Manual Spam Action Revoked... Finally!
-
Just got this:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www. for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated ourquality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
-
Hi Stephane, I'm wondering if you've seen any rebound at all since the penalty was revoked back in May?
-
Well think of it: If you keep your old site, you'll have to clean it up first and then start building links again almost like it's a new site. And nothing guarantees that it will be ever successfull as it once was. Chances are, it will never be.
If you start a new website, you'll also have to build links again but you won't have to clean it up first. You'll also get to monitor your link building campaign so that you can keep your link profile clean.
So no matter if you keep your old website or build a new one, you'll have to build links and that will take the same amount of time.
My advice to you is to start building a new website and keep cleaning up the old one for a while but try to minimize the lost as much as possible. If the old site ever gets back on track 100% before the new one gains traction, just redirect the new site to the old one. If the new one gains traction and starts getting profitable, kill the old site or whatever but don't redirect it to the new one to avoid passing bad link juice.
I think it's best to play it safe.
-
Wow. These are very unfortunate news...!
Can you please PM me the old site.
I'm on the same dilemma... I got the approval but nothing happened.We already spent so much time on it that if in fact we had done what you suggest we could have been way better off. But it is an old site so we hope for the best.
I do know that I need to fix many other things but still...Thanks
-
To sum up things, the site has pretty much gone to hell since so I'm abandoning it.
Don't waste time an energy recovering from a penalty, it's faster (and more profitable) to build a new website from scratch.
-
Hi Stephane,
You are now 2.5 months over. Are you back up? Is it truly over?
On that note, how long did it take you from the penalization to the RR approved?
During the penalization, did you have pages de-indexed?
Thanks
-
Great work, I don't think you're so lucky, perhaps a bit but it appears you did what was necessary to clear your link profile many would shy from as it's laborious and difficult. But not impossible.
Excellent feedback from you, so many thanks. I've gotta go through the process for a client very shortly.
-
I should also add that when submitting the reconsideration requests, I explained everything that's been done, from the SEO services / softwares used to build the links to everything you did to clean it up.
I included the full list of back links in a Google Docs spreadsheet as well as the list