We have been involved with an interesting case recently with a retail site that hasn’t been ranking too well. Having conducted an investigation we concluded that the probable reason was because Google had been penalising the site for what looked to be an unnatural linking pattern.

This was because all of the links to the site’s pages contained the same word - an unnatural feature in Google’s eyes, according to our sources. However the site didn’t really have an unnatural link pattern at all – the nature of the site meant that it was hard to link to the site without mentioning that one word; especially since the domain name featured that word. So for example (i’m not going to use the actual website we worked on as I’m not sure I have permission) you have the domain www.multi-coloured-bottles.com and the site focuses on blue bottles, black bottles, green bottles, red bottles etc. How do you link to that site without mentioning the word bottles? Even just providing a standard link (without anchor text) still contains the word.

You might want to know how we solved the problem. Well, we removed the word from the internal link structure, which seemed to be included in Google’s assessment of the unnatural link pattern. So, with the fictional example of www.multi-coloured-bottles.com, the anchor text for the categories of products were changed to red, blue, black, green.

This seemed to work the trick and the site is now moving up the rankings. Something to keep in mind though - a phantom unnatural link pattern.

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Content, Google, Link Building, Search Engine Optimisation