Should I be taking a gradual approach to link removals?

[mgane]

Quick background: My parents run a travel company and have seen their google ranks drop dramatically in the last few years (usual story: they employed an SEO agency, saw good results to begin with, and then a massive decline in their rankings post-Penguin).

Over the last few months I've been working to remove as many of the spam links pointing to their site as I can. However, as I've been doing so, our keyword rankings have been declining even further, not improving. This time last year we were bottom of page 1 for one keyword, then we suddenly dropped to page 5 around Nov with the Penguin update, and now, since I started cleaning up our backlinks, we're no longer in the first 20 pages - we've vanished. Similar situation for other keywords (though not as dramatic)

I've been pretty careful to only delete links that are clearly spam (article directories, forum signatures, spam comments on blogs with a keyword-rich username linking to our domain etc). It may be that some of these links were still helping us, but I'd be surprised - they were pretty obvious cases of spam.

My question: Is it normal to see this sort of decline at the start of a clean-up campaign? Does google see a sudden decline in the number of links, spam or otherwise, as suspicious? I've devoted weeks already to trying to work on the problems affecting my parent's website, and the situation just seems to be getting worse and worse! Do websites ever recover from a severe Penguin hit?

[mgane]

Travis, your comments are a massive help. Thanks so much. That Screaming Frog tool is also really helpful.

I had noticed that different backlink checkers were giving me different results, and so I've been working with several (Webmaster tools, webmeup, Moz, and ahrefs) Originally, i was just working with webmaster, and so it was something of a revelation when I first looked at the data provided by the others and found that there were about five times as many spam links pointing to our site as I had first suspected. I think many of the sites pointing to ours have been deindexed, so won't show up in webmaster tools.

I had also noticed that recent reports I'd generated were picking up on far fewer spam links than older ones, despite me not having managed to get rid of that many links. The post from Robert Fisher helps explain why.

With most of the links I'm deleting, I think they're clearly spam. The seo company we used depended mostly on article directories, but also some forum and comment spam - some on legitimate sites, most on forums that were clearly just created for SEO spam. What I'm thinking is that I will focus on deleting the links with the most repetitive anchor text, and leave a few of those with more varied anchor text. From my understanding of penguin, google doesn't so much penalise you for having a large number of links from spammy sites - it penalises you for having a large number of links with identical anchor text, so I'm prioritising those links with keyword rich anchor text ('Tanzania safari', in our case) and leaving in place for the time being some of the smaller number of links with less repetitive anchor text (a small number say 'trips to Tanzania', for instance).

The content audit looks like a mammoth job, but I'll try and work on that this weekend. I know that our site has a lot of duplicate content, for one thing (in some cases for good reasons). Perhaps we've been hit by panda as well as penguin.

Thanks again.

[Travis_Bailey]

It sounds like you've been doing link removal manually. That's all well and good. You should manually inspect inbound links. There are quite a few that jump right out, like easylinkseodirectorygooglerankings4ulol.com.

Though there isn't any easy 'yes' or 'no' to this one, especially without knowing the site. So with my bed-wetting white hat on, I would say; "Cleanse and burn - scorched earth, sir." With my realistic hat on, I would say; "Don't go terribly overboard. Really think about what you're doing. Sure the pure spam should go, but be careful."

The interesting thing is that Google has to pick The Best of The Worst. Travel can be a particularly spam-ridden vertical. But I would look into backlink profiles for competitors in your niche - say African Safaris. Round them all up.

Know that your sources of backlink data are flawed. A lot of spam sites have started blocking popular backlink data provider's bots. That means you have to crawl all of your 'deleted' links while spoofing Googlebot. You can do this with Screaming Frog. It also makes Google Webmaster Tools data more important, even though it's lacking in volume. Robert Fisher and his team at drumBEAT caught this skulduggery.

Get all of the backlink data you can. We're talking Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Moz OSE, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and The Kitchen Sink. Seriously, get all of the backlink data you can. Throw them all into a spreadsheet, then eliminate duplicates. Just know that it's a big internet and you will never have the complete picture.

While it's kind of an expensive tool, you should more than likely go with Cemper Link Detox once you have your master spreadsheet. It will give you a pretty solid understanding of where the site stands in general. From there, you should manually review each link. There are false positives and false negatives, but the tool is getting better all the time.

If the tool states the site has a Risky or Toxic profile, then you will want to start looking at a prudent disavow list. Removing bad links is great, if you can, but it's not entirely reasonable nor is it expected.

But if it's not saying your backlink profile is Toxic or Risky - you definitely have other problems. Still, you should always try to earn quality backlinks. Here's a great guide from Moz if you're not sure where to start.

You can also use Cemper's tools to get some good ideas from your competitors.

Man, that was a screed.

TL;DR:

Definitely get a better idea of where your backlink profile stands from a top level perspective. There are tools that will get you there. When you know where you really stand, you will know your priority.

The next Penguin update may be a long time away. It may come tomorrow. Take some time while you're getting all of this together. Then do a content audit on your site. And use the link building guide to move forward. (I slipped that ginormous sucker in there at the end... XD.)

[mgane]

Thanks, Travis. I will look more into potential on-site problems. I've been devoting a lot of time to removing backlinks but not much else.

So, just to clarify, you wouldn't advise that I slow down in the link removals? Get rid of all the spammy links, even if it means a decline in our rankings for the time being, and then focus on good links?

[Travis_Bailey]

Yes, there are sites that recover from what appears to be a Penguin related penalty. It's generally a good idea to get rid of the spam backlinks. However you must also replace the spam with quality links. Low quality links can still somewhat prop up a site.

There has been a significant delay between Penguin updates. Now would be a good time to focus on acquiring quality backlinks.

You might want to give siteliner.com a try. There are also the Moz Pro tools that can help determine if the site has some on-page problems. There's usually always more than one main problem.