Google Manual Penalty - Dilemma?
-
Hi Guys,
A while back, my company had a 'partial match' manual penalty from google for 'unnatural links' pointing to our site.
This glorious feat was accomplished by our previous SEO agency for quite heavily spamming links (directories, all kinds of low quality sites).
That being said, when the penalty hit we really didnt see any drop in traffic. In fact, it was not long after the penalty that we launched a new website and since our traffic has grown quite significantly. we've doubled our total visits from prior penalty to now.
This previous SEO also did submit a couple of reconsideration requests (both done loosely as to fool Google by only removing a small amount of links, then abit more the next time when it failed - this was obviously never going to work). Since then, I myself have submitted a reconsideration request which was very thorough, disavowing 85 Domains (every single one at domain level rather than the individual URLs as I didnt want to take any chances), as well as getting a fair few links removed from when the webmaster responded. I documented this all and made multiple contacts to the webmasters so i could show this to Google.
This reconsideration request was not successful - Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously. But really, my main point is; am I going to do more damage removing more and more links in order to remove the penalty, because as it stands we haven't actually noticed any negative effects from the penalty! Perhaps the negative effects have not been noticed due to the fact that not long after the penalty, we did get a new site which was much improved and therefore would naturally get much more traffic than the old site, but overall it has not been majorly noticed.
What do you guys think - is it worth risking drop in rankings to remove the penalty so we don't face any future issues, or should I not go too heavy with the link removal in order to preserve current rankings? (im really interested to see peoples views on this, so please leave a comment if you can help!)
-
That's the problem...it's often hard to tell whether a link is natural or not. For example, a local directory listing might be ok, but it could be unnatural. If it helps, I wrote a Moz article that describes different kinds of unnatural links: http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines
-
Thanks for your response, you've clarified a lot for me here.
Essentially, so long as only the unnatural links are removed I should not harm my sites ranking?That is, so long as Google agree on which links are the unnatural ones!
I better get to work auditing all of these links - see you again in afew years! haha.
-
"Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously."
This made me chuckle. Google is a strange animal. John Mueller has said many times that looking at your links in Webmaster Tools is enough, but I will often get back example unnatural links that are not in Webmaster Tools. This is one of the reasons why when I do a backlink audit I combine links from a number of different sources including OSE, ahrefs and majestic.
Now, I have seen sites lift penalties by just going on their Webmaster Tools links but really it's best to get them from multiple sources.
BUT...even when I combine every possible source I can find I will quite often get example links back from Google that don't exist on ANY backlink checkers. These are tough. But usually they are clues that can help you to find more links. For example, often when this happens it's a scraped version of a press release that is given. What I'll do is take a chunk of text in quotes and search for it on Google and often I'll find 3-4 additional links that weren't in my audit list.
Another thing you can do is download new links from GWT as often new ones will pop up even if they are years old.
Are you going to do more harm to your site than good? That depends on how good you are at auditing links. If you're only getting rid of unnatural links then you won't hurt your site and you may even see an improvement in rankings either immediately, a few weeks after the penalty is lifted, or when Penguin refreshes. But, if you're guessing at your disavow decisions then yes, if you disavow good links you're going to do harm to your site.
Best of luck!
-
Keep doing what you're doing. As long as you know how to properly identify if a site/link is good or bad, you shouldn't hurt your site. Better to do this work now and prevent another penalty in the future than to put it off.
RE: total backlinks - I recommend combining and deduping Open Site Explorer, Webmaster Tolls, Majestic, and AHREFs for the most thorough picture.
-
It will often take multiple requests for Google to remove a manual penalty to ensure you put enough effort in to cleaning up your link profile.
What tools did you use to find your links? It's best to use a combination of tools to find all of the possible links to your site. The amount of links you remove/disavow is relative to the size of your link profile, some sites have had to remove or disavow 1,000s of domains.
Ensure the links that you remove are exact match links or those from directories and guest blogging etc.
It's best to remove more links than not enough as even having poor links will result in Google marking you down. If you're not thorough enough, there's every chance you could get penalized again in the future. Also make sure your recon request is clear and simple and clearly demonstrates the work you have done to remove or disavow any offending links.
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
-
Guest blogging penalty
We would like to receive a blogging post from guest on our blog which links to their website and vice versa....a link from their blog to our website. Does this affect us in terms of Google's "guest blogging" scenario? We have natural link exchange from our partners...website to website from partners page.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does Google want contact numbers in the meta description?!
Reading up it seems like there's complete free reign to enter what you want in the meta description and they are not considered a direct ranking signal However I have added contact numbers to the meta descriptions for around 20 reasonably high ranking pages for my company and it seems to have had a negative effect (taken screen grabs and previous rankings) More strangely when you 'inspect' the page the meta description features the desired number yet when you find the page in the serps the meta description just does not feature the number (page has been cached and the description does not carry on) I'm wondering whether such direct changes are seen as spam and therefore negative to the page?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing1 -
How does google view...
I have two urls that are almost the same for example: www.mysite.co.uk/motoring/car_fuel www.mysite.co.uk/motoring/car-fuel both pages are very different, but on the same topic. How does google view the use of _ and - in urls? Will it see my urls as different? Please advise if you know the answer. Thank You.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesT0 -
Resubmitting disavow file after penalty removal
Hi, We had a manual penalty for links removed about a year ago. The disavow file we submitted was pretty extensive and we took the machete approach, as recommended by Matt Cutts. Recently we took a look over the file again and are of the firm conviction that some of the domains are entirely legit and the links are not manipulated. We would like to resubmit the disavow file excluding these domains so Google picks up the links again. Does anyone have experience of this and if so what were the results? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | halloranc0 -
The wrath of Google's Hummingbird, a big problem, but no quick solution?
One of our websites has been wrongfully tagged for penalty and has literally disappeared from Google. After lot's of research, it seems the reason was due to a ton of spammy backlinks and irrelevant anchor text. I have disavowed the links, but the results are still not rebounding back. Any idea how long the wrath of Google gods will last?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mouneeb0 -
Penalised by Google - Should I Redirect to a new domain?
Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem. I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed. I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back. Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn730 -
Google Penalising Pages?
We run an e-commerce website that has been online since 2004. For some of our older brands we are getting good rankings for the brand category pages and also for their model numbers. For newer brands, the category pages aren't getting rankings and neither are the products - even when we search for specific unique content on that page, Google does not return results containing our pages. The real kicker is that the pages are clearly indexed, as searching for the page itself by URL or restricting the same search using the site: modifier the page appears straight away! Sometimes the home page will appear on page 3 or 4 of the rankings for a keyword even though their is a much more relevant page in Google's index from our site - AND THEY KNOW IT, as once again restricting with the keywords with a site: modifier shows the obviously relevant page first and loads of other pages before say the home page or the page that shows. This leads me to the conclusion that something on certain pages is flagging up Google's algorithms or worse, that there has been manual intervention by somebody. There are literally thousands of products that are affected. We worry about duplicate content, but we have rich product reviews and videos all over these pages that aren't showing anywhere, they look very much singled out. Has anybody experienced a situation like this before and managed to turn it around? Link - removed Try a page in for instance the D&G section and you will find it easily on Google most of the time. Try a page in the Diesel section and you probably won't, applying -removed and you will. Thanks, Scott
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scottlucas0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0