Google Helps with THOSE Webmaster Tools Messages

There were a lot of people on the internet over the weekend and at the beginning of this week complaining about the unnatural link warning messages, myself included. Why? Well, Google had sent out more messages to website owners about unnatural links and then shortly afterwards announced that these messages weren’t the same as previous batches of messages. These messages were aimed more at “transparency” and were more about 1 or 2 links on your website and not, as previously, a serious warning about the links which might result in a link penalty.

This lead to a lot of people wonder what the value of these link warnings would be if half were important and the other half could just be ignored.

Well, Google have now improved this situation making a tweak to the wording of the “informative” message compared to the original message which was a warning of a forthcoming penalty due to a large number of “unnatural links”.

The two messages are now worded differently, and there have been a change to how these are displayed in Webmaster Tools.

The Message used to read as the below:

The below is the new message relating to a link warning which might not be as serious.

As you can see the new message is less detailed. The new message is much softer and contains a little less information. The warnings about Link Schemes has been removed as this is more about individual links and less about a pattern of lots of links pointing to a website.

Another big difference introduced following all of the fuss about the link messages is the removal of the warning symbol from the second kind of message. This allows website owners to easily see which messages are the more serious, and those which are more advisory.

I’m really pleased about this as this new message allows website owners to easily tell if they need to make urgent changes or if it is just the less important “one or two links” message they have received. This is a quick response from Google and makes these messages a lot more helpful, which was my concern yesterday.

So if you receive one of these messages check which of the two wordings you message contains and look out for the warning triangle so that you know which of the two messages you have received for your site. This will let you know how urgent Google sees the issue of links on your site.

Regardless of which message you’ve received, I’d still recommend reviewing your links and working out if there are any which need urgent attention and to identify any site wide links as well. This will enable you to quickly see which links are an issue for your site and to be able to address these issues as quickly as possible.

Ideally in the future I’d like to see Google allowing us to discount links from within Google Webmaster Tools, as there will always been that ONE link which despite your best efforts you can’t get rid of. It would be great if we could get Google to allow us to tell them which links we want nothing to do with and which links we don’t want to count towards our rankings. Bing have recently allowed webmasters the opportunity to “disavow” links from within their webmaster tools, so hopefully Google won’t be too far behind.