What is an Unnatural Links Penalty – How To Avoid & Fix Guide

Google still runs on links and with the AI push hoovering up most of Google’s engineering resources, the spam team has never been thinner, the algo never more reliant on blunt trust/authority signals, and SEOs never more incentivized to game it before the cash cow runs dry when they flip the switch on “AI Mode” being the default for everyone.

That means if you’re still scared of “unnatural link penalties,” you’re playing last decade’s game… Today’s winners aren’t avoiding link buying, they’re avoiding the few, antiquated spam systems that Google has left running. They’re blending their paid placements into a trust based profile, stacking entities, building consensus signals across the web, and riding the fact that Google simply doesn’t have the compute to police everything anymore…

This isn’t a morality guide. This is a money guide. I’ll show you:

• What an unnatural links penalty actually is (and how Google applies it).

• How to build or buy links without triggering Google’s spam detectors.

• The new wave of trust signals and AI-driven consensus you must inject into your link profile.

• The exact recovery process if you do get clapped.

• And as always, my ROI driven approach throughout…

What Are Unnatural Links?

Google defines “unnatural links” as any link intended to manipulate search rankings. Which basically means: every single serious link you’ve ever built. Guest posts, niche edits, PBNs, press placements, even reciprocal link swaps if they’re obvious, all technically break the rules.

Unnatural links only get you burned when they’re detectable though. Detection is about patterns, footprints, and lack of trust signals. Google doesn’t actually care if you bought a link on a news site, they care if they can algorithmically or manually prove it’s manipulative.

The difference between a penalty and a power link? Execution.

What is the Unnatural Links Penalty?

When Google decides your backlink profile looks like it’s been juiced with manipulation, you don’t just get a slap on the wrist, you get clapped. The “Unnatural Links Penalty” is Google’s official way of saying: we caught your footprints, and now we’re turning off the tap.

You’ll get a shiny red notification in Search Console, and a “Unnatural links to your site” dropdown on the manual actions page –

From here, you’re on the hamster wheel of link removals, disavows, reconsideration requests, and months of lost revenue while you prove your site is a good little boy again.

Both boil down to the same end result: Your links stop working, your pages stop ranking, and Google treats your domain like it’s radioactive.

The penalty isn’t about morality, it’s about detectability. If Google can’t confidently spot manipulation, they can’t apply it.

How Google Detects Unnatural Links

Google doesn’t have a manual ban button, at least not anymore… They’re not scrolling Fiverr for $20 guest posts, though they might be buying up some services for “tests”!

Detection just comes down to two things:

1. Algorithmic footprints – Their link spam filters (leftovers from Penguin and a patchwork of classifiers) look for obvious junk:

   • Anchor text abuse (money terms repeated across unrelated pages, internally and external).

   • Velocity spikes without brand, virality or trust signals to balance.

   • Networks of sites with recycled templates, zero traffic, and the same outbound patterns.

   • Orphan guest posts – Single page “contributors” with no internal links.

2. Manual actions – The rare but lethal one. A human reviewer inside Search Quality flags your domain after a report, a competitor spam claim, or an algo handoff. If that happens, you’ll get the dreaded “Unnatural Links” notice in Search Console, and traffic starts circling the drain.

And Google’s resources for this are at an all-time low. The AI division eats all the engineering budget, so spam teams are running on skeleton crews. That means detection is mostly automated, and automated detection is dumb. It punishes footprints, not strategy.

Which is why the smart SEOs aren’t scared. They’re busy building what looks like a natural, high trust ecosystem, even if 99% of it is paid for!

How To Avoid Unnatural Links Penalties

If penalties are about detectability, the game is about camouflage and avoiding risk. You don’t stop buying links, you stop leaving footprints. You make your backlink profile look like something a brand that isn’t SEOing would naturally attract. That’s how you beat dumb automation and avoid human (or even AI agent) review.

Here’s the anti-detection playbook that works best in 2025:

1. Entity Stacking Comes First

Before you even fire a single guest post, you need to look like a real business, and get Google to not only validate but trust your brand/entity.

• Build out every major citation and profile: Crunchbase, Yelp, TrustPilot, even Wikipedia if you can – And making sure it all aligns up with your GBP/GMB.

• Spin up social profiles across every major network, even if you’re not posting constantly, the presence alone is a signal and setting up RSS feeds to post automatically will help indexation.

• Use PR wires (Yahoo, MarketWatch, GlobeNewswire) to seed brand mentions that Google indexes as “trusted sources.”

This creates a baseline of legitimacy. Google’s algo references “consensus” across trusted sources, you want your brand to be the same everywhere – Website URL, name, phone number, address etc…

If you want the full tutorial on this, watch my video below –

2. Pillow Links & Anchor Dilution

Your expensive tier one links are for money pages and supporting content. Everything else? It’s cover fire.

