Guide to Unnatural Links Penalty: Audit, Removal and Recovery
Tim Capper first argues that both manual and algorithmic penalties stands from the fact that Google is in effect policing the search result based on its guidelines:
" any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. "
This (according to the author) led to the backlink problem. Namely, " the same quid pro quo and deal-brokering that powered the world of commerce long before the Internet existed, has now become a sort of underground Internet backlinking economy as well. "
But there are gray areas because in normal economic and/or social behaviour people/businesses do refer to each other. Tim argues:
" there can be an ever-widening disconnect between marketing activities that may seem benign and commonplace to us in other formats, but that Google specifically disallows within its own web ecosystem. "
He continues with hand-on tips to recover from unnatural links, which I leave for you to read... :D ?
Penguin 3.0: Google Unnatural Links Penalty: Audit, Removal, Recovery - Online Ownership