wingslevel - 4:49 pm on Mar 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

We are seeing more and more of this. Think it's related to the January algo tweak that was announced as being link related?

As smart as they are, whenever google engineers try to divine intent from data, there seem to be lots of innocent casualties. Looking at our back links, let's walk through what decisions they have to make. Say a spammy directory site links from 2000 pages to example.com - are they scrapers? Did they just build a junk directory and list example.com? Did one of example.com's competitors buy the links? Did the directory scrape some news site and then place the link to example.com? If >10% of example.com's inbounds come from these types of sites, do they get a penalty? >20%?

I wish I could say that I felt comfortable with google making the right choices on those questions right now, but I don't.

For those of you who have received the message, can you share some data with us? Maybe as to the type of links and percentage of total inbound? Since we will never get guidelines from google, maybe we can develop a framework here by sharing some numbers.

On one of my ecom sites, there are 45,000 inbounds showing in WMT. Looking at the top linking sites, 5 have greater than 1,000 links and three of these link only to our home page. A couple of these are sites that are low quality directory type, but, I don't think real spammers. I have never bought a link in 14 years. Should I be worried? Two of the sites don't even publish any contact info. Should I go through Whois and demand that they remove the links? Why should I have to bother with this? I haven't done anything wrong.