Based on the happenings over the past few weeks, and especially given that Google is sending warning messages about unnatural links to webmasters, it seems almost inevitable that the next great link building business scam will be promising to clean up linking messes for websites, so those sites will have a chance to get back in Google’s good graces.

Not all such businesses will be scams. It is possible to go through a process to “cleanse” a site of enough of the spammy links that the site can return to Google. Whether or not that site’s ranking returns is a whole different question.

My Site’s Ranking Tanked. What Happened?

Before making the decision to pursue the time consuming process of cleaning up “bad” links, it pays to understand the variety of potential reasons your site might have dropped in the rankings in the first place. Not all rankings drops have to do with your site’s links, and not all Google warning messages result in a ranking penalty or removal.

Google’s known about these unnatural links for years. All that’s new here is Google has decided to tell you about them, and good for them.

Google won’t tell you the exact URLs they think are unnatural, for reasons that you can kind of understand. They don’t want the link networks to know they’ve been caught until they have found as many different pages in the network as possible.

Here’s a summary of seven different occurrences that could explain a drop in your site’s rank.

1. Other Sites Gained Additional Legitimate High Trust Links to Help Their Content Outrank Yours

This is the most painful explanation to accept. Nobody cheated. You just don’t have the content quality that a competitor (or some other site) does.

To get

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2170399/7-Ways-Links-Cause-Search-Rank-Changes