Carson Ward recently published an excellent post on the SEOmoz blog, exploring the current phenomenon of unnatural link warnings from Google, and the rapid de-indexing of blog networks.

Anyone that is not au fait with the current state of play, I suggest you go and read the piece here - Unnatural Link Warnings and Blog Networks.

As a reminder, here is what the message from Google webmaster tools looks like:

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Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://you-site.com

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://you-site.com

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team
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In his post, Carson discussed various issues, including paid blog networks, like Linkvana, Build my Rank & Authority Link Network, explaining that these networks have seen a recent massive de-indexing by Google, so much so that Build my Rank closed its doors.

I agree with everything Carson mentioned in his post, but it got me thinking...

Is Google De-Indexing JUST Blog Networks?

If we pause for just a moment and take a step back to look what could be happening here, I wonder whether big G is really JUST de-indexing the paid blog networks. It seems that there have been way too many ‘unnatural link’ messages going around for them to all be related to the handful of paid ‘blog networks’, so what else has changed? What is the Google algorithm seeing as ‘unnatural’ now, that it wasn’t a few months ago?

My own chain of thought goes something like this:

We all know that Google automates as much of its business as it can, and it is pretty obvious that this latest de-indexing of blog networks is algorithmic. Quite likely the sending out of these messages is also automated, at least to some extent.

What I am wondering, is would Google go to all the trouble of writing a shiny new part to its algorithm that finds, and de-indexes low quality blogs that are a part of a network, without designing into the algo the ability to identify individual blogs that are used primarily for link building?

Is it not possible that their latest tweaks serves not only to track footprints of some of the larger blog networks, but also assesses individual blogs, based on various metrics?

For example, blogs in which every post, or every other post, contains lots of links to other websites, mainly with anchored body text links?

Although this would possibly not be a strong enough signal on its own for Google to use as an argument to de-index a blog, the above is just one example of a metric that can be used to start to weed out not just blogs that are a part of a 'blog network', but also individual blogs used purely for link building techniques. All automated.

There are doubtlessly several other simple metrics that could be used - lack of social media accounts tied in with the blogs possible, and lots more that the brains at Google could easily come up with (possibly using some of the quality scores that Panda uses).

It could well be that if a blog ticks more than 'x'% of these negative quality scores, then the blog gets de-indexed, or at least penalized in some way... whether it is a part of a blog network, or not.

If this is the case, then if a website is found to have lots of links from posts on blogs that are over that threshold, then we would expect to see lots of sites getting the 'unnatural link' message via webmaster tools - like the 700'000 to 1 million (depending who is reporting it) or so that have been received in the last 2 months.

In short, instead of being a move to de-index 'Blog Networks', could this in fact be a move to differentiate between 'REAL' blogs, and lower quality blogs, with a de-indexing of the latter, followed with a 'slap on the wrists' of anyone found to have lots of backlinks from such websites.

So, rather than an anti-blog network folter, are we in fact looking at an 'Anti-Splog' filter here guys? If so, then it is going to become important to not only quality-check blogs prior to guest posting, but also to keep an eye on what happens to the blogs after you have posts, if it changes hands and the new owner turns it into a splog (it happens, domains change hands all the time), it may be wise to remove your content... if you can!

On a final note, with so many ‘unnatural link’ messages being sent in such a short period of time, what are the chances that all the sites will be penalized, or at least see some degree of ‘filtering down’ of their SERPS, is it likely that the messages are in most cases there to warn webmasters off using similar practices in the future, whilst big G de-indexes the blogs that score badly in its quality control systems?

What do you guys think? Are we about to see a large drop in the amount of low quality blogs in Google’s index?, Are we almost at the stage Google have been trying to get us to for several years, whereby if your 'SEO content' efforts are not engaging, useful, and don't serve to improve the internet as an entity, then you are liable to a slap in the rankings? 

My own feeling is that we are almost there, what's your opinion?