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
-
How Many Backlinks Can One build To Blog's Homepage Daily To Avoid Algorithm Penalties
Hello, Am new to blogging and also new to link building and things are pretty confusing for me right now, I was told by a friend that have spent years in the industry that the maximum number of Backlinks you should build for a domain to stay safe is 2 daily, but am seeing different thing on the internet, so I wanna know the exact number of quality Backlinks one can build to homepage daily to avoid penalties, please I need suggestions from pros. Sergio!
Link Building | | Gabriel50 -
Why my spam score is 2%?
hello I do white hat SEO on my site and I Don't do any spamy job on my site but my spam score is 2%.
Link Building | | nangmbahkoeberaspp
please look at my site and tell me what can I do to decrease it to 0. https://hosseinibrothers.ir/ this is my site.0 -
Spam Links
Hi everyone, I've just joined the Moz community and after completing our first site crawl I've discovered that we have approximately 200 links with a spam score of over 50%. Should I just disavow all these links or is their a formula to deciding which links to disavow? Thanks in Advance Steve
Link Building | | StevenWalley0 -
How will it affect my site SEO, if I get backlink from a hign spam score percentage site like 70 % .
**Above how much percentage of spam score should I avoid getting backlinks. **
Link Building | | ShashankDubey10 -
Site received penalty, Traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour
Dear all We received a penalty notice at webmaster tools 2 months ago, in that stated "your pages violate our quality guidelines" and "contain some inorganic links to your site". Ours is a Coupon website and tried to follow all quality guidelines given in webmaster central. Also we tried to identify and remove spam kind of links and still we are working on that. Suddenly from yesterday website traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour, but website main keyword SERPs are not changed much and still ranking at good positions. my question if any website is under manual penalty, it's traffic will be restricted by Google???. Every link we build manually and not gone for any paid links or reciprocal links. But the sites given some links as sitewide, example we tried to get a back link & submitted url at once only, but it was showing in webmaster Total links 468 and linked pages 1. Can any one please explain, how it can happen?. We are trying to remove these spam kind of links, but from directory owners response is a bit disappointing, kindly any one suggest that, will Google Disavow tool help in this regard and how much time it will take to nullify the links?. Kindly help us..Thanking you all in advance
Link Building | | Shashidhar.SEO0 -
Not getting ranks for long tail keywords
Hi I started white hat linkbuilding for this site - http://www.capsulekratom.com/ since 2-3 months, but I havent got any ranks for my keywords. Whereas I started few other new sites along with this on same niche and they are growing both in terms of traffic and ranks. Not sure, why I am not getting ranks for this website. Any help wud be appreciated. Thanks Mark
Link Building | | seoss50 -
Competitor ranking through SPAM
We have a competitor called SwitchWise who has done a whole heap of social bookmarking and article marketing, using a deceptive link with anchor text reading "i select electricity" which has got them ranking #2 in Australia for the term iselect (a big comparison company here in Aus). The articles are low value, the link is deceptive and it is generally bad for the consumer. I could copy their tactics for my client, but I'm concerned about the links eventually being devalued and the company placed in the sin bin. What is the best course of action as I really don't want to let them get away with this, either we need to be up there, or alternative we need to dislodge them. p.s I know this is not a great keyword, but it's more about stakeholder management in terms of what my client sees and how they interpret what we are doing relative to their competitors.
Link Building | | Dekoda_Jones1 -
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