How long to recover from manual spam penalty?
-
If anyone doesn't think that spam sabotage is possible, here is proof. In February we received a suspicious spammy link notice and penalty from Google. We did several things to try and fix the problem including getting old links from not very relevant sites removed and submitted, and were denied, reconsideration twice. On the advice of Billy here on the forum, we went through the bottom end of our inbound links through OSE and found about forty domains that had linked to us and were purely trash sites full of link spam. We filed another reconsideration request listing every one of these sites along with dates we tried to contact the site owner (almost always impossible) to delete links to our site and two weeks later we received a note back that the manual penalty had been lifted.
My question now is, from your experience, how long does it take to notice a recovery from this penalty?
This experience also has me concerned that site sabotage is actually pretty simple when you can plant garbage links from 40 sites, many of which are the same with different urls, and get someone penalized on Google.
-
For the first site, it took 2 weeks and was successful on the first try. I know exactly which links were suspect and detailed the removal of the ones under my control and my requests for removal of the others (only about 50% of which were deleted). I think they considered that I reformed my spamming ways, and so lifted the penalty.
The second site took three separate RRs over a period of about 2 months, each time more links were removed to satisfy them. The site went from 600 root linking domains to about 150.
-
So two days ago the majority of our rankings took a jump up with a few falling slightly. Our organic Google traffic has been up over 65% since then. We have a long way to go before we are back where we were in January and hopefully this adjustment is the first of a good trend.
So in our case the answer to my initial question is that it took ten days to see the first improvements. Hopefully these aren't the last.
-
Hi Klarke,
What was the time gap between submitting the reconsideration request to Google and the "manual spam action - revoked" message received from Google.
-
Fortunately, these bad links represented a very small number of the links to our site so we will hopefully see a strong rebound in the next few days.
-
I agree with Klarke's assessment.
Some sites recover almost fully due to their rankings not being propped up by the negative links. Other sites are no where close to where they were before the penalty. All of the penalty removals I have worked with have had their rankings improve after the penalty was removed, but the amount of recovery varies widely.
-
I've had two different sites recover from manual spam actions. The first one regained all of it search positions (and even ranks better now) within one week after receiving the "manual spam action - revoked" message.
The second one received the same message, but hasn't been able to regain its rankings.
The difference between them is that first had really good links and some bad ones that Google probably wasn't even counting in the first. So when the penalty was revoked, the rankings returned as they were before.
The second though had alot of bad links. Many of those were helping it rank, so when they were removed ...the rankings went with them. But it was clear that the penalty was lifted at about 10 days after receiving the revoked message.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spam sites republish a article with 'money keyword' anchor text and causing a pentalty.. how to prevent.
About 6 weeks ago we had a DA50 / PA50 homepage site publish an article on our company which included a money keyword anchor text to our site.. Great. Once this happened we shot up the SERP for this term, but quite a few other spam / crawler sites seem to automatically republish everything this DA50 site publishes. This didnt seem to be a problem up until a couple of weeks ago, but now with the new penguin update it seems we have been slapped with a penalty, for having 20 sites all with the same article and anchor text. (the rest of our profile is pretty natural, so this is the main culprit for the penalty) Im now going to write to all the webmasters apart from the DA50 site, and ask them to remove the article, failing that ill have to disavow them. For future reference what is there a way of avoiding this issue of spam sites republishing a propper article and triggering a penalty.
Link Building | | jpeg800 -
Can 302's Negate Spam Link Profile?
To make a long story short, the previous SEO company we hired spammed us on LOTS of crappy links, many of which are still indexed. We're currently in the act of removing these links before we receive a manual spam penalty/notification + building new, stronger links to balance out our profile. While most of these garbage links were sent to our homepage, many are linking our Services page (and a bunch to our .com/sitemap.html for some reason, lol). Now we're in the midst of updating our entire website and the permalinks are going to change. While I'd normally 301 our old links to the new ones, Id rather not bring the horrible link profile with it if at all possible. Would a simple 302 redirect effectively dodge the bad juju from these spam links to our Services page since they pass 0 juice? Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | kirmeliux0 -
How to Manually Check if Link is Follow or No Follow?
So I just got the link - yippee! When I look at the source code href line with my url I don't see the term 'no follow'. Does this mean I have a followed link?
Link Building | | Clicksjim0 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
How long before a new dmoz Will get picked up?
Hi all, I have a site which I've been trying to get into dmoz. It's taken approx 2 years and I went back recently to submit it and it was there. I hadn't submitted for a few months so can't be sure when it went in. Is there a way to get google to spider that category again so it gets picked up quicker? The site is www.nutritionmission.co.uk and wasnt showing up in my search explorer results yesterday. Thanks for your time Ian.
Link Building | | ianwr0 -
How long google & roger need to notice backlinks
Hello, It is three weeks I have begun link building to a client website through partnerships and neither Google (link:mysite.com) nor Roger are seing any of these backlinks Any idea what is the time commonly needed for small and new websites (no trafic at the moment) to see domain authority growing ? Loïc
Link Building | | mandinga0 -
Google Penalty for strong industry link?
I work as the SEO manager for a company and we recently launched a new site. Along with this I've been doing some intensive SEO over the past 30 days in getting partners to add or change links and had a big impact on our main keyword, document management software. For the past 2 weeks we've been at position 6 but today I noticed that we dropped down to 11th. I'm wondering if I'm getting penalized for too many exact anchor matches because we recently have been featured on an industry site, cmsreport.com with good anchor text and suddenly we have dropped. Is Google penalizing me for this? If so it seems odd that with legitimate PR and posts I get penalized.
Link Building | | Gerad0 -
I'm aware that spamming tools can lead to ruin..what do you use as a backlink strategy.
But I have had some luck with bookkmaRKING DEMON, and understand the pitfalls of massive submission, but I deal in facts not generalities. If the goal is to mix your links accross the pages in your site, and mix the DA quality, or pr of the links, and have them contextual as well as comments, directories, etc. who cares how it is done as long as it appears natural 1. Linkvana claims to be a posting service for you. you put text in with your link and it posts to relevant sites, the same as you would do manually. For my context links I see this as a better way than begging people to give me a link, or wasting time kissing butt of reporters (kike i did in the past). Anyway there is good and bad with everything. I want to know if anyone knows of anyone who used linkvana and what their experiences is ? And more importantly.... WHAT DOES EVERYONE USE AS A COMPLETE BACK LINK STRATEGY? Thanks
Link Building | | joemas990