Have you seen this thread going around the web now regarding a warning message in Google Webmaster Tools about unnatural links? It’s a crazy issue right now because everyone is trying to reverse engineer how Google is identifying which links are natural and which are manufactured for the sake of artificial ranking increases.  Search Engine Land has posted some recent articles about this and how to identify such strategies on your site.

If Google decides to devalue the links to your site, you’d better be prepared for some loss of rankings. Start right now by creating good content that is useful to your industry. You can figure out what topics people need answers on by using the Google External Keyword tool. You’ll get better results if you have an Adwords account, but just try searching for your industry keywords and find phrases that are asking questions like, “What is a SATA laptop hard drive” or “hard drive specs.” The number of searches may surprise you and you can then share your knowledge through a blog post or infographic. There are also methods to share your content throughout the web like Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

P.J. Fusco from Search Engine Land just wrote an article about what to do if you’re website is over optimized. It’s an amusing article written in Jeff Foxworthy redneck style, so enjoy. Most of the suggestions are obvious, but a few warrant some extra consideration:

1. Buying links

2. Lack of original content

3. Your inbound links mostly contain the same anchor text

4. All your links come from blogs or forums

I’ll go into each one of these in future blog posts, but the immediate response should be to stop forcing link building and start encouraging it by offering good, usable content to your industry. If you have engaged in paid link building strategies, use Webmaster Tools to examine your links. What kind of pages are your links on? Is the content relevant and useful to the reader? You may discover that you have some clean up on Links Aisle 7 to do! So, get a plan and respond to Google regarding what happened, how you’re going to fix it, and what you’re doing going forward to fix it. The more useful content you spread out there, the greater your chances of getting good links will be!

By Scott Eggenberger