Has building quality content always been your priority? Were you losing web traffic because you did not buy the Back-links? Here is good news for you.

Google will now penalize sites using unnatural links to get back-links and improve rankings. What about advertisements, then? Do not worry. Google Webmaster Tools say, ‘Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results’ ( http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736 ).

Then who are penalized?

Blog Networks are affected the most. Build My Rank is a back-link building site that is said to be shutting down for the same reason.

Blog Networking is one of the common techniques used to generate back-links as paying bloggers give quality content as well as a large number of back-links.

Lately, Google has been sending warning emails to the website owners who seem to violating their guidelines related to unnatural links.

Sample of email from Web Master (Google)

If you receive such a mail from Google, read the changes they have suggested and apply them. This, even though reduces the traffic to your website; will allow you to build good and relevant content that attracts genuine traffic.

‘TO-DOs’ after receiving a message from Google

Check your back-links: Google Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz back-link analysis tool are some of the best ways to understand where your website is driving traffic from. This is how the analysis will look:

This analysis not only gives you an insight into the traffic but also help you cut down on unnecessary back-links. People misinterpret this process as ‘less traffic’. What the website owners fail to notice is unpaid or unnatural links will lessen the number of unwanted visitors giving you authentic traffic as the importance will be given only to the relevant content, which in turn will give you serious buyers.

Devalue the unnatural links: If you are one of the sites who have purchased the back-links, then devalue them. We must say that Google has taken a smart step by sending a warning to website owners. They have just eased their job of manually deleting thousands of paid back-links. So, you can devalue these links and send your website for reconsideration.

We hope you will now not panic with other person round the corner hollering about one more change (and penalty) by Google, as you understand that this change will only benefit, and not harm you. Even if you have paid back-links you can take a step to make it right and save yourself the penalty.

Have your site rankings dropped lately? Check the quality of links pointing to your website. It may be one of the reasons for the steep drop.