Google Manual Action (manual-Penalty)- Unnatural inbound links
-
Dear friends,
I just get from Google two "Unnatural inbound links" notifications via Google Webmaster Tools, the first is for our WWW version of the site and the second is for the NON-WWW version.
My question, I should send two identical reconsideration request for WWW and NON-WWW or treat them as different sites?
Thank you
Claudio
-
Somos vecinos, por favor contactame a editor (at) freesharewaredepot (dot) com y
skype fsd.network (at) live (dot) com asi podremos intercambiar conocimientos o nuevos tips (todos los dias algo nuevo)
Un abrazo
Claudio
-
Asi es Uruguayo en US
Feel free to contact me (linkedin/twitter/etc.), I had similar experience and can offer some help (free, of course )
-
Dear Federico,
I agree 100% the procedure recommended by you, and also I want to share with you:
1. Sources where we get links: Webmaster tools, SEOMoz, and link magestic, so you will get a hughe list of links, so we are working on this list, also google know that the problematic links are usually abandoned blogs (which register the domain only for one year) and in general doesn't provides any contact info, even if you contact the hosting people, in general they say "No response from the owner of this account" ....
So we try to remove the possible, and fill the disavow and comment to Google Team the job done.
At this time you was responding to my question with a 10++
Thank you
PD.: Do you speak spanish ? I'm from Argentina
-
Claudio,
Alright then you have it right (the www/non-www thing).
First go over all your shady links and try to have them removed or no-followed. There are online tools that can research contact forms, emails, etc from those links, like Link Detox from LinkResearchTools (I think it is).
Run a full report and include all the links that are downloadable from Webmaster Tools, and those from OpenSiteExplorer. By doing that, it will analyze every possible link you have. Then filter all the shady ones, and send an email (a template of course) to each webmaster (if there's no email, try searching for a contact form). Point them where's the link that should be removed in their sites, make their job easy so they actually do it.
Once all have been contacted, wait a couple of weeks for the results, run the report again and create a disavow file with all those links that were not removed.
Wait a couple of weeks.
Get on the reconsideration request (same for both www/non-www); again send them proof of your work, share the spreadsheet you created while removing the links, the emails, some responses, show some removed links, etc.
It could take a while to get your rankings back if the reconsideration is approved, but unfortunately I've read cases where their rankings were never returned.
-
Dear Federico,
You're right in all, our site is freesharewaredepot (dot) com it has the non-www redirected (301= to the www and also we use canonical, and google webmaster tools continue for years showing us both versions and even sending us both manual actions notes.
My question is "I have to send different reconsideration request treating both sites as different?"
In my opinion, I should to send the same (identical) reconsideration note for both.
Only to share our knowledge, we are in the hard task of link removal with a success of only 5%
Let me know your ideas
Claudio
-
Prior to send the reconsideration request, have you fixed the issue? Have you contacted Webmasters asking to remove those links? If yes, did you submit the non-removed links using the disavow tool?
If all that is done, then one more question before sending that request, why are you serving both www and non-www? If you are, then it will create a duplicate content issue, and if you are not, then one reconsideration request from the site actually needs to rank should be fine (but it won't hurt sending the same to both if the content is actually the same and the backlinks were the same).
Keep in mind that a reconsideration request isn't just a letter, it must show your efforts in correcting the issues, copies of emails, spreadsheets of bad backlinks and their status (contacted/removed/disavowed), etc.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Can Google bypass an AJAX link?
On my company's events calendar page when you click an event, it populates and overlay using AJAX, and then the link that is populated in that overlay then takes you to the actual events page. I see this as a problem with Google because it can't follow the AJAX link to the true event page, so right now nothing on those pages is getting indexed and we can't utilize our schema to get events to populate in the Google rich snippets or the knowledge graph. Possible solutions I considered: 1. Remove the AJAX overlay and allow the link from the events calendar to go directly to the individual event. 2. Leave the AJAX overlay and try to get the individual event pages directly indexed in Google. Thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Large Number of Links appearing in Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, In the last week we have noticed an extremely large number of backlink links appearing in Google Webmaster Tools. One of the sites which links to us now have over 101,000 backlinks pointing to us, when in reality it should only have 300-600. We have check the websites have not been hacked, with hidden links etc, but we can not find any. Has anyone else experienced problems with Google webmaster tools lately, displaying way too many links? Or could this be a negative SEO attack, which is yet to emerge. Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomfifteen0 -
Should you bother with an "impact links" manual action
I have a couple sites that have these, and I have done a lot of work to get them removed, but there seems to be very little if any benefit from doing this. In fact, sites were we have done nothing after these penalties seem to be doing better than ones where we have done link removal and the reconsideration request. Google says "I_f you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you’re able to get the artificial links removed, submit a reconsideration request__. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action._" I would guess a lot of people with this penalty don't even know they have it, and it sounds like leaving it alone really doesn't hurt your site. If seems to me that just simply ignoring this and building better links and higher quality content should help improve your site rankings vs. worrying about trying to get all these links removed/disavowed. What are your thoughts? Is it worth trying to get this manual action removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Micro Site Penalty?
I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz. After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper. Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH! Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns. Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites! As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO. Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this! server-side 301 redirect for the micro site? Delete the micro site (drastic measure) Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7 other options? The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
If this is what happens when a penalty is removed, I want more penalties
So a couple of weeks ago I posted that we had submitted a reconsideration request along with a list of about 40 spam pages that were linking to us that we had attempted to have remove their links to us. On 8/3 we received a note from Google that our manual penalty had been removed. We have thousands of inbound links so these 40 pages were a minuscule part of our links and ones that we hadn't tried to get in the first place. So I thought "Great, our rankings should go up." Up until this point our year-to-year organic Google traffic was between 45% and 100% over last year. As of 8/9 our traffic is now only 26%-39% above last year. I don't think we can handle too many more penalty reversals like this one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
Link equity of ifram
If I link an iframe to pull its content - does that count as inbound link for the iframed content? Am I passing linklove to that page? I am on x.com and have an iframe pull content from z.com. Does this give linklove from x to z.com? (I am NOT asking if the z context is indexed in x, although I am weary to follow the most frequent statement that they do not. Google states that they will try to pull the content from the iframe, but don't guarantee it.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreas.wpv0