Automatic Unnatural Link Detection – A Simple Tool for a Complex Problem

By [Razvan Gavrilas](/content/blog/author/admin/ "Posts by Razvan Gavrilas"/index.html) | July 2 2013

Sean Si, Founder @ SEO-Hacker:

"We used cognitiveSEO's Unnatural Link Detection to filter out most of the junk links pointing to this client's site. It made the task super easy. Things went smoothly and now we're on our 2nd year of engagement. The client is extremely happy with our work. And that's just one of the uses of cognitiveSEO's full tool suite. I cannot recommend this highly enough."

In the last months we have been working on an automatic unnatural links classification system. Before going into the details of this new tool, I would like to share with you the challenges that we had in implementing such a complex system.

1. User Oriented Concept

The Unnatural Links subject generates a lot of confusion among website owners, webmasters and even SEO professionals. I can tell you that the unnatural link concept is a hard to grasp concept for the majority of the people. Some other techniques that classify links are based on a certain "toxicity" level or "potential" risk.
We consider these techniques generate a poor user experience and are only adding complexity to an already complex formula.
The route we took is to simplify the unnatural link understanding and disavowing process.

We developed the system in such a way that it will split the links in:

Unnatural Links.
Suspect Links.
OK Links.

2. False Positive Ratio

It is important to have a really low incorrect detection ratio. To put it simply, you would not want a system that detects only 10% of your unnatural backlinks or misclassifies the good links as being unnatural.
This was hard to achieve. No automatic detection system provides 100% certainty (Google misclassifies site links also). We took the performance up to 97% percent well-done classifications and a false positive ratio of only 3% on our testing dataset.

3. Incorrect Metrics

An important factor for a well-done classification, are the metrics that are used in order to draw any valid conclusion out of it.
We do not use any external metrics in our algorithm in order to detect unnatural backlinks. This made the development process harder but in the end more accurate and trustworthy.

4. Detection Algorithm

I am not going to share the algorithm that is used in order to classify links as natural or unnatural but I can tell you that this algorithm does not use external metrics and it relies on AI, in-depth content and link profile analysis in order to segment the so-called "toxic" links from the natural ones.
The rule set we use is based on the official Google Quality Guidelines.

The tool that simplifies the “unnatural links” complexity!
Identify Unnatural Links & Recover from Penalties.

Some of the most important features of the tool are:

Automatic unnatural link classification.
Transparency & detail on each classified link. (why it is unnatural)
Google Disavow Export.
Fast Double-Check using the Link Snapshots.
Flag & Tag Links. (bulk actions available also)
Advanced Link profile segmentation using unnatural filters.

Who should use this new tool?

1. Penalized Sites Owners
This is the ideal tool if you’ve received an unnatural link warning or have been penalized by the “Google Penguin Updates”/ received a manual penalty.
The tool helps you find every link to your website and then analyze the potential risk they carry.
Links that pass the unnatural test are marked as OK because those are natural links. Keep those links and use them as an example of high-quality backlinks.

2. Non-Penalized Sites Owners
For sites that haven’t been penalized by any unnatural link warning or update, the tool helps to manage the link risk by monitoring your site and competitors on a weekly basis.
You will stay ahead of the game by being able to:

Make informed Link Building Decisions.
Know your risk to be penalized and monitor it weekly.

Link Risk and toxic links or harmful links, as concepts, are only useful if you know your bad links before Google takes any action against your site.

Recover Your Site Now!

To be able to test the system we give free 14-day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations.

Matt Cutts
Former head of the web spam team at Google


If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO...
"Matt Cutt has recommends using the Disavow tool even if your site wasn’t penalized."