Unnatural links from your site: should we remove or qualify paid links?

Google's Manual Actions report distinguishes unnatural links from your site from links pointing to it. Save that wording before briefing a vendor. Outbound remediation starts with your own pages, templates, and publishing records; the inbound-link guide addresses a different investigation.

We write the direction directly into the work brief: source page on our site, destination elsewhere. This avoids an expensive but irrelevant backlink audit. If both action types are present, maintain two inventories with separate owners and evidence. The fact that both involve links does not make the same technical fix appropriate for both.

A useful inventory records more than destination domains. Include the visible anchor, current rel value, page template, publication date, commercial relationship, and person or vendor who approved the placement. Join the crawl to sponsorship records and editorial history where those records exist. Mark unknown relationships for investigation rather than assuming that every link is paid. We give commercial records priority over an anchor-text score because a contract can explain the incentive behind an otherwise ordinary-looking link.

Look for shared controls: a sponsored-post template, an affiliate integration, a footer placement, or contributors with direct publishing access. A single template can explain many links, while a single contributor may have used several templates. Keep both dimensions so the cleanup covers the mechanism as well as the visible examples.

Google's link-qualification documentation prefers sponsored for advertisements and paid placements; nofollow remains acceptable for those links. The link spam policy permits properly qualified advertising links. A visible sponsorship label alone is not a link attribute.

For a legitimate paid article, we inspect both the editorial disclosure and the actual outgoing links. For a placement whose only purpose is selling ranking influence, we reconsider whether the inventory should exist at all. Qualification should describe a defensible relationship, not become a reason to preserve a page that misleads readers or creates a different policy problem.

A contributor's article is not automatically a paid-link scheme, and an affiliate destination is not automatically a reason to delete a useful guide. We inspect the agreement, content purpose, and link implementation. Where a payment, benefit, or placement contract exists, make that relationship part of the decision record instead of relying on an editor's memory.

An illustrative register might retain a useful comparison with qualified commercial links, remove a purchased insertion into an unrelated old article, and repair a missing attribute in a shared affiliate component. Those outcomes require different explanations. If an entire partner section exists primarily for ranking benefit, also review the site reputation abuse guide ; a link edit alone may leave that separate issue untouched.

After changing a CMS field or component, inspect the rendered public output. We recommend testing old and new posts, any mobile-specific template, and rich-text links that bypass a shared component. Include a page edited after the change: sometimes the publishing editor rewrites attributes or a later deployment restores older HTML.

Keep the verification simple enough to repeat. Record the inspected URL, destination, resulting rel value, and template version or deployment reference. If you remove a placement, check that its copy does not survive in a related widget. We prefer that repeatable public check to a screenshot of an administration screen. A link fixed in the CMS but restored by the next edit is an open publishing defect, even if the initial cleanup was extensive.

Google's disavow tool concerns backlinks pointing to your site. It is not a way to edit or qualify outbound links. We do not upload a list of the destinations you link to and describe the outbound action as remediated.

When an old vendor placed links on pages you control, recover the relevant publishing access and fix those pages. Where control is fragmented, assign the access problem explicitly: who owns the CMS, who can change the template, and who can approve the removal? Treat missing access as unresolved work, not as a reason to substitute a different search tool.

For the reconsideration request , we summarize the placement patterns, completed decisions, and verified public output. Include representative examples and the actual scope of the audit. A concise explanation of a shared template fix can be more useful than a long unannotated URL list, but it should not conceal placements that used other templates.

Close the loop with publishing controls. Identify who approves commercial placements, how qualifying attributes are applied, and how older inventory will be reviewed. Keep sensitive contract details out of public materials; the useful evidence is the relationship and the resulting correction. If several commercial owners need to coordinate, our manual action recovery support can help structure the work. Revocation and subsequent visibility remain separate outcomes.