Google wants me to remove links from sponsored WordPress themes

[1script]

I like it when Google folks tell you what exactly they find wrong with your site. It happens only rarely (to me anyhow) but when it does, it feels great. Until you realize that you can't do what they're telling you to...

So, I have just been honored to receive another (#2 in my 10+ yrs career) personalized response to a reinclusion request. In it, they provide two examples of links they find "unnatural" ("inorganic" is how the person typing this message called them). One of them is a blogroll links from a buddy in the industry (not SEO industry, mind you, an actual "proper" manufacturing industry) that I can remedy by shooting a quick email, even though I didn't think genuine industry connections may hurt your site in this way. Kinda invalidates the whole point of blogrolls.

But the second one puts me squarely in hot water, I don't know if I can possibly do anything about it: Some 2+ years ago in throws of questionable wisdom I sponsored about 5 or 6 WordPress themes where the "Designed by" link in the footer gets replaced by a link to your site. They were nice looking and "relevant" themes, at least as far as the name and pictures used in design suggest. They were not used much initially and I did not think much of them until these "unnatural links" notices started flying a month ago.

So, now I have a confirmation from G that they do not like these links indeed. Problem is: several of those themes were linking directly to the homepage of the site. In the years past they were picked up by quite a few sites, some very unsavory, sometimes re-designed to look nothing like the original theme (yet the footer links remain). Some of these sites are hosted in faraway lands and I think it's quite obvious I cannot remove them.

One or two of those WP theme links were pointing to subdirectories and I was able to "invalidate" the URLs to which they link by returning a 410 Gone response on these particular URLs. I hope this will take care of those (or will it?). But the ones pointing to the homepage - I can't possibly return 410 on it.

The language of the email response is rather stern and includes a passage like "we will consider reviewing your reconsideration requests only after we see a significant decrease in the number of inorganic links". I am unhappy to report that most of them point to the homepage.

I can't just pack up and leave to another domain for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I don't want to look like a flight-by-night operation. It's a good name, took me awhile to find it and besides, I already moved the site once.

So, what would you guys do? Has anyone been to a situation where the links were not removable? Has it been resolved? I'm looking for any comment or suggestions from fellow webmasters on how to proceed best.

Thanks!

[1script]

Guys, this thread veered into the Google-bashing territory and that's not a very productive way of addressing the issue at hand.
I'm not particularly fond of Google and, because of these heavy penalties, Bing is putting bread on my table these days. The situation with these links is very difficult for me yet rather logical and as much as I'm looking for your input, "Google sucks" does not really help my or anyone in my situation.

I know that there are many (hundreds of) webmasters out there that did the same thing I did and now may be wondering what could they do to fix it. In fact, I just checked - the template sponsorship marketplace at DP is still thriving, so there are people out there right now making the same mistake I made 2+ years ago. So, let's agree that there is a problem and let's discuss what can we do about it and let's not lay blame where it does not belong.

Here is how I see the issue:

Google's algo is very dependent on links. There are certifiable bad links out there (in tens of thousands for my site alone) and every party agrees that they are in fact bad links. These bad links are just clogging the system. They are not helping me now and never have as far as I can tell. But they are adding tens of thousands of bad data points into the Google's index calculations and they'd rather have them removed instead of keeping them in the system and marking them as bad.

It is a very difficult and tedious work to convince anyone to do anything on their site and Google would rather make me do the work because they have me by my balls right now with this penalty situation and also, sadly, because I caused this mess in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that no one at Google looks at the details of my link cleansing efforts. But they would like to make sure that I did at least some work that, in theory, can lead to removal of a few bad data points from their index database. Granted, it's a drop in the ocean, but, since it does not cost them a twitch of a finger, they'd rather wait for me to do it.

Anyhow, I am seeing pretty discouraging results of my efforts to mitigate effect of the bad links by returning 410 Gone on the URLs that were the href of those links (talking about non-homepage links). It's been three weeks and the list of bad links in my WMT didn't budge. It looks like "normal" links are fluctuating but these links to 410-ed URLs are like frozen in time - their number is still exactly the same.

This may actually be an indication of Google's strong preference for removal of the links from live crawlable pages as opposed to just invalidating their destinations because of the concerns I talked about earlier.

Is there a better code to return than 410? Any idea about an HTTP header or perhaps a page content that more effectively "kills" a page as far as Googlebot is concerned?

