"Unnatural links to your site" manual action by Google
-
Hi,
My site has been hit by a "Unnatural links to your site" manual action penalty and I've just received a decline on my 2nd reconsideration request, after disavowing even more links than I did in the first request. I went over all the links in WMT to my site with an SEO specialist and we both thought things have been resolved but apparently they weren't.
I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse.
Thanks,
Yael -
Yes. It will often take me 3-6 weeks to do a thorough job on a manual penalty. I can do it faster if I dedicate all my time to it, but yeah...it's time consuming.
If you don't get example links it usually means that you have a large number of unnatural links still not addressed.
-
Thanks Marie for your input and advice. I didn't get any examples from Google despite asking for them twice. As you've suggested I'll create a spreadsheet with the list of domains, contacts etc. It's tricky to understand which domain needs to be taken down and which is valid, I don't want to make mistakes and dig a deeper hole for my site if and when it comes out of penalty.
I did get a sitewide manual action so I just hope to get it resolved as quickly as possible. Obviously contacting dozens or hundreds of sites would take some time to complete.
-
I'm working now to get as much information as I can to understand and cope with the issues that caused the penalty. I'm sure I can get the best advice here on Moz. Which site link auditing services would you recommend?
-
When you failed on your first two requests, did Google give you any example links? Those usually hold the key to why you are not passing.
Also, when you get a manual action it is vitally important to make attempts to try to remove links and not just disavow them. If you have links that can't get removed, then you need to show some sort of effort. I usually include a Google doc spreadsheet with the domains and the contact info and notes on how many attempts I have made at contact. Sometimes, if I have a site where I can't get any links removed I'll make a comment as to why. But usually, there are some that can still be removed. For example, you can report spam domains to Blogger or Weebly and they'll probably remove them.
It may be a good idea to have someone else review your links as well to see if there are more that could be removed/disavowed. Sometimes it is obvious which links are unnatural, and sometimes it is not.
I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse.
If you have a sitewide manual action then yes, when your penalty is removed you should see a good return in rankings for brand terms. But, if it is a partial match then you may find that not a lot changes unfortunately. I wrote an article on Moz about this which you can read here: https://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase. Sometimes with a partial action I'll see some improvement, but sadly it is usually not dramatic. With that said, if your site has a really good base of truly naturally earned links then you have a good chance to see good improvement.
Hope that helps!
Marie
-
"Your seo specialist" may have got you into the pickle... have you also obtained independent advice and run a deep site link audit?
-
Hi Ishai,
There are a few steps I typically run through in this instance to get the issue resolved.
Firstly, rather than just submitting a disavow file, spend some time actively trying to remove as many links as you can without paying for them. Fixing a penalty isn't as simple as submitting a text file and Google wants to see that you're actively trying to fix the problem before they will lift the penalty.
It's often said they don't read the comments in your disvow file but I always add these in anyway. I mention what I've done to resolve the issue (contacted all possible low-quality sites requesting the links be removed) and even having a separate section for the particularly dodgy sites that want me to pay for removal.
Being able to demonstrate that you're legitimately trying to fix the mistake rather than waving the magic Disavow wand goes a long way to them removing your penalty.
Another tip that you may or may not be aware of - always disavow at the domain level rather than individual links. This way, if some of the dodgy directories shuffle their site structure and link to you from a different page, the links are still disavowed.
The syntax for this is simple: domain:badwebsite.com
This info is all covered in Google's Search Console Help section
EDIT: I should also mention, just pulling Link to Your Site from Search Console isn't going to give you a very comprehensive list. Consider combining this list with an export from Ahrefs or Moz's Open Site Explorer as this will give you a better idea of exactly what sites are linking to you.
Frustratingly, Search Console only seems to show a selection of referring domains.
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
-
Recovering from spam links on MY site
Hey guys, Having a weird situation and wondering if anybody can help. I run a sizable WordPress site with a number of content writers. One of the writer's accounts was hacked and was used to post several dozens of complete spam posts with spun content and links to all sorts of shady sites. Recently the site has begun losing rankings on all sorts of pages. There's no manual penalty or anything, but I'm concerned that we're being penalized for having had these links on the site. Of course, as soon as we found the content, we immediately removed it, reset passwords, etc. But a decent number of the pages were indexed. Does anybody have any experience with this or ideas of what to do about it? Is there somewhere we can talk to Google about it or some way to show that we are not part of bad neighborhoods? Thanks so much for any thoughts, Yon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yon230 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Google Plus Links - Good for SEO?
I created a link on my Google Plus page under the recommended links with the relevant anchor text and url. It turns out that this is a do-follow link from a webpage with a Page Rank of 8. Is this just too good to be true or have Google genuinely missed something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinHof1 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0 -
Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Hello I have assembled a list of web-sites that have "Links" section that has a list of persons` favorite tools. Those pages have a link to my competitor. I know my tool is just as good if not better and want to request a link. I`m thinking of sending an email asking for a link and offering a small amount of money for it. Questions: A) How much should I offer? Should I offer anything at all B) Is there an email style that someone can suggest that has been tested and proven to work for this type of situtation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellopotap0