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.
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
-
Google Algorithm non-manual penalty. How do we fix this (quality?) drop?
Hi, See attached image. We received a non-manual penalty on March 22, 2015. I don't think we ever came out of it. We have moved up due to the Penguin update, but we should (by DA PA) be up on the first page for tons of stuff and most keyword are lower than their true strength. What kind of quality errors could be causing this? I assume it was a quality update. I am working on the errors, but don't see anything that would be so severe as to be penalized. What errors/quality problems am I looking for? We have tons of unique content. Good backlinks. Good design. Good user experience except for some products. Again, what am I looking for? Thanks. non-manual-penalty.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Got dropped on Google rank - Tips to discover why please
Hi guys originally my website was poor ranked on Google. So, after sign in on Moz and follow their tips I achieved the 4th position for one of my keywords (amazing!). But a few days ago my page dropped to bellow the first 50th pages for this same keyword, but I didn't make any changes on it. Anybody has some tips of how can I discover/repair what happened? Thank you all in advance. Best regards Paulo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phlcastro0 -
Traffic Generation Visitor Exchange Systems & Google Algo / Punihsments
So, in recent years some services have been developed such as Engageya I want to ask the experts to weigh in on these types of services that generate traffic. I know of sites that have achieved higher ranking via these NON-bot, user browser visitors. Here's their own explanation. Any thoughts will be appreciated. I could not find what Google's Matt Cutts has to say about these affairs, I suspect not very good things. However, I KNOW of sites that have achieved higher ranking, with about 30-40% of traffic coming from similar systems to this. Join our exclusive readers exchange ecosystem Engageya offers an exclusive readers exchange ecosystem - either within the network only, or cross-networks as well - enabling participating publishers to exchange engaged readers between them in a 1:1 exchange ratio. No commissions involved! Why networks work with Engageya? Create traffic circulation within your network - increase your inventory and impressions within your existing properties.Engage readers within your network and experience an immediate increase in network's page views. Enjoy readers'- exchange from other networksOur engine intelligently links matching content articles together, from within your network, as well as from other networks. Get new audiences to your network for non-converting users clicking out. New revenue channel - monetize pages with reader-friendly content ad units, while making your readers happy!This is the time to move from aggressive and underperforming monetization methods - to effective and reader-friendly content advertising.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ripe
Let our state-of-the-art semantic & behavioral algorithms place quality targeted content ads on your publisher's content pages. Enjoy highest CTRs in the industryContent ads are proven to yield the highest CTRs in the industry, starting at 2% and up to 12% click-through rates! This is simple. Readers click on an article they are interested-in, whether it's sponsored or not. Enhance your brand - Offer your publishers private-label content recommendations today, before someone else does.Content advertising is becoming more and more common. New content advertising networks and suppliers are being introduced into the online advertising market, and, sooner or later, they are going to approach your publishers. Engageya offers you a private-label platform to offer your publishers the new & engaging content ad unit - today! Comprehensive reports and traffic control dashboardTrace the effectiveness of the content recommendations ad units, as well as control the traffic within your network.0 -
Google Local Listing Verification - Is there a way to skip this?
Hi, We are running 2 types of service in our company. 1.) Dry Cleaning 2.) Laundry Services The problem is we have 2 website but only 1 office address.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chanel27
It is not recommended to put same address for the both websites
both doing laundry & dry cleaning services. Is there any tip on how we can get listed on Google place without using the same address for both website?0 -
SEO Experiment with Google Docs
Please check out this doc - https://docs.google.com/document/d/19VS4SnVvq6VJHQAIrB3CX7iL1ivZU4DH6fyfrHLsNFk/edit Any insights will be highly appreciated! Oleksiy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcrfintl0 -
How google treats RSS fetcher?
All I want to know how google treats RSS fetcher. I want to push my blogs to my own website. Both are there on the same domain . But I want them to be updated automatically on the home page of my website through RSS fetcher if i create it on my blog page. My site name is http://www.myrealdata.com and my blog site name is http://www.myrealdata.com/blog
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SangeetaC0 -
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 -
When to give up on a website with a Google penalty?
I recently had a Google 60 penalty hit my website. The main two issues were that I had a person helping me with SEO and they bought some links. The second issue is that I own about 90 URL's in the my vertical. I created about 60 one page sites for these keyword targeted domains. I then linked these sites to main site. Big mistake! I kept these URL's all on the same server as my main site. In October 2010 I noticed my site hits dropped dramatically. I started looking for the issue. I didn't know which issue caused the penalty. I fixed both issues in November 2010 and asked Google for reconsideration in early December 2010. I kept link building for my site by finding quality links.I was extremely honest with Google. I gave them all of the domains I own and I told them the name of the person that bought links for me and the websites where those links were placed. As of late February 2011 a Google search for my domain still showed up in approximately the 64th position. I recently asked Google again to lift the penalty. I basically told them that I fixed all of my issues that led to the penalty and let them know I have been waiting for almost 3 months. I told them I have put the past 2 years of my life into this website and begged them to forgive me. I also asked them to let me know if my site was never going to be forgiven? I got the typical canned response from the Google team. As of today the penalty is still in effect. I just want to know when you should give up on a site. I have spent about $20,000 on this site and about 2 years of hard work. I don't want to give up, but I don't want to keep putting my hard work and time into the site if it will never escape the dreaded Google penalty. Do you think I should continue to wait and if so how long? Anything else I can do to persuade Google to release me from this penalty hell? If I do abandon the site and start from scratch what steps should I take? Do I need a new server? What if any content can I take from my current site and transfer to the new site? If I can how do I do this without getting another penalty or lose the credit for the original content. I created about 2,000 pages of original content for this site. I'd love to be able to transfer this content if I have to start from scratch. Any ideas or detailed help plans would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tadden0