Penguin or paid link penalty, or both?

[BestOdds]

Hello,

I have a site, macpokeronline.com, that has seen dramatic decrease in visitors in the last few months, it has went down from 800 per day to 200 per day. It is a pretty complex situation.

The site owner purchased paid links from reputable mac sites for years (they were more of followed advertisements, but were only there for SEO Purposes), now that i'm going through the link profligate ins OSE, I can see that a majority of their links come from these sites.

There is also a branding issue, there are almost 15,000 links with the anchor text of "macpokeronline.com" These are obviously branded links, I don't know the best way to deal with them (though the majority are coming from the paid link sites)

We have just sent the request in to remove the paid links from the sites, and i'm guessing since he is paying over $1000 a month for the links, they will be removed quickly.

The site has been receiving significantly less traffic since penguin (apr 24-25)

We received a message on July 19th which was the generic unnatural link warning, saying that once we remove links make a reconsideration request. Then on July 23rd, we received another message that says they are taking a "very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole" which I have never seen before.

This damage was done before I was hired by this client, I just want to get his traffic back up so I can help him even further, I want to know more about the steps I should take.

1. I will definitely remove the paid ads

What else should I do,

thanks

Zach

[Marcus_Miller]

Good stuff, let me know how you get on.

Have you done any analysis on which anchors are causing the problems? That is, which keywords has the site lost traffic for?

If you do a compare between the two weeks before and the two weeks after the penalty and look at the organic keywords in traffic sources you can see the specific ones that have dropped in traffic. This will give you more input into which anchor texts are problematic so you can dig further into the link profile.

Anyhow, do let us know how you get on.

Cheers

Marcus

[BestOdds]

Just as an update,

I turned the paid links off, they will be removed eventually (contract issues), but they are at least nofollowed right now, sot they are out of the SEO way.

[Marcus_Miller]

If the client has a generally healthy link profile, with just some crap, then removing that will see you bounce back. This really becomes problematic when a large percentage (if not all) of the link profile is just pure dirge and then... it can be time to start over.

Keep us posted, would love to hear about it when you get this site to bounce back and updating this ticket would make it a better resource for all.

All the best

Marcus

[BestOdds]

Thank you for your response. My client has invested a lot of time and money into this site and understands that we have to fix the penalties before we can go acquire more links etc..

I got entered into this mess post penguin, and my all of my clients besides him were not penalized so this is kind of new territory for me. Overall, besides these paid links, his site is pretty healty link wise, and I think once these are removed he will be up and running in no time.

thanks again

Zach

[BestOdds]

Thank you for the response. I actually was abbreviating OSE, meaning open site explorer. I'm currently cleaning up the site itself in test mode, then making it live afterwards. I am also working on the links.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Zach

The penalty issues in 2012 have become a nightmare to deal with in some ways as the messages from Google are unclear and there are just so many potential issues. So, to deal with it properly we have to diagnose what the issues are and then make sure that we show what we have done that was wrong and that we have made efforts to have it removed.

Looking at your case from like 10,000 feet it we can discern the following.

1. you lost traffic on the 24th of April so you were seemingly hit by penguin. We know penguin is going after certain types of links so a quick look at your link profile in open site explorer shows us that the most popular keyword used by a site to link to you is 'poker on line' and not a branded term as would be expected - this is used by 74 sites.

You also have 15,000 links with the URL as the anchor so a branded and safe anchor, but, these 15,000 links come from only 19 sites so you have another penguin favourite in masses of footer links.

These two points represent a large chunk of your links so cleaning these up may see you bounce back if this is purely an algorithmic penalty.

2. July 19th Message - if this is the standard message it would indicate you also have a manual penalty as well now and need to take further action. This is now more difficult as you need to ensure your link profile is squeaky clean as it will be reviewed by a member of the web spam team.

3. This further email lets you know that google are distrusting some links to your site rather than your site as a whole. Quite how this fits into your penguin and manual penalty situation is unclear but I would say that the action points you need to take for points 1 & 2 will cover this anyway.

Action Points

A. Contact the 74 sites and where they are not spammy links ask them to change the anchor on these links to something branded.

B. Contact the 19 sites with the sitewide footer links and have them removed OR no followed. If they are paid, then just get rid of them.

C. Review the entire link profile and contact the sites to have any dodgy links removed. You would do well to keep a spreadsheet and date the requests and if you do three attempts log the dates. If you want  to go further, you can have a legal letter drafted and send it to the site owners and again detail this in your spreadsheet.

Reconsideration Request

Once you have cleaned up everything as best as possible you can then submit a reconsideration request. You will want to link to your spreadsheet and detail everything you have done to remove the dodgy links. Remember you seemingly have a penguin penalty and a manual penalty so you will want to ensure you have done a thorough job that will solve the anchor and footer links problem and resolve any problems that human eyes will spot on a review.

--

Best of luck, your site is in a hole and has picked up every link penalty going so... as the old song says, things can only get better! I would certainly indicate to your client just how bad the situation is and that your job, before you can do any 'SEO' and improve his traffic, is to remove his problems.

All the best
Marcus

[MoosaHemani]

Zach this is something I have already dealt with...

1. OSE will never show you all the links I would highly recommend you using Open Site Explorer as it will give you the detail link of back links...
2. Using Network of site is a BIG no... Try to remove as many links as possible and submit the reconsideration request to Google.
3. Build quality links to the website... as many as possible
4. I have witnessed the limited penalty due to unnatural links because you are overlooking the links that are not shown in OSE.

Try the suggestions above and you will be get some traffic back and this is the time when you should submit your reconsideration request again!