A client/Spam penalty issue

[GrumpyCarl]

Wondering if I could pick the brains of those with more wisdom than me...

Firstly, sorry but unable to give the client's url on this topic. I know that will not help with people giving answers but the client would prefer it if this thread etc didn't appear when people type their name in google.

Right, to cut a long story short..gained a new client a few months back, did the usual things when starting the project of reviewing the backlinks using OSE and Majestic. There were a few iffy links but got most of those removed. In the last couple of months have been building backlinks via guest blogging and using bloggerlinkup and myblogguest (and some industry specific directories found using linkprospector tool). All way going well, the client were getting about 2.5k hits a day, on about 13k impressions. Then came the last Google update. The client were hit, but not massively. Seemed to drop from top 3 for a lot of keywords to average position of 5-8, so still first page. The traffic went down after this. All the sites which replaced the client were the big name brands in the niche (home improvement, sites such as BandQ, Homebase, for the fellow UK'ers). This was annoying but understandable.

However, on 27th June. We got the following message in WMT - Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. 
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxx.co.uk/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

This was a shock to say the least. A few days later the traffic on the site went down more and the impressions dropped to about 10k a day (oddly the rankings seem to be where they were after the Google update so perhaps a delayed message).

To get back up to date....after digging around more it appears there are a lot of SENUKE type links to the site - links on poor wiki sites,a lot of blog commenting links, mostly from irrelevant sites, i enclose a couple of examples below. I have broken the links so they don't get any link benefit from this site. They are all safe for work

http:// jonnyhetherington. com/2012/02/i-need-a-new-bbq/?replytocom=984

http:// www.acgworld. cn/archives/529/comment-page-3

In addition to this there is a lot of forum spam, links from porn sites and links from sites with Malware warnings. To be honest, it is almost perfect negative seo!!

I contacted several of the sites in question (about 450) and requested they remove the links, the vast majority of the sites have no contact on them so I cannot get the links removed. I did a disavow on these links and then a reconsideration request but was told that this is unsuccessful as the site still was being naughty.

Given that I can neither remove the links myself or get Google to ignore them, my options for lifting this penalty are limited.

What would be the course of action others would take, please.

Thanks and sorry for overally long post

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks for the replies everyone, now comes the fun part when I have to crack on and work way through 48,000 backlinks!

[MatthewBarby]

Yeh, tbh, you don't need to worry too much about nofollow links. The only thing that I would do is check through some of the nofollow links to see if they are all blog comments that have been done with an automated system. If this is the case then there could be duplicate content issues that are leaving a footprint back to your site (i.e. within the spun comment). This isn't a major concern but worth a little look - but as a general rule, you don't need to worry.

Matt

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I agree with that Carl.  It's one thing if your worried that Google might penalize you, maybe you don't worry about the nofollows.  However, once Google has already placed a manual penalty on the site, it's all about showing Google that your not trying to game their system and you're working hard to correct the situation.  A bunch of links on spammy sites will still look bad to a reviewer even if they are nofollow.  I'd try to get them removed as well...though I may not put as high a priority on them.

-Kurt

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks for the replies everyone, they are most welcome.

If I could trouble you to one sub question before I mark this as solved. When cleaning up a dodgy backlinks profile, what is the general view on no follow links? Going through the client links and they seem to have a fair few no follow links from generic directories. Even though they shouldn't be counting toward a site ranking, I have been asking people to remove these too. My view is that if I remove all the bad links, regardless of follow situation, that will show Google that I know what is right and what is wrong re the site.

Thanks, Carl

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Yeah, Google definitely wants to see that you've put some effort into removing the links and that you aren't doing it anymore.  It's also not uncommon for it to take several requests and several months.

[GrumpyCarl]

No, sorry I may have worded myself poorly...the client used an seo agency until a couple of months back, it seems although a lot of the spam links were posted between Dec and Feb they are only now impacting on the site. When I referred to negative seo, I more meant it as a joke that the links look like the perfect example of a negative seo campaign. Found some forum spam earlier on Arsenal FC forum and a forum about psychological issues faced by transgender people. Both of these sites seemed fine sites in their own right but one would have to question their value when linking to a door handle website!!

The initial (and thus far, only) request was a very basic one to say we have received this penalty, we hired a poor seo company to look at our site and it seems they spammed our domain. I told them I had disavowed several hundred domains but I think it failed owning to the lack of proof of manual work, so, as suggested by Matthew (above) I will include a document this time to show who we contacted, when, the reply and the current link status

[MatthewBarby]

Yeh, I would recommend using Buzzstream for the data gathering, it saves a heap load of time - I also outsource it to freelancers on oDesk - you can do this for a very l;ow budget and just speeds the whole process up.

With the Link Detox tool, importing all of your other link data is vtial towards getting a good reflection of the links. Good luck

If you get really stuck, email me (my email is on my Moz profile) and I'll help you out more where I can.

Matt

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

In your request to Google, did you explain that you were not building these links and that it appears to be someone performing negative SEO on your client?

-Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[GrumpyCarl]

Matthew,

Many thanks for the detailed reply. Shortly ago I used the linkdetox tool, I didn't realise you can upload files to it so used their built in bad link identifier. It has given me about 1800 bad links which am working though. Helpfully a few of them are blogger sites and have no contact!! Am managing to contact about 30% so far so that's better than nothing.

I have read about using buzzstream.com to try and pull the contact information on the other domains, I will employ this once I have finished going through the list. So far I have documented the urls and contact times in a spreadsheet. I must admit I didn't know you could link to a Google doc in the reconsideration so the spreadsheet I am working through will provide a good start, especially if the removed column starts to fill up!!

Thanks again

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Carl,

First step is to identify all of the links. Pull off the full backlink data from OSE, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and WMT. Compile all of them into one master spreadsheet and then upload these to the Link Detox Tool (http://www.linkdetox.com/). This will give you a starting point for finding all of the toxic links - bare in mind that this is just a guide and you will still need to go over the link manually.

Start gathering webmaster details and record EVERYTHING in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Record the webmasters' contact details, URL, date you contacted them, the date of the response, any action taken, etc. Spend a good month on link removal to get as many removed manually as possible.

Once this stage is complete you will need to Disavow the rest of the links. Be careful here not to Disavow genuine good links. When it comes to the likes of SENuke links, you will want to Disavow them on domain level, i.e:

domain:jonnyhetherington. com

After you have submitted a Disavow, submit a reconsideration request and let Google know all of the bad links that were pointing to the site, why they were there and what you have done to rectify it - be explicit. Also, link to the Google Docs spreadsheet with all the details in.

If you get a negative response back then dig a little deeper with the links to Disavow - most reconsideration requests get knocked back the first time but ignore those that say 'you can't recover', because you can. Just make sure that your client understands the implications of everything. They will have further dips in rankings and traffic before it gets better.

Hope this gives you a good starting point.