Google Confirms No Recent Campaign Against Unnatural Links

There have been some discussions about Google penalizing guest blog posts or a spike in unnatural link penalties. They were wrong. Gary Illyes from Google said "no" there was no change, adding "I don't know of any specific campaign run recently, but this manual action has been around for quite a while."

Here is one example of a manual action sent for outbound unnatural links recently:

@rustybrick huge scoop for you pic.twitter.com/owj7uIpgHD

— Ronnie Lawson-Jones (@Ronneh_) February 26, 2020

Now, this is not new, Google has been sending this out for about ten years now. Heck, prior to manual actions, Google would simply drop the PageRank of sites selling links to distrust the links on the site. Now (past ten years) Google sends manual actions since the PageRank score is no longer visible. And yes, Google has been sending them for years, we even wrote about it in 2019 - these notifications are sent to webmasters fairly often.

So Gary was asked by some in the SEO industry if something has changed. Did Google run a campaign against unnatural links in a big way this week. Gary said nope.

Sounds like working as intended? What am I missing?

— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 26, 2020

I don't know of any specific campaign run recently, but this manual action has been around for quite a while, so I'm still not sure what I am missing :)https://t.co/JSg01av2V8

— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 26, 2020

No. We're beating a dead eggplant. With a cucumber.

— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 27, 2020

Yeah, me too. I don't think we have anything to announce at this time though, but maybe we could do a reminder blog post about how either Santa or the Easter Bunny doesn't bring presents for the naughty.

— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 27, 2020

I scanned through all the big SEO forums, even the Google forums. I do not see an unusually high number of complaints, at least more than a normal week, of complaints around unnatural link penalties. So I am not sure what is going on but Google seems to say no, no recent change in efforts around manual actions for unnatural link manual actions.

Forum discussion at Twitter.