• Stack cheap nofollows (Plus boost your AI mentions) from Reddit, Quora, Tumblr, Medium, Flipboard, LinkedIn Pulse.

• Mix in generic anchors (“click here,” “website,” “brandname.com”) until your money terms are less than 5–10% of your total anchor profile.

• Run branded + naked URLs aggressively. A real company doesn’t have 80% of its links as “best payday loans online.”

Pillow links don’t rank you, they stop your powerful (and often riskier) links from triggering tripwires.

3. Trust Link Injections

Every backlink campaign should include injections from sites Google still over tunes trust from:

• University pages (internship/job listings).

• Local government citations.

• Local and regional press outlets with high DR but low outbound spam.

• High ranking pages from authority sites in your niche.

Toxic links have been on the decline for a while, and most “bad links” will just be neutralized by Google these days so they don’t have to run expensive processing resources to actually validate if they are breaking guidelines or not.

If you do get a toxic link at your site, or even worse, multiple of them, then having your entity stack + trust layer will significantly reduce the likelihood of being affected.

4. Velocity Masking

Dumping 200 guest post links in a week to a 6 month old domain is suicide. But if those links land alongside:

• Fresh content publishing.

• A handful of social posts being indexed.

• A drip feed of pillow links from forums and social platforms.

• And you split them across 100+ supporting pages.

…it looks like growth, not manipulation. Time your campaigns with publishing. Velocity becomes natural when there’s something to point at.

And Google absolutely loves Reddit signals right now, so just getting your posts shared on there can be a big trust signal in and of itself.

5. Parasite Diversification

Not every link needs to point at your money site. Parasite SEO is the laundering layer.

• Publish on high trust domains.

• Funnel riskier links into parasite pages, not just your site.

• Rank the parasite, collect the traffic, and use the capital to re-invest in the core site with a much cleaner campaign.

Even if your money site gets slapped, the parasite stays ranking. It’s an insurance policy on top.

How To Remove an Unnatural Links Penalty

💣 Pro Tip: For the full, step-by-step breakdown with templates, check out my guide on how to disavow links.

Removing an unnatural links penalty isn’t about begging Google for forgiveness. It’s about damage control, perception management, and re-engineering your trust layer so Google’s automated systems have no choice but to reinstate you.

I’ll walk you through the process the way I do for clients who pay five figures for penalty recovery. No fluff, no “play nice” nonsense, just the actual workflow that gets sites back from the dead.

Step 1: Confirm What You’re Dealing With

First, identify which penalty type you’ve actually got.

• Manual Action: You’ll see it clearly inside Search Console → Security & Manual Actions → Manual Actions. It’ll literally say “Unnatural links to your site.” This is human-reviewed, which means you’ll need to show visible effort in cleanup before a reconsideration request will fly.
• Algorithmic Suppression: No notification, but you’ll see sharp traffic drops that correlate to link-related filters. These are harder to prove and recover from, but usually resolve faster once you fix footprints because there’s no human bottleneck.

Don’t confuse the two. Manual action = paperwork and proof. Algo suppression = clean up and wait.

Step 2: Audit Your Link Profile Like a Prosecutor

Google’s already got you flagged, which means you need to get one step ahead of their classifiers. Fire up Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMrush or whatever your poison is, pull all referring domains, and export the full sheet.

Here’s what you’re looking for:

• Anchor text spam: 50 links with “best payday loans online” as anchor? That’s a footprint.
• Zero-traffic domains: DR 60 sites with 0 traffic and a footer full of casino/crypto outbound links = garbage.
• Foreign language spam: Chinese forums linking to your UK bakery site? Junk.
• Over-templated guest posts: Identical author bios, recycled templates, orphan posts, classic footprint signals.

You need to treat this like a forensic case. Tag everything as keep, remove, or disavow.

Step 3: Link Removal Requests (The Performance Art Stage)

For manual actions, Google wants to see that you tried to clean your mess. This doesn’t mean you’ll get 100% removals. It means you need a paper trail.

• Reach out to webmasters of toxic domains with a polite removal request.
• Document everything: email logs, contact forms, even LinkedIn DMs.
• Don’t waste weeks, send one attempt, follow up once, log it.

This is theatre. You’re showing Google that you made a “good faith effort” to clean house. That documentation becomes part of your reconsideration request.

Step 4: Build and Upload a Disavow File

The real nuke button: Google’s Disavow Tool.

Take every link/domain you couldn’t get removed, consolidate into a .txt file, and submit through the Disavow Tool. Format it properly:

domain:spamdomain.com
domain:crappyguestpost.net
http://toxiclink.com/badpage.html

Keep it clean, no emotional comments, no excess. The disavow is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

Important: Don’t over-disavow. Nuking good domains because you panicked will cripple your authority even after recovery. Stick to links that clearly trigger footprints.

Step 5: Reconsideration Request (Manual Actions Only)

This is your pitch to the judge. You need three elements:

1. Admission of wrongdoing (without specifics): “We identified manipulative links in our profile that may have violated Google’s guidelines.”
2. Demonstration of effort: “We contacted 142 webmasters, successfully removed 38 domains, and submitted the remainder via Disavow.”
3. Commitment to quality going forward: “We’ve shifted our focus to brand building, PR, and trusted partnerships to avoid future violations.”

Keep it short. Keep it professional. Don’t cry. Don’t rant about competitors. Think of it like writing to a parole board.

Step 6: Rebuild Trust Immediately

Here’s where most SEOs screw up. They think recovery = disavow + wait. Wrong.

You need to actively inject new trust signals into your profile so when Google re-processes your site, they don’t just see a neutered backlink profile, they see a cleaned-up brand that looks more legitimate than ever.

Do this in parallel with cleanup:

• Launch entity stacking – PR wires, Crunchbase, social profiles, local citations.
• Secure clean press coverage – Regional news, industry publications, interviews.
• Build fresh branded links – Aim for DR 70+ with brand or naked anchors only.
• Push social buzz – Even paid Reddit/Twitter chatter indexed by Google helps create a natural cover.

You’re not just neutralizing the penalty, you’re actively stacking new legitimacy, aka link rejuvenation.

Step 7: Wait, Monitor, Iterate

• Manual action review timeline: 2–6 weeks. You’ll either get approved (penalty lifted) or denied (go back, add more removals/disavows, resubmit).
• Algo suppression: Expect 1–3 months of flux. As Google re-crawls and re-scores your profile, rankings will slowly creep back if you’ve rebuilt the right trust foundation.

During this time, don’t stop building. Keep feeding brand, pillow, and trust links. Keep publishing content. Keep signals fresh. A static site waiting on a penalty review looks like a zombie.

Step 8: Post-Recovery Strategy

Once you’re clear, you can’t just go back to hammering exact-match guest posts. You need to rebuild with a tiered, risk balanced strategy:

• Use parasite SEO for high-risk campaigns.
• Funnel riskier links into tier two properties, then pass juice indirectly.
• Keep your money site focused on clean authority, branded anchors, and high-trust injections.
• Rotate suppliers, diversify platforms, never let footprints build up again.

Think of it like laundering money, you need multiple washing cycles before it’s safe to spend.

Just remember, unnatural links penalty isn’t the end of the road. It’s just a forced audit. If you handle it correctly, you can come out stronger than before, because your competitors will sit in paralysis while you’re already rebuilding trust and stacking signals.

And Google isn’t omnipotent. They’re under resourced, over automated, and increasingly dependent on blunt trust heuristics. If you know how to remove the footprints and reinject legitimacy, you’ll not only beat the penalty, you’ll harden your site against future algo turbulence.

Why I Wouldn’t Worry About Negative SEO

Negative SEO is the boogeyman SEOs love to scare clients with, the idea that competitors can tank your site by blasting thousands of spammy backlinks at it. Maybe that worked a decade ago, but today? Google has spent years neutralizing the impact of bad links because they simply don’t have the engineering resources to police them one by one.

Here’s the reality:

• Most junk links are ignored, not penalized. Google built its link classifiers to neutralize spam at scale. If your bakery site suddenly gets 2,000 links from Chinese gambling forums, the algo doesn’t punish you — it just stops passing value.

• Only a handful of entities on earth can still pull off consistent negative SEO campaigns. I’m talking about state level actors, organized black hat networks and multi-billion dollar agencies with access to massive infrastructure who can afford coordinated attacks. Your local plumbing company rival in the same SERP isn’t one of them.

• The tactics that actually work in 2025 aren’t link based anymore. Content inversion, parasite outranking, entity hijacking, review bombing, AI content poisoning, those are the real weapons. Links are the least efficient way to hurt someone now.

So no, I don’t lose sleep over negative SEO, and a lot of the campaigns my competitors have thrown my way have ended up benefiting my sites more than hurting them…

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, link penalties are just one more tax on doing business in Google’s ecosystem. They’re not a moral failing, they’re not the end of your brand, and they’re definitely not something to fear if you understand how detection actually works.

The SEOs who thrive in 2025 are the ones who play the game on their own terms, building money driven link profiles wrapped in layers of trust, consensus, and camouflage. They know that Google isn’t all seeing; it’s a lumbering giant with resource bottlenecks and outdated spam filters trying to keep up with AI-era chaos.

If you’re operating in high-value SERPs, penalties are a possibility. But they’re also an opportunity: a forced reset that clears out weak competitors and rewards those who can rebuild stronger, faster, and smarter.

So don’t aim for “safe.” Aim for profitable resilience, stacking entities, laundering risk through parasites, keeping trust links flowing, and always having a recovery playbook in your back pocket.

Because when the next update rolls through, it won’t be the cleanest sites that win. It’ll be the ones built to take a hit, adapt instantly, and keep collecting ROI while everyone else panics.