Penalties are never good. It doesn’t matter how you end up getting one. Whether it’s a red card, a big fine, or a link penalty from Google, no one likes being in the penalty box. It’s always a loss for you (and often a gain for your competitors).
Google issues link penalties when it sees bad backlinks in your backlink profile. On top of that, you can be penalized at any time if your backlink profile doesn’t meet the quality standards set out in their guidelines.
There are a number of things you can do to attract this negative attention, both intentionally and unintentionally. Fortunately, there are also things you can do to avoid suffering a penalty. The best and easiest way to avoid any type of link penalty is to always monitor your backlink profile. It’s not exactly easy—without help, anyway.
We’ll walk you through link penalties, how to avoid them, and how to get out of the penalty box if you’ve already been caught.
What Is a Link Penalty?
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| What Is a Link Penalty? |
Link penalties are the result of spammy, low-quality, irrelevant, unnatural, repetitive or other bad links in your website’s link profile. Google views these types of links as a violation of their webmaster quality guidelines, and as an attempt to manipulate your site’s rankings to your own advantage with artificial link schemes.
This is a big no-no. Google is all about organic. Anything artificial in your link profile is a red flag. They’ll investigate. If they don’t like what they see, they’ll either give you a penalty or remove you from Google’s index entirely—which means your website will never be visible anywhere on Google.
So while you’d prefer a penalty in this scenario, it’s still not a great outcome. A penalty means Google will demote your site, resulting in a significant drop in your visibility and organic traffic—all the things you’re trying to address with your SEO work.
How to Spot a Link Penalty
Links often appear and disappear without warning. Without a proactive tool doing the monitoring for you, chances are you’ll miss a few things from time to time.
Just like you might rely on security cameras to keep an eye on your sprawling property, you should rely on a backlink monitoring tool to keep an eye on your link profile so you can head off any issues—before they result in a penalty.
1. Take Advantage of Link Monitoring Technology
Anyone serious about optimizing their SEO uses a link monitoring tool like SEOptimer to closely monitor their backlink profile.
Your handy link monitoring tool can really make a difference. SEOptimer will actively scan your link profile and alert you to potentially harmful links, making it easier for you to check each new inbound link and analyze its relevance and value to your site.
2. Stay Updated on Bad Links That Could Lead to Penalties
Once you enter your domain, our tool will monitor the links pointing back to you and alert you to any potential bad links. It will pick up on signals like unnatural anchor text and a high number of external links.
You should always analyze these potentially bad links carefully. You’ll find that some of them are actually good—but it’s the ones that aren’t that will result in costly link penalties.
3. Running a Site Audit
Yes, you’ll want to audit your site’s overall performance and SEO on a regular basis. The good news is, if you’ve decided to take advantage of SEOptimer, you can easily run these audits yourself. This gives you a real-time view of your website that includes your Link profile, On-Page SEO, Usability, Performance, and several other important SEO aspects of your site.
This tool gives me everything I need to know the current quality of my site and its link profile, including domain authority, total number of backlinks, number of spam links, new links acquired and more. So you will always know how your site is performing!
The Algorithm Behind Links and Link Penalties
Google uses a very complex and intelligent ranking algorithm to determine the SERPs and where your website is located in them. It is an algorithm that is updated 500-600 times a year. This means that Google is always evolving and getting smarter. So, SEO must also continue to evolve.
1. Penguin and Link Penalties
The part of the algorithm that’s behind links is called Penguin, and it’s responsible for detecting links that Google deems manipulative. Its goal is to identify links that are spammy, irrelevant, or over-optimized.
Penguin penalizes you for these links by dropping your rankings—sometimes dozens of pages down. In Google, that’s pretty much the same as not having them at all. Users rarely scroll past the first page of search results.
Penguin works in real time, so it’s constantly monitoring websites and their backlink profiles, all the time. All the more reason why you should constantly monitor your website and backlink profile, too!.
2. The Difference Between Manual and Algorithmic Link Penalties
If you get hit with a link penalty, it will be one of two types: a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty. Manual penalties are applied by a member of Google’s webspam team. A real person manually reviews your link profile and issues you the penalty.
This type of penalty can be triggered by a variety of things, including spam reports from competitors, being in a competitive niche that Google actively monitors, and sometimes just plain bad luck.
Algorithmic penalties, on the other hand, are applied automatically by Google’s Penguin algorithm, without any human intervention or review. These are more common because Penguin works in real time (and much faster than humans), constantly scanning your link profile and weeding out the ones it doesn’t trust.
But ultimately, both types of penalties are equally bad for your website. You should actively work to avoid both. That means using good organic link building tactics to only get high-quality, relevant links. These are the strategies that Google considers manipulative or spammy. These are the ones you should avoid at all costs if you don’t want to get penalized.
Remember that securing good links should take time. If a link opportunity seems too easy or too good to be true, it probably is.
1. Link Spam
This should be obvious when you see it. Link spam involves bad URLs or over-optimized hyperlinks dropped in the comment sections of random, irrelevant blogs and forums. Sometimes with short, unimportant comments that add no value to the discussion.
These types of comments can be posted with automated software, and it’s something that still happens a lot in black hat SEO. It may sound productive to post so many links, but don’t be fooled—comment automation leaves a trail of duplicate content all over the internet for Google to find, and spam links won’t help your website in any way.
They won’t provide any value because they’re forced, not natural. They’re often completely irrelevant to both the blog/forum and your own website. In fact, you’re more likely to get penalized than see any SEO improvements.
Alternatively, selectively commenting on relevant, authoritative blogs and forums in your niche is effective. This can be an effective way to gain backlinks when supported by white hat SEO and a broader link building strategy.
