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I can't speak to why they've penalized you, but it sounds similar to what they did with RapGenius. Rap Genius would pay others to link to them to help increase

by uptown 12y ago

I can't speak to why they've penalized you, but it sounds similar to what they did with RapGenius. Rap Genius would pay others to link to them to help increase their pagerank. Google caught wind of it, and penalized them for gaming the system. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-seo-genius-lyric-site-fails-to-recover-traffic-after-google-penalty http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-... I'm not sure why they think you've done the same - but that's likely why they are blaming you for the links others have created to your site. I agree - if you did nothing to encourage those links to be created, it's difficult to see how you should be responsible for their removal, but hopefully the article I've linked will give you more context as to what Google is probably trying to weed out from their search results in order to help you get it resolved.

graeme 12y ago
It's not just payment. Google also considers an unnatural link profile as evidence of spammy actions. This is perhaps reasonable in isolation and in most cases. But it certainly raises the possibility of negative SEO, where you point large numbers of spam links to a competitor's site in order to blacklist them with Google. See this for example: http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalti... I run a site that has received a few tens of thousands of visitors. I checked webmaster tools. I have a bunch of spam links from btclush.com, marqueefy.com and some russian sites. I can't actually find the linking pages, btclush.com itself is blank and all content is on subdomains. It's not clear to me what I, a small webmaster, should be doing about this. I'm hoping these sites send spam links to almost every site – in that case presumably google is aware that site owners are not at fault. I don't have the time to contact spam sites to tell them not to link to me or to disavow all these links. Note that the composition of the spam links changes. The last time I checked different spam sites were linking to me.

by uptown 12y ago

graeme 12y ago

It's not just payment. Google also considers an unnatural link profile as evidence of spammy actions. This is perhaps reasonable in isolation and in most cases. But it certainly raises the possibility of negative SEO, where you point large numbers of spam links to a competitor's site in order to blacklist them with Google. See this for example: http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo http://moz.com/blog/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalti... I run a site that has received a few tens of thousands of visitors. I checked webmaster tools. I have a bunch of spam links from btclush.com, marqueefy.com and some russian sites. I can't actually find the linking pages, btclush.com itself is blank and all content is on subdomains. It's not clear to me what I, a small webmaster, should be doing about this. I'm hoping these sites send spam links to almost every site – in that case presumably google is aware that site owners are not at fault. I don't have the time to contact spam sites to tell them not to link to me or to disavow all these links. Note that the composition of the spam links changes. The last time I checked different spam sites were linking to me.