What are unnatural links?

Unnatural links are active promotions of your website by practicing link exchange at aggressive attitude such as by paying or by spammy practices.

The tactics to get easy-to-get links you had were linking to your competitors’ websites. So you can actually frame it as “Links created intentionally to manipulate PageRank in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

Gone are the days when Link Building was as easy as abc! All those links that were built for your websites have become “Unnatural”.
 

Now, how will you detach these unnatural links? Sometimes its very easy to detect such links and at times not so easy. If we actually try to understand this, lets take a look at how links are important. If you have experience of SEO in the early 2000, you must be clear how actually the search engine rankings happened. 

At a quick explanation, it was a system where the importance of a page was determined by how many high quality pages were linked to it. These were considered as recommendations or so called “Votes for the Site”. A site that was recommended maximum was considered as trustful and a quality website. And, this helped them rank on the search engines.
 

Comparing today, the ranking is absolutely different. With all the confusion and all the updates going on, it may be a bit overwhelming to keep track on all the search engine guideline violations. Amongst these, Unnatural linking is very important topic. The blog of this kind is very useful for the professionals who want to work with good conduct.

Understanding, Unnatural Links will actually help to stay in right practices to SEO.

So to stay away from unnatural links you have to say NO to:

Link to Link  
Link to link is link exchanging. For instance, having links from and to networks of the same niche. For example, if your website is about selling shoes, you may link to a website selling shoe polishes and vice versa. If you do have such links built, Danger Ahead!

Buying Links 
You’re paying for something to own it right? You are spending money, so why does someone have to have a problem with giving you something in return of monetary funds? Well, Oh Well, Search Engines do!! These are bad practices! Beware, this might put you in trouble again.

Artificial Comments 
You see something, you read it, you like it, you comment on it! Being more helpful, you give them a reference for more information. Yes! These are netiquettes you should possess. But, overdoing something for personal benefits, No! You’ll be caught and will definitely have to pay a fine.

Text or banner advertisements that pass link juice

Similar to paid links. If you have purchased advertising on a website, for quality guidelines, it says that you need to have “nofollow” tags attached and a few more other guidelines. See to it, you are not interpreting the wrong things. It might hurt your site.

To take google’s view on impact of unnatural links to our site: 



Google will never like you to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. So when realized that some links are outside of our control, they do not take action on overall ranking of the site, Instead, they apply a targeted action to the unnatural links pointing to our site.
 

So, beware of the unnatural links. Aim at quality. Consult experts, there are very many of them who offer free advice like we do; Livebrain Technologies in Mumbai, is an SEO services company providing expert SEO consultancy for those businesses worried about being penalized due to bad SEO practices. Get in touch, we would love to help!