How to remove unnatural links from your website to recover after penguin 2.0

It was with an intense reaction how the SEO world welcomed the Penguin 2.0 update and the dozens of threads on places like warrior forum, which were solely dedicated to Penguin update, are the best signs to show how restless the SEO world became after the update. The cold response of Matt Cutts regarding “denying value upstream for link spammers” added to the confusion when he said that Google would deal with it later.

This response left the webmasters in confusion about what to do about penguin hit. The possible reason for why your sight has been hit by Penguin is the low quality backlinks pointing back to your website. And the effective solution would be to weed out the low quality backlinks from your link profile.

It is better to check your link profile to ensure that there are no unnatural backlinks, even if your site is unaffected by Penguin hit, because you cannot predict whether someone will link to your website in future. You might say that talking is easier than doing and yes we admit the fact that the backlink removal service is not an easy thing but the difficulty level depends on how you look at things. If you make a proper plan and try to remove the backlinks, your job will be done easily. Let us have a look at the best action plan.

Spotting the unnatural backlinks

Half of your job will be done if you successfully identify the low-quality backlinks pointing to your website and such links are usually from websites that:

- Are apparently new
- Have less or few traffic
- Have big number of external links

Immediately put the links in to-remove list if they are coming from such websites.

After enlisting the bad links

A considerable number of SEOs and webmasters are confused about what to do with the caught fish and they remain puzzled with unnatural back links they identified. Here are a few things that can be done once you identify the unnatural backlinks to your websites.

#1 – ‘404’ the pages that are linked to

One of the common strategies used by most webmasters is to 404 or 410 the linked to pages in a hurry to recover from the penguin penalty. SEOs think mostly about recovering from the penalty and therefore they might try to get rid of the linked to pages. However, this is not a viable option because you cannot remove the linked to pages if they are important pages such as home page.

#2 – Request a link removal

The next thing you can do is to request the webmasters who have linked to your pages from their website to remove the backlinks. However, it can be a daunting task to trace the webmasters contact details and to request them individually. You can take the service of companies that can contact the webmasters for you. You should also remember to request them in a proper manner because there are situations in which the request may not get approved.

#3 – Google’s link disavow tool

You can send a disavow request to Google for backlink removal service as a last resort after trying to remove the backlinks yourself by other means. Make sure that you send the disavow request only after considering every other options to remove the links yourself.