No reply from Google despite reconsideration and hard work!

[Townpages]

Hi everyone,

I hope someone can help.

The site www.danbro.co.uk suffered a manually penalty in April.

It had a number of poor quality sitewide blog links and the link profile looked (and still does despite a massive improvement) unnatural.

The work to over turn the penalty

Since then 80% of the spammy blog links have been taken down. the other 20% of sites simply do no respond to requests (these sites were documented).

The webmaster also has started building up more natural links as 95% of the anchor text could be classed as 'money keywords'.A low % of links included the brand name at all.

A number of requests have been sent ( i told the site manager this should have been avoided but hay-ho). The last request of which i assisted them with was sent last week. The reconsideration was extremely detailed and documented all link removals and links that were still live yet poor quality.

some questions

1. Its been a few months since the penalty - should a brand new site be launched?

2. If option '1' was to be implemented, is a 302 re-direct a feasible option as the site's content is vast? will this pass on the penalty?

3. in your opinion Is the websites link profile the root of this penalty?

4. If point '3' is true would you a) start a fresh site or b) continue working on balancing the link profile?

Any help or case studies would be tremendous

thanks in advance

[Marcus_Miller]

Steve, sorry, I completely misread that original question, if it is a manual penalty, things are somewhat worse and recovery, in my experience is a whole lot harder. You will have to be absolutely fastidious in your approach and get rid of everything manipulative or start over.

Sorry buddy, skim reading whilst stuffing my face at lunch time!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Steve, it is difficult, especially if you inherit these problems with a new client and there is just not a great deal of case study data out there.

You just need to be brutal in your clean up and attempt to remove anything that is obviously manipulative and as Robert mentioned above, if you have links from other sites that are clearly spam honeypots for Google then get them removed.

Best of luck
Marcus

[Townpages]

Hi Marcus,

thanks for your answer.

with regards to the 24th - The site was actually hit on the 12th April.

The link profile is deffinately alot better than 3 months ago however it still looks unnatural.

The only issue is where to allocate resources and time...

should time be spent making a more natural looking profile (google may not even respond or take notice) or is it easier 'burining the house down' and starting a fresh.

it is a difficult one.

thanks for your time - much appreciated

[Marcus_Miller]

Arghh, looks worse than I thought. OpenSiteExplorer won't expand the linking sites for me at the moment but if it is this rotten, then a clean up is just not always practical let alone possible.

This is the client needs to be transparent and if they can't be, then you need to dig through the link profile to guide your hand.

If they are doing .edu and .gov link building then this is a true case of manipulation and as Robert says above, fixing it will likely be pretty difficult.

[RobertFisher]

Steve,

I feel your pain, but....

Thinking about your situation, I went to the site and used OSE to see what your links look like. The first red flags I see came within 5 seconds of opening OSE and clicking on linking domains. You sell accounting software for contractors and, while that can be rather broad, the first couple of domains that stand out are links from NASA and the University of TX.

There were so many links from the NASA blog I did not bother looking for yours and assumed a lot of BS was there. For UT, I started scratching my head as the blog post was around a UT student visiting Germany. For your comment a "student" named Alex is gushing about Germany being efficient but, the name is actually a link to your home page.

So, what is Google seeing?

My guess is that if I can hit two really questionable links, one a .gov the other a .edu in the first few seconds and Google is really digging, you are going to have to work very hard to fix this. Otherwise you are going to have to reform your site by doing as you state above and rebuild.

My only incredulousness comes from you stating that Google does not respond. I would have thought they would have sent you the does not meet Google Quality Guidelines.....resubmit request for reconsideration... email.

Good Luck,

[Marcus_Miller]

If you have done a lot of work and have a manual penalty then play it out a while longer and see what happens. If you simply don't get a response or the link profile is just too rotten to repair then it may be time to burn the house down and start again.

I have had a quick look at the link profile and have seen a lot worse. You have two main keywords targeted with thousands of links from only a handful of sites so if you have got rid of a lot of sitewides, it may be a lot more balanced. That is not taking

Your questions.

1. If it was on the 24th then the link profile is highly likely

2. I have to admit I am not sure about this one. In theory, it should not, but I would really want to cut all ties with the previous site so you may need to deindex all that content first. In reality, the 302 redirect is for content that has been moved temporarily and not for redirects that are temporary so this is not really the correct usage of the redirection.

Possibly a custom 404 with some links to the new site and a change of URL in webmaster tools may be a better option but I am unsure of any best practice here and you may have to ride out a bit of turbulence when first moving.

3. Yep, the date alone tells us that to a degree of certainty and it's further compounded by the use of the sitewides etc.

4. That's not a five minute answer and really depends on whether there are any natural and quality links or is it 99% junk? If the latter, then with the rumoured update to penguin getting more aggressive, then it could be time to move on.

What i would do is compare against other people in your niche. Look at some market leaders, figure out what a normal link profile looks like and determine how close you are to that.

Hope this helps

Marcus