[AussieWebmaster]

personally I think Google could have just devalued the links - they found them to use to make the list of 'unnaturals' it is really a way to slow play the possible bounce back and force sites to buy traffic

why not allow no follows or server side redirects of the links

personally I wish I had a few of these sites as I would be redirecting the link sources to Matt Cutts blog

anyone want to design a template for Matt :)

[Gemini23]

1script are you able to provide the exact text that Google sent you? without the actual urls to be removed....

[Ralph_Slate]

From the original post, is it confirmed that blogroll links can hurt a site? Are those links that we should try and get removed?

[1script]

@Gemini23:
It contained a canned response (still violate ... specifically look for possibly artificial or unnatural links...) and links to Google Webmaster Tools help pages about linking schemes, then three paragraphs added that had examples of my wrong doing:

To illustrate how these articles could apply to you, here are examples of pages that contain inorganic links to your site:

http://www.example.com/url1
Anchor Text: {MySite's Name}

[anotherexample.com...]
Anchor Text: {Some other very generic anchor}

(I preserved the original format with curly brackets and all)

The one that irked me quite a bit was the first example which was my buddy's blogroll link and the name of my site is how everyone in the world is linking to my site - I could not possibly do anything about it. I ended up not removing that link.
The second example they gave was a legit bad link - from a sponsored WP theme. I was able to get it removed later.

So, to answer Ralph_Slate's question: I don't think my experience shows that blogroll links specifically were the problem. In my case the most problematic links were from the footer of WP themes used on many sites, many of which were outright spam autoblogs. So, if you're talking about legit blogroll links from "normal" blogs (i.e. those where humans post and sometimes visit), I think you're fine.

[diberry]

If they actually get around to it, the ability to "disavow" links in WMT might be helpful, too. I know that's no help now, but maybe that's the direction they're heading and that's why they're starting to tell people more specifically which links are their problem.

[Ralph_Slate]

It's odd that they still included the blogroll link in the email. Do you think it was because the domain was identified as spammy, or because of the profile of the link?

I don't have any manual actions, but I was hit by Penguin, and am trying to figure out why, since I don't buy, sell, or trade links with anyone. I have links which stand out that fit two profiles.


Domain Links Linked Pages
--------------------------------
domain1 465,158 798
domain2 38,904 1
domain3 22,309 1

These are message forums with tens of thousands of posts and my site appears on each page. I contacted a few of the domains and asked them to remove the links, however we're going on almost 3 months since the #1 site removed the links, and Google is barely recognizing that they have done so (the peak was 600,000).

Also:

Domain Links Linked Pages
--------------------------------
domain1 76,971 18,411
domain2 43,237 14,031
domain3 24,641 16,924

Those are Wikipedia and the the Wiki-scaper sites.

I'm not sure which, if either, might trigger Penguin.

[1script]

@Ralph_Slate: I think you should be mostly concerned about sitewide links that are going to a single linked page. So, in your Table 1 domains #2 and #3 would be an issue, not the domain #1. Also, none of the Table 2 domains would be an issue then either. Granted, I don't know which 18,411 of your pages they are linking to: what is it, a scraper of some sort? Are those 18,411 your actual legit pages?

As far as Google not recognizing bad link removals: I know what you mean. On another site of mine I also have this WP theme links problem. However, no matter what I do, they don't budge. The number of links in WMT for that domain hasn't changed in 3 months, even though through pure luck I was able to remove more than 80% of bad links, most of them removed back in June. In fact, for that particular site they haven't even responded to my RR (see my other recent thread). I think once they label a site as "bad" for whatever reason, the amount of time expenditure for dealing with that site goes way down and it's really hard to get attention of someone at Google if they consider the site being "bad" (whatever the definition)

[Gemini23]

1script - I found it of particular interest as John Mu had replied to me that a blog roll link wasn't a problem.

"Links such as the one from the blog that you mentioned are fine -- just because a link is site-wide does not necessarily make it unnatural.”"

[productforums.google.com...]

[Ralph_Slate]

@1script, thanks for the info. That is really unfortunate, because I have 85 sites linking to me where the ratio of their pages to my page is more than 100 to 1 and 20 where the ratio is more than 1000 to 1. Many of the sites are in Europe - they are not spam sites, they are on-topic with mine, and I guess the site owners just decided to blogroll my page because it's a good resource.

To answer your second question, the 18,411 pages on my site are 100% legit. For good or for bad, my site is being used as the foundation to build out a topical sector in Wikipedia. The editors take information from my site and make a Wiki page, and at least leave a link to where they got the data. However, Google does not recognize the 75,000+ Wikipedia links for what they are - a signal that my site is a highly trusted resource.