Google Hands Down Unnatural Backlink Penalties

All I can say is, "It's about time!" A few weeks back Google began handing down penalties for using unnatural incoming links. How about all those sites that SEO firms cross-link to each other as referred links? I'm sure that they are next. Here's a quote directly from Google that was received by webmasters:

If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches.

Figure A - Unnatural Linking

However, once again, Google's warnings seem to go in one ear and out the other with a lot of SEO firms and site owners. Take "Small Business Trends," for example. Here's a website that is supposed to be an authority on SEO and yet weeks after the Google penalties were handed down they place an article 'explaining the basics' of SEO. In this post they put incoming back-links as the number one thing to consider with SEO for beginners. And, not one mention in the post about relevance. Not one. As a matter of fact, they actually have the audacity to call it a 'popularity contest.' Well, what happens when Google deems a back-link, or inbound link, unnatural? Google can penalize the site and devalue all of the other natural links on the site because of an unnatural incoming or outgoing link(See Figure A). Google seems to be upping their game. And, it makes me wonder why so many webmasters still think it's 'proper SEO' to purchase back-links, participate in link sharing schemes or take some form of compensation for including links when all they have to do is create substantive, high-quality, relevant content? Way to go in helping beginners with their SEO.

Time and time again I ask my fellows in SEO, "Is what you are doing part of a scheme or is it actually beneficial to the site visitors?" Chances are that if it is part of a scheme (or, you are being paid for it) then eventually the practice will be penalized. Don't be lazy because once the penalties start coming down then there is little else to do but backtrack and undo every instance on on every site. Have fun explaining to your clients why all that money they spent was wasted and how you must go back and do everything the right way. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.