Google's WMT Examples of Unnatural Links

[JesterMagic]

In the Feb 11 Google Web Master Help video Matt Cutts

[youtube.com ]

mentions (starting around the 40 sec mark) that they are working on a new feature of web master tools to give you examples of any unnatural links your site may have. He says that they are slowly rolling out the feature.

Does anyone have the feature available yet?

I feel like Google is just going in circles here and trying to make the 80 percent or so of webmasters who do not do black hat techniques do more work.

For years they just didn’t count unnaturally links. Then they release the disavow tool making most of us wonder if we need to use it and which links to use it on. Now this new feature that will show examples. At this point Google might as well go back and just not count unnatural links automatically.

Don’t get me wrong I am glad to see that we will be given examples. My site traffic is down and I haven’t done any unnaturally link building so hopefully this will confirm to me if any of the natural links I have for some reason Google sees as unnatural.

[Hoople]

There's another similar discussion going on here [webmasterworld.com...]

[1script]

There's another similar discussion

Not really, the only similarity I could find is that the other OP also received the "Unnatural Links" notice.

But the new feature, if/when it will become available, would be very interesting to look at. I have a number (a great number) of links that I don't like, that look suspicious, never solicited by me, that I would love to see Google categorize for me as just noise or as bad links. I'd be happy to send the disavow although you would think it would be silly to NOT send a disavow on links that they label as "unnatural", whether you actually did something to acquire them or not.

In other words, it all just comes down to "why can't they simply remove them from your PR calculation if the links are certifiably bad?"

[lucy24]

why can't they simply remove them from your PR calculation if the links are certifiably bad?

How 'bout when the linking page itself should never have been crawled, by google's own guidelines? (The "ignore parameters" section of wmt.) Every time they happen to crawl a search-results page which happens to include a hit on one of your own pages, that gets translated into a link. Can the world's leading search engine really, truly not tell when it has landed on a search-results page? The mind boggles. If any page on your site mentions any human-- living or dead, real or fictional-- with any name less common than "Smith", you will wake up one day to a fistful of spurious links from every people-finder site on the planet.

Grr.

[JesterMagic]

In other words, it all just comes down to "why can't they simply remove them from your PR calculation if the links are certifiably bad?"

Right. I have a few links that might be questionable (I didn't do anything to create them). MY site traffic has been cut by 50% since April and I would really hate to disavow any link that is helping me just because I am paranoid trying to figure out what Google thinks is a bad link.