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Cutts Tells How to Spot Unnatural Links

Matt Cutts

Google has good news for SEOs who’ve been receiving unnatural link warnings but were unable to identify them.

In a brief video released today, Google Web Spam Chief Matt Cutts explained how to spot these links, as well as what Google is doing to make this process easier in the future, in response to a question that was posted on the Google Webmasters Forum.

Cutts’ opens the video by saying that Google is trying to be more transparent when it comes to unnatural links. (That campaign started with a major increase in unnatural link warnings last year.)

To that end, they’ve rolled out a feature allowing webmasters to sort links by, most recent within their Webmaster Tools dashboard. This should make spotting the links that triggered the warning a lot easier.

Cutts also said that Google is going to be sending out more examples of bad links along with their unnatural links warnings. He is, however, quick to point out the examples won’t be comprehensive and really made it appear as though this was a work in progress.

Some examples Cutts uses of unnatural links include paid links and article directory links. Both methods were commonplace before the Penguin update, but have fallen from favor since then.

This is the second video with link advice Cutts has released in the last few weeks. His last video covered what to do about negative SEO.

Do you think these techniques will be helpful? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.