Artificial links, Google warnings arrive in Webmaster Tools

The fight against spam is becoming more fierce inside Google. For a few days, some webmasters have received a warning from Google, through Webmaster Tools. Google states, through this warning, that it has recognized unnatural or artificial links connected to the site. Through the same methods, Google warns webmasters that it has detected illicit techniques such as, for example, cloaking. The increase in notifications within Webmaster Tools was announced by Matt Cutts, a Google engineer who has been communicating through his famous blog for years, in early December during a public speech. The links to a site must be natural, says Google, meaning spontaneous, and it is precisely thanks to links (along with other factors) that Google and other search engines can understand how credible a site is.

A few years ago, the race to link exchanges or purchases served to increase the Google PageRank, the green bar present on Google’s toolbar which, thanks to its score from 1 to 10, indicated the popularity of a site. Today, Google PageRank is no longer an important element to the point that Google itself has removed it from the Webmaster Tools elements.

Buying and selling links, therefore, to build a good reputation of a site in Google’s eyes which translates into better ranking in the search engine index, is increasingly deprecated by the Mountain View search engine. Out with artificial links, out with link exchanges, out with hidden links which, even today, several webmasters (and some SEOs) insert on their sites.

It remains to be seen whether Google’s commitment to send warnings and notifications also coincides with the anomalies that many sites encounter in Google’s SERPs and which have nothing to do with these illicit techniques. Google increasingly close to users, is often repeated by some Google representatives, now also closer to webmasters and site owners?