on such as SEOquake that just highlights nofollow links so that you can quickly find them.
Also, be sure to contact your customers who bought those links and let them know about what you’re going to do. Doing so allows you to retain your credibility and still do what you’re forced to. Otherwise you may face lots of refund requests and people may just start thinking bad things about you. And you need no bad karma.
Reconsideration Request
That done, you can submit a reconsideration request to Google. Feel free to use my reconsideration request message as a template:
Hey guys,
We’ve received an email message from you about a penalty for unnatural outbound links from our site. We nofollowed all the suspicious outbound links. You can see them in this doc
[link to your Google docs file]
Please double-check and remove the penalty.
Best regards,
your name.
Confirmation
Once you’ve sent your reconsideration request, you should get a confirmation that Google received it. They usually send that message next day after receiving your request. Within 24 hours or so, you should receive a confirmation that they received your reconsideration request. You can expect a verdict from them in a week or so.
In case that worked and Google lifted the penalty, congrats! You can actually stop reading the post right now.
Your Site Still SEO-Sucks
If they got back to you with the message that you site still violates their quality rules, keep reading. That message may look like this:
Get Ready to Lose Money
Since you nofollowed your paid links, your customers will start to notice that and either ask for refunds or at least stop working with you. Should you have a really quality blog, you may be able to agree to put up banners instead of the text links that you used to sell them. As a matter of fact, you should not rely on that too much. If you set rel=“nofollow” without letting them know (hopefully you did not), you may have lost a whole lot of credibility. In case that’s exactly what you did it, you really need to seriously think about affiliate programs.
Fix More
So, Google sent you a message that they still think your site is not in line with their quality guidelines. At this point, you need to take a look at your site and make sure that you’ve nofollowed all outbound links (even if they are not paid ones).
Other than that, you should remove irrelevant links from your site. You should be able to spot such links really fast because such links have nothing to do with the niche you’re in. Plus you were most likely on the fence while deciding whether it’s a good idea to sell links to those sites.
Again, though you’ve nofollowed your irrelevant outbound links before sending your reconsideration request for the first time, you need to actually REMOVE them now.
Also, be sure to set nofollow to all your links in sidebars. Google doesn’t really like sitewide links either. You can just install a WordPress plugin that sets rel=“nofollow” to blogroll links. In case you’re not using WordPress (which you should), you may have to either do it manually (or have someone do it) or just find a plugin for your CMS.
Second Reconsideration Request
Having that done, you need to send your second reconsideration request to Google. You may be scared to bug them with your multiple requests, but that’s not a problem in fact, Thing is, reconsideration requests hardly ever work if submitted once. Chance are, it’s because you usually want to change as little on your sites as possible. As a matter of fact, you’re pretty lucky if you had to submit just a few requests because there were cases that site owners did it for 7-8 times before it actually worked. So, just hang in there.
The second reconsideration request I sent looked like this and, again, feel free to use it as a template:
Hey guys,
We received an email message from you about a penalty for unnatural outbound links. We fixed those issues and submitted a reconsideration request (the previous report)
Then we got a reply that our site still violates your quality guidelines. We meticulously checked the guidelines and made sure that our site follows them to the tee.
Here’s what exactly we did:
1. deleted irrelevant links. See them in this doc
2. nofollowed all irrelevant outbound links throughout all our site.
Please double-check and remove the penalty.
Best regards,
your name.
Penalty revoked
Once you’ve submitted your reconsideration request, you need to wait for anything from 24 hours to about a week till you get a reply from Google. If they liked what you did and your site no longer violates Google’s quality guidelines, you’ll receive a positive reply. Now it’s time to order some pizza and celebrate your ass off…
The message should say that they like your site now and you should see your SEO metrics (such as PR) bumped up soon. That said, you may notice that your warning is still in the Manual Actions section.
It should go away once Google gives back your SEO metrics. Hang in there!
By the way, if you’re not sure where the Manual Actions section is, you need to go to your Google Webmaster Tools account and expand the Search Traffic drop down menu. The option you need is at the very bottom.
PR Back
Just in a few days after the positive reply from Google, you should have your PR back as it was before you got penalized. In case you also lost rankings, you may need to be waiting a bit longer till you get your rankings back. The bottom line is that you did what they wanted and you should be good to go now.
Useful Links
- SEO Rankings Drop: A Step-by-Step Guide to Recovery
- Panguin Tool
- Google Penalties: How to Find, Fix, and Avoid (An Expert Guide)
Conclusion
You should not base your business on selling paid links any more. You’ll get a Google penalty for unnatural outbound links sooner or later. It’s just a matter of time. Signing up for affiliate programs is the way to go because it’s future proof and Google does not seem to have a problem with that now or anytime soon.
[icon_question] If you also had an experience with Google unnatural outbound (or inbound) links issues, be sure to share how you took care of that.
Comments
35 responses to “Unnatural Links Penalty and How to Fix (Outbound Version)”
I did this before but the reconsideration link is not working now and my rank is still on the same position.
