How can I get examples of bad links to my site?
Matt's answer:
MALE SPEAKER: Today’s question comes from Adeel in Manchester. Adeel asks, “Client got unnatural link warning in September 2012 without any example links. 90% of the links were removed, asked for examples in every reconsideration request, but got no reply. Shouldn’t it be better to have a list of bad links or penalties in Google Webmaster Tools? Think about genuine businesses.” So that’s fair feedback. We appreciate that. We’re working on becoming more transparent and giving more examples with messages as we can. I wouldn’t try to say, hey, give me examples in a reconsideration request. Because a reconsideration request– we’ll read what you say. But we can really only give a small number of replies– basically, yes, the reconsideration request has been granted, or no, you still have work to do. There’s a very thin middle ground which is your request has been processed. That usually only applies if you have multiple web spam actions. And then maybe one has been cleared, but you might have other ones left. But typically, you’ll get a yes or no back. But there’s no field in that request to say, a live amount of text to just say, OK, here’s some more examples. But we will work on trying to get more examples in the messages as they go out, or some way where, for example, it would be great if you could just log into Webmaster Tools and see some examples there. What I would say is if you have gotten that message, feel free to stop by the Webmaster forum and see if you could ask for any examples. And if there’s any Googlers hanging out on the forum, then maybe we could check the specific spam incident and see whether we might be able to post or provide a few examples of links within that thread. But we’ll keep working on trying to improve things and making them more transparent.
by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team
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