Has Google called you out for suspicious links? Here's what to do.

• We received an interesting note from Google through our Webmaster Tools account that states we have "bad links" pointing to our site. Soon after receiving this notification, we also seemed to experience a drop in our rankings. Is this a new trend by Google and what we can do to fix the issue?

Answer: Yes, this is a new trend with Google and one that has been a long time coming. Google has always been notoriously tight-lipped with communications between themselves and site owners. So in our view, ANY communications that you can receive from Google is a step in the right direction.

Google first began sending out these type of notifications through Google Webmaster Tools accounts back in January 2011. At that time, these notifications were sent mainly to sites that had been guilty of selling links, to put them on notice that they had been assessed a penalty.

Now, with your notification, we have documented proof that Google is sending out notices to sites that they believe have been guilty of BUYING LINKS or of having a suspicious number of bad links pointing back to their sites. Here is what that notice looks like for illustrative purposes:

Google's war on the buying and selling of links that pass PageRank has been something that we have noted previously in SearchEngineNews. We've covered strategies on