How to remove bad link to your site?
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Hello,
Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong.
After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are:
This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us.
What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.
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The best way to go is to continue building quality links. These links you've 'kindly' acquired from a competitor have clearly made your link profile look worse than it should be. The fact you've got nearly 450k links coming from less than 100 domains will look a tad suspicious to G.
If you continue to build quality links, google will see that you're not getting your links from spammy sources and the other links you've been given could easily turn from having a negative effect to having a positive effect.
As it's a new site, this is the time when your link profile is watched carefully, so although it's unfortunate to have got these links, it's not the end of the world by any means. Try and get some links from sites with a high MozRank using white hat tactics.
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If it was the competitor's bad links that triggered a penalty, you can try a Google Reconsideration Request and explain what happened.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843
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Assuming that you didn't use any questionable linking practices to get your site where it was before the penalty, I would submit the site for a manual review.
If you were using some gray hat tactics, you'll have a much better chance of getting rid of those links than the ones that were so generously pointed your way. So, you time would be better spent getting rid of the links you wouldn't want them to see that you actually built vs. trying to eliminate the ones that were likely sent by a competitor. The other alternative is to blame all of the bad links on the competitor...again, assuming that you built some links you don't want Google to see.
The other option, although more painful, is to wait it out. I've seen several sites get clobbered by competitor's nasty link building tactics and after a few months they all the sudden popped back into the SERPs higher than they were before hand.
The other thing I would suggest is to make sure those links are the source of your problem, i.e. how's your anchor text? Is it over optimized? How about on-site? And how could we forget good ole Panda and it's many, many revisions. Are you certain that it didn't get hit in the 2.14x update? (I'm kidding about the numbers...it just seems like Panda is never-ending.)
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Since you have no control over those other websites, you can't really do anything to get them to remove the links. But because of this, incoming links to your site will never penalize your site. If they did, you're right, a competitor could get sites penalized on purpose and point lots of links from them to your site.
What else could have caused your site to get penalized? Could one of the Panda updates have caused it? Check out the time line here and see if it lines up to when your site lost its traffic: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change.
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