This should only be done manually and only on highly relevant sites where you can add real value to the online community with your links. And quite simply, throwing your links around on every blog and forum you come across is not the way to add any value.
2. Some Paid Links
Notice I said some, not all, because not all paid links are bad. There are some, like premium directory listings and relevant editorial links, that are usually fine. However, bad paid links are really bad.
In general, Google hates the practice of buying and selling links. It acts very aggressively against any website that does it unethically. It has temporarily banned a number of well-established and well-known organizations from the SERPs as punishment for doing exactly that, including J.C. Penney, Forbes, Overstock and even itself—Google Japan, in fact, banned it for 11 months for this.
So I’m not exaggerating when I say Google will come down hard on you if you’re caught buying and selling links in a way that passes ranking power. Technically, you can buy as many links as you want, but they should be nofollow links that don’t pass you any “link juice.”
But as a general rule, don’t buy links. The exception might be links from highly relevant sites with good domain authority that will include your link naturally and valuable. Definitely never pay for links wherever they are offered. That’s a surefire way to get penalized.
3. Private Blog Networks
Private blog networks (PBNs) are a very high-risk, grey hat link building strategy that I recommend you stay away from. The potential rewards are not worth the risk.
A PBN is basically a network of websites all owned by you, that you use to interlink with each other and pass link power to the sites you make money from. The sites in a PBN will have no value to your money-making sites unless they have their own inbound links.
So SEOs who insist on using this strategy will usually pay to acquire a recently expired domain with existing inbound links, and then add new content to it.
This is a bit questionable, and while there are still niche SEOs who support the use of PBNs for link building, there are no two opinions about it. This is a pretty manipulative tactic. Google hates manipulative tactics—it’s the reason link penalties exist.
4. Links from Low-Quality or Irrelevant Sites
This is another pretty obvious one. It goes against the whole concept of organic link building. Google wants links to be earned. They want to see that your backlinks are coming from reputable sites that actually want to link to you because you’re providing some kind of value.
That means you need to have some kind of real connection with them, usually through outreach and relationship building—or through content that’s so valuable that it attracts links. That basically means links shouldn’t be easy to get. It’s too easy to get links from low-quality and/or irrelevant sites.
These sites that provide easy links may be used simply to pass on ranking power, and Google doesn’t look kindly on that. And speaking of irrelevant websites, I should mention here that foreign websites usually fall into this category as well.
If you’re a US site, Google will expect that the majority of your inbound links will also come from the US—or at least in English. Of course, there are exceptions to this, such as a large multinational brand with multilingual sites for its customers in different countries.
In general, having a significant percentage of your inbound links coming from foreign-language sources (.ru, .cn, .su and .ua domains in particular, which are notoriously spammy referrals) is another big red flag for Google.
5. Excessive Link Exchanges
Reciprocal linking is another grey area. It’s likely something that happens naturally over time. It makes sense that websites in the same niche will talk about and link to each other the longer they’re around. But as a link building strategy, it’s become more about simple link exchanges than a reciprocal exchange of benefits and value.
This is problematic for Google because it’s so artificial—there are thousands of pages on the internet that exist purely for link exchanges rather than for users. Many of these are self-serving and not niche-specific, making them an irrelevant addition to your link profile.
So as a general rule, I would recommend that you don’t contact websites to ask for link exchanges because it’s not an organic link building strategy. If you’re not careful, you could end up getting a link penalty for all your efforts.
Recovering from a Link Penalty
If your site has been hit with a link penalty, it means that you have too many bad links in your link profile and you need to remove or disavow them in order to recover.
You will need to clean up your link profile. Then, if you received a manual penalty, you can submit a reconsideration request to Google. If you received an algorithmic penalty, you should see your site recover fairly quickly now that Penguin is running in real time.
1. Contact the Webmaster
For some bad links, you may be able to contact the site owner and ask them to remove their link to your site. In some cases, it may be an honest mistake, so they will simply take it down and that’s the end of the matter. Simple and easy.
Unfortunately, in most cases, you won’t get a response if you reach out. You will be left with only one option: manually disavow these links. You will need to ask Google not to consider these links when assessing your website.
2. Disavowing Bad Backlinks
Luckily, I have been able to do this neatly with SEOptimer. First, you will want to head to the Backlink Research section. Here you can enter your domain to pull your backlink profile.
Next, you’ll want to switch to the “Backlinks” tab to see a list of backlinks pointing to your domain. You’ll then need to comb through your list and identify any spammy or unnatural links that could be causing a penalty. Add these bad links to a text file and submit it to Google Search Console.
3. Check Your Outbound Links
In addition to removing and disavowing bad links, it’s also a good idea to go through your website and look for any bad outbound links where you may be linking to bad websites. This can also have a negative impact on your link profile, and could come into play if you’ve received a link penalty.
Remove anything that’s irrelevant and that you don’t need. If there are some that you must keep, set them as nofollow links so that Google knows not to consider them when reading your website. Once you’ve done all of this, you should see a recovery from your link penalty. Hooray!
Conclusion
The idea behind backlinks is simple, really. Do it right and as organically as possible. Be proactive and realistic about the nature of the backlinks. Whether you mean it or not, you may end up with bad backlinks that put you at risk of getting penalized—or that result in a penalty. Even if you do everything right, you can still get penalized for bad links.
You can save yourself a lot of time and headaches by using a proactive link monitoring tool like SEOptimer that will help you identify bad links as soon as they appear.
If you are unlucky enough to get penalized, this tool will help you recover as quickly as possible without much hassle. Trust me, getting out of the penalty box is not a task you want to tackle alone!
