Google Webmaster Notifications About Bad Links Pointing Their Sites

Google began to send out more webmaster tool spam notifications including notifications that your site has been penalized because of selling links from January 2011. Now there are reports that Google is notifying webmasters that they have bad links pointing to their web site, as opposed to bad links on their web site pointing outwards.



A sample of the email notification from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/,

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

The key distinction here between the January notification and this notification are the words "unnatural links pointing to your site" versus "unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites."
Google says webmasters that their site has been penalized because they have bad links, maybe paid links or other unnatural links, pointing to your site.