If you are serious about your SEO health and you analyze your Google Webmaster Tools account on a regular basis than you might have received one of these “unnatural links” messages recently in your account. For some, this message might have caused serious panic. The truth is that you don’t have to go nuts when you see this message. Take a deep breath and start to explore what it really means in relevance to your Internet marketing approach.
Unnatural Links Video
Google penalties are not fun. We have personally spoke with people who have received a slap on the wrist from Google and the cleanup process can be very long and painful. Depending on how bad your situation is you could find yourself really trying to hunt down the culprit responsible for pushing you into the hot seat with Google and it can take some time. If you depend on your website traffic for revenue and company growth you will know that a penalty can really keep you up at night and utterly cripple you.
At some point during your journey you will definitely have to do something called a reconsideration request with Google. This is something that can be done directly through Google Webmaster Tools once you feel you have cleaned up your dirty steps you might have taken marketing your business.
Here is a great video from Matt Cutts discussing the topic in further detail.
Google Reconsideration Request Video
Yes! Well, you should at least get it onto your website at the very minimum. Google Webmaster Tools gives website owners valuable insight as to how their website is interacting with the web and overall health of a website.
Google wants the community to really understand the technical behavior of their websites so they can properly market them and drive valuable targeted traffic. Not that long ago Google launched Webmaster Academy where website owners can learn even more about the interaction of their website and the technology of Google.
Here are some important reasons why you might want to use Google Webmaster Tools:
- Helps you understand search queries
- Crawl errors
- Overall health of your website
- Website optimization
- Site performance
Google Webmaster Tools Video
301 redirects when implemented correctly can be a life saving effort when it comes to preserving the power of older web pages.
Google recommends using a 301 redirect when:
• You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it’s a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. You can also use Webmaster Tools to set your preferred domain.
• You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.
Google 301 Redirect Video