I just added one of my old affiliate amazon sites to GWT and as soon as i had, I got a nice message saying Google detected un-natural links. I've never had this before , Will this cause problems for me? Those guys are f*cking idiots though!
If it was displaying the message immidiately after you added it, the chance is big that the penalty was always there, but you just didn't know about it because you couldn't check
Its an Authority Amazon site , Always has been. Not seen any penalties (I monitor the traffic regularly). Only linking i done was manual. Ranked 1-20 for around 200 keywords. Cheers
I do not thing you will get any trouble if you are 100% that you use only white hat technique. As I said before I don't think G can give you all the credit for all the backlinks out there since it is possible that not all are made by you, and I thing they can not take the risk and open the door so wide for "negative SEO" If you do not see any changes in your ranking and traffic then just forget about it. If you see and you are 100% that your website is bullet proof then ask for a manual review.. all trough I will not do that and just let thing get back since they will.
Johandr's right - the message was waiting for you. They did not wait for you to sign up to WMT to analyse your website It's just that when you don't sign up to WMT, they don't really have any other secure way to send those messages. The bad part of just signing up now is that you can't see when the website's backlinks were initially flagged, so it's harder to tell what might have triggered it. Not everyone who got those messages saw actual changes in their rankings, btw. I think you should consider it a tip to have a look at your backlink profile and see if there isn't something you could improve...
Why would you use GWT? For analytics? Oh there is GetClicky and all that! I totally stopped using this. To be honest, don't know if it has any effect or not, but sites that are not integrated to GWT are ranking well for me (steadily going upwards).
@crusher - don't confuse GWT with analytics. GWT allows you to "set" certain aspects of your website. For example - it's where you can associate your website with a specific location if you are targeting a particular country (this is very useful when you are using .com and hosting in the US, but want to target Spain, for example). There are a few other settings which are very useful in specific situations. GWT also shows you crawling errors on your website which you may not otherwise find. Also, for the paranoid - you aren't actually installing anything on your website/domain with GWT - they don't get any special new way to track your data. You just get to see a bit of what they see.