Thanks for your Felix. Do you mean this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration ? As a matter of fact, it can take you anything from a few days to a few months to get back your SEO metrics. What exactly does your penalty message from Google? And what have you done to fix that as of now?
Hi Kenneth, I got a big relief after reading this article. My site too was penalized for unnatural outgoing links. I’ve removed all the links from my site, including paid and free links without informing the customers and owners of the links because I was nervous. Now my PR dropped to 0 from 3. Can you help me out by telling me now how can I make money, since I won’t be getting any more articles. If you want you can mail me to :faizan@techsenser.com. Thanks for this informative article.
I’m really glad that I was able to help you in one way or another. As a matter of fact, not informing your link buyers is not exactly a great idea, but I see where you’re coming form. As for making money, you may want to sign up for affiliate programs that are relevant to your niche. It’s a surefire way to earn money in a safe way. You just need to create high-quality content that is interesting for your users.
Hello Kenneth,
My website got a penalty because of the outbound links and result of which I made the changes by turning all the links as nofollow, including the one in author bylines as well as in the sidebar, leaving no stone unturned this time from my side.
So, doing this, today I made my second reconsideration request to Google BUT after submission, I get no message from Google confirming that they had received my request. Please share why is it so or do I need to wait for some time to make the request.
For a note, I made my first request on February 05, 2014 and got the reply from Google on February 18, 2014 and today, now on February 25, 2014, I made second reconsideration request.
Thanks in advance.
Karan
Thanks karenn1617, you may want to make sure that you’ve nofollowed ALL your text links and banners. In case you’re ok with that, I’d like to take a look at your site.
Did you get a penalty message in your Google Webmaster Tools account? It should be under Search Traffic -> Manual Actions. Thing is, if you don’t have a message there, but you got one in your email, it means it was not a manual penalty but an automatic one. In that case, you won’t get a reply from Google. It’ll just re-evaluate next time (usually when a new Google update rolls out).
Thanks Kenneth. I did nofollowed all the external links including the links in content, author bylines, social media links as well any possible link I can find out in my website. And, after doing this, I did submitted the request yesterday only and now waiting to get the reply back from Google.
Thanks for getting back with more details. So, do you have a penalty message in Search Traffic -> Manual Actions?
Hello Kenneth,
Actually I was having a penalty with the message from Google on Webmaster’s Manual Actions page BUT today only I received a confirmation from Google saying that the penalty has been revoked. Can you please share that how much time will it take for Google to give back Pagerank among other keyword rankings back.
BTW I must say a big thanks to you and your (above) blog post as this really works as a very useful tool for me to uplift the penalty from mine website.
Thanks again.
Karan
Hey karenn1617 ,
You should have your SEO metrics back within a week or so. At least, that’s what happened in my case. So, I don’t think it will be too different.
I’m really glad my tips helps you out. Be sure to let me know if you have any questions or issues.
Thanks Kenneth and I will be looking forward onto getting the PageRank and other ranking metrics back soon.
BTW I got one more question for you, can you suggest some good articles on how to build traffic. I did tried many things in the past, including SEO BUT now I want to see and try some more things, please advice. Thanks.
Sure, please make sure to let me know how it works out for you. The best way to build traffic is create awesome content and share it on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. That said, I’m about to create a video course that helps just with that. If that sounds interesting, be sure to sign up for my newsletter (it’s right after my post). Alternatively, please email me with the help of the Contact form.
Hello Kenneth,
Great article. I receive an “Unnatural Outbound Links” notice this morning in my webmaster tools inbox. It was not in the Manual section so I take that the notice was automated.
The strange thing is, my site is really thin with no paid outbound links that I am aware of. I have been trying for several hours now to locate the mysterious outbound links to no avail. Are you aware of any tools I can use to locate them?
Also the only thing I have changed as of recent is installing a well known form plugin. Could that be what is triggering the notice?
Thanks in advance.
~John
I suggest you uninstalling the plugin you referred to. That done, you need to wait for the next Google algo update to see if it worked for you. If that does not work, you may want to contact Google directly and tell them that you never sold links from your site. I’m sure that it’s gonna work for you. In either case, please keep me posted.
Hi Kenneth,
Thank you for the reply. I found the two links (yes that is just TWO links) that were causing the problem, and no followed them.
I used SEOQuake to locate all external links and inserted the nofollow attribute to the only two outbound links on my site.
The fact that Google would issue a penalty for a site that has only 5 pages and two posts is absolutely amazing to me.
Either way, great article Man. Keep up the good work!
~John
Hey Guys,
I have also received this message from Google today “Unnatural outbound links”
However I am really confused ???
We are a health and fitness bloggers community and have never sold “follow” links
We allow our members to post to our community blog section (for free) and have even decided to nofollow all author bio links just as a caution. We do allow links in the body of these blogs but manually make sure they are not over-optimised or spammy looking links.
