On Friday, we reported that Google began sending out a new batch of link warning notifications. What we found out later was that these were not penalty notifications, but rather just a heads up from Google that Google is ignoring some links that are pointing to your web site.

Matt Cutts posted the update on his Google+ page saying that these notifications can be ignored. Ignored! Yes, ignored!

How can manual notifications be ignored when Google has told us that manual notifications are penalties and should not be ignored? Well, they did.

Google’s intentions were golden. They wanted to be more transparent, tell you they are ignoring links but when it came down to the implementation, they simply messed up.

Danny Sullivan blew up and called this insanity and he is right. It caused a major scare amongst SEOs, webmasters and those who owned web sites, never bought a link in their life, didn’t even know what link buying was and got this severe notification that read, “our opinion of your entire site is affected.”

So Google changed the message over the weekend. Matt Cutts updated his post to write:

So why is Google informing webmasters that they are ignoring links pointing to their site when it has no impact on their rankings? Any ideas?

Of course, if they did have a positive impact and no longer do, then that might be useful. But from the way Matt worded this, “If we’ve taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example.” So these ignored links wouldn’t cause a drop in rankings I guess? So why inform webmasters of links that simply do not count?

We know Google has said they ignore links and it plays no role in hurting your site. But Google has also said if they ignore links, it can confuse GoogleBot.

Update: This afternoon, Google sent out another notification to those on Thursday/Friday via Google Webmaster Tools about this. The message read:

Forum discussion at Google+ and WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock for head in sand