More Google Penalties?!
The confusion about Google’s latest round of unnatural link warnings is getting more bizarre by the minute.
After sending out the warnings and getting hit with a wave of criticism concerning how vague and confusing the warning were, Google’s head of Webspam Matt Cutts took to Danny Sullivan’s excellent story on the confusion and left the below comment:
“An engineer worked over the weekend and starting with the messages that we sent out on Sunday, the messages are now different so that you can tell which type of situation you’re in. We also changed the UI in the webmaster console to remove the yellow caution sign for these newer messages. That reflects the fact that these newer notifications are much more targeted and don’t always require action by the site owner.”
So they “don’t always require action by the site owner”. Don’t always? Could Google be any more vague?
To add to the confusion, the revised link warning still advises the webmaster to remove any links if they are able to and submit a reconsideration request. Why would Google advise you to remove the links if there’s no repercussions?
Or better yet, why are Google playing so coy with the information webmasters need to fix their rankings considering how forthcoming they’ve been with these types of announcements over the past six months. We’ve got a feeling something’s a-brewing at the Googleplex that we’ll find out about in the next few weeks.
But until then, we recommend taking the unnatural link warnings just as serious as before because after all, you’re still in violation of Google’s guidelines. That’s not a good place to be in amidst the uncertainty about this particular situation. Get your links sorted out now to save yourself the headaches later.
If you’ve had any of these new link warnings leave us a comment below or sign up for our newsletter so we can keep you up to date with what’s going over the coming weeks!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
