Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
-
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
-
It is something we have considered, but it is a very good source of income.
Obviously this only when it is ranking. It has a whole lot of history (granted this is why it is not ranking) and the domain is our brand as well. Basically we would rather keep it if we can.
Kindly thanking you for your advice Matt.
-
Hmmm, I understand. It can be frustrating.
The problem is that even if you are trying (and trying hard) to sort the issue out, if they still see bad links they wont lift any manual penalty.
I'm not saying that it is worthwhile in your case but sometimes it can make sense to throw away a domain and start again. Does it take many sales?
Just remember that if you start again with a new domain, do it properly and don't outsource to people who can't be trusted
-
Yes the penalty is referring to rankings, and while we are being indexed we are still under a manual penalty.
We know we have a good site, and have seen natural links since we dropped last year, but it is the old spammed backlinks which obviously spurned Google on to hitting us with this penalty.
-
Yes, you are right!
About a year ago we outsourced our SEO work to a company in india and they were extremely aggressive with these industry specific keywords.
Needless to say when penguin rolled out we pretty much disappeared.
I cannot say we have disavowed all of them but we have been working on removing these unnatural links for the past 9-10 months or so. So everything we found which we couldn't get taken down or no-followed we disavowed. As you can imagine the disavow.txt was longer than my arm!
The point is we have done everything we can and shown evidence of this but Google fails to recognize this.
-
Looks like your site is getting indexed. Is the penalty referring to rankings?
If so, some sites pre-penguin experienced high rankings because of their backlinks. If some of those backlinks' "value" were pulled (spammy links) your rankings fell.
Even if some of those spammy links were successfully taken down, doesn't necessary mean you get the organic position you lost after penguin.
This may or may not apply to your case--but generally speaking.
-
I see a problem already, although it could be that these links have been disavowed (there is no way something like Open Site Explorer can tell this).
Check out the image attached. You have used some very aggressive link building tactics which target exact match anchor text links - and lots of them! Very unnatural indeed.
Can you confirm that these have been disavowed?
Matt
-
No problem, thanks for your time. www.accidentsdirect.com
-
Do you have a link to your site please? In order to help, I think we would need to have a good look around your link profile.
Matt
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
-
If I deindex a page then will Google stop counting those links pointing to it?
Hey everyone, I am deindexing some posts of my website as I think they are not providing any value to the users. My question is that if I deindex a post and it has some good quality links pointing to it, will google stop those links counting for my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bunnypundir0 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Manual Webspam Error by Google!
Hi,back in June 2013, our company received a notice of unnatural links which resulted in 'a manual spam action' from Google.A reconsideration request was filed a week later which received the following response from Google:_'We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.'_Naturally we are confused by what seems to be an error in Google's communication.We are also left questioning whether it was necessary to remove the links Google stated were unnatural.Since the notice was received, we have struggled to recover traffic even after implementing Google best practices. Some clarity on the issue would be greatly appreciated.My URL is: www.homefurnitureland.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | users_engaged0 -
If you remove a 301-re-direct, will there be a corresponding drop in traffic?
We built a better version of a search results page and re-directed from the old search results page to the landing page, and are seeing a huge uptick in traffic. Wondering if we remove the re-direct and 404 the original search results page if we'll see a drop in traffic. I ran the search results page through open site explorer and Google Webmaster tools, and there aren't many links, but the search results page used to see quite a bit of of traffic over the past couple of years.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why, oh why does Google hate us?
My URL is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candylotus
www.drupalgeeks.org I have tried my very best to cover all the usual SEO items.... But nothing... We are a legitimate company offering a legitimate service. Ideally we would come up in the results for: "Drupal Developers"
"Drupal Development" and
"Drupal Designers" Yet, we cannot break the top 50 for any of these.... We have:
Optimized Meta Tags
Written Quality Content
Maintained a Social Presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google Plus
Blogged with some consistency
Guest Blogged
Canonicalization
And dozens of other things And we are all around nice people and a good company....... Why oh why? Can anyone take a look and see if there is something blatantly obvious I am missing? Are we using "drupal" too much?? Thank you in advanced for any assistance. Candice1 -
Does Google index more than three levels down if the XML sitemap is submitted via Google webmaster Tools?
We are building a very big ecommerce site. The site has 1000 products and has many categories/levels. The site is still in construccion so you cannot see it online. My objective is to get Google to rank the products (level 5) Here is an example level 1 - Homepage - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/ Level 2 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/ Level 3 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/ Level 4 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/autocebantes.html/ Level 5 - Product is on this level - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/autocebantes/autocebante-recomendada-para-filtros-vc-10.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0