We have a few sponsored articles that are clearly marked as “paid content” and these all have “nofollow” links included in them.
Where do you suggest I start to look at finding what might be causing the problem ??
I appreciate any help
Kind Regards
James
Thanks for your comment, James. Could you please tell me the exact message you got from Google. Also, I’d suggest nofollowing all outbound links from your site.
Hi Kenneth, thanks for your detailed explaination of the outbound version of the unnatural links issue. My site very recently got hit by the same (site wide manual action). Yes, there was quite a bit of sponsored content and guest posts as well since I run the site as a community site. I have gone ahead and no-followed all links using the Nofollow plugin. Howvever, is there a way to ensure that I dont have any suspicious outbound links from my website before i submit a review request
Thanks for your comment, Ankit. Since you’ve nofollowed your links, you need submit a request to Google and tell them that your site uses links in strict accordance to their guidelines from now on. Also, you need to make sure that you don’t have any suspicious links in you sidebar/footer and on the homepage.
if they reply that you still violate the rules, please get back to me with your website address and I’ll take a look.
Also, you may want to install this Google Chrome plugin to make sure that you’ve nofollowed all your outbound links:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf
Kenneth, thanks for you response. I did use SEQuake on the homepage and used the plugin you mentioned as well (although it only tells me about broken links). I am keen to submit a re-consideration request but here is my concern.
While I do not see any suspicious links from the homepage how could i ensure that there aren’t any specific post/pages that might still have some unnatural looking outbound links. With over 1000 articles, I just dont see it feasible to check every page manually? Or would you suggest that it wont hurt submitting a reconsideration request anyways and see what Google responds with? Thanks again
I don’t really think there’s a tool like that out there. You can just do it manually by checking each of your posts/pages.
Chances are, what you’ve already done is enough for Google and you can submit your reconsideration request and see what happens next.
I finally sent in the reconsideration request. Now the long wait before the big G answers *fingers crossed*. Thanks for all the help Kenneth
Sure, be sure to let me know what happens with your site and situation after that.
Hi kenneth, just thought I will comment to share that Google did revoke the manual action (outbound) for me. All i really did was use a no-follow plugin and that took care of things. However, this has also put me in a spot because as much as i hate to admit it, sponsored posts were my major revenue source and I am now in a soup whether to accept them going forward or not
Thanks for your comment. It’s really great that you shared how it worked for you. As a solution, I can recommend signing up for affiliate programs because it will help to generate revenue from nofollow links.
Just wanted to let you know that I followed your instructions for my “unnatural links” penalty and I had the action removed within a few days. Thanks so much for your detailed instructions.
Three of my websites were penalized, all at the time when MyBlogGuest was penalized (about a month ago). I would imagine that is the same thing that happened with most of your commenters since most comments were made about a month ago. Thank goodness I only used MBG a few times, probably less than 20 over three websites.
I’ve only requested a review from Google Webmasters Tool for one of the sites. I’m doing a second one today. In my first request I made all outbound links nofollow. This time i am going to try it with just making links nofollow that I know came from MyBlogGuest posts. It will be interesting to see the response to this. If it works to nofollow only the MyBlogGuest post links, on my third and most important website, I’ll try it with just the MBG posts nofollow.
Thanks for your help…much appreciated.
Congrats! Removing a penalty within just a few days is a real cool thing. I’m sure that using MBG services just for a few times played its role. It’s totally ok to find multiple reconsideration requests to Google. There are cases when people do it for up to 12 times. Please keep me posted of how it works for you. It’ll help to improve the article and help all the people who use it to have their penalties revoked. Thanks 🙂
Well, just nofollows on the MBG outbound links did not work. Just got a
notification from Webmaster tools that my site still “violates our
quality guidelines.” Even though I nofollowed all the links on the first
site I submitted, it doesn’t seem right that they should all be
nofollow. I link for citations to very reputable websites that I think
deserve a follow.
I guess I could try nofollowing some more
links but at this point it would be so much easier to nofollow them all.
I’ll have to think about this a little bit. Right now I’m just
frustrated and probably need to be more patient 🙂 Would you nofollow
all the outbound links?
I’d try it one at a time. Nofollow a bit more, then a bit more, and if everything else fails, you will have to just nofollow all of them.
Hi,
Just wanted to check that does Google reply every time you make a reconsideration request with the outcome ? Also how much maximum time can it take to get back with the result of our reconsideration request for unnatural outbound links ?
Thanks for your question, Shubham. They usually reply within a few weeks (like 2-4 weeks). You should have a message from them, which states that they’ve seen your efforts to fix your issue and now your site is back in good standing or that they still don’t believe you because your site still violates Google’s quality guidelines.
Thanks, that helps !
Sure, please let me know how it works out for you 🙂
Should we no follow affiliate links?
Thanks for your question, Heather. Yes, you want to apply rel=”nofollow” to your affiliate links. As a matter of fact, you use the affiliate links to drive traffic but not to pass link juice. Hope it helps.