In the beginning of 2012 Google started sending out webmaster notification messages to reportedly 700,000 webmasters all around the world. A lot of these were about “artificial or unnatural links”.

Note from the Webmaster: This is a Guest post from Rankpanel‘s Director, Alexander Puschilov. I think Rankpanel is one of those new tools that might just make it big  – especially with the Google Penguin (over optimization) update.

The notices seem to be related to some new search quality system in place, which renders certain link building techniques no longer viable. Patrick Altoft from branded3.com puts it well, when saying that the major difference between this recent update and previous ones is that this one penalizes the SEO strategy used. In the Rankpanel data set, we started noticing the first major impact on a large number of sites in the week ending March 18, 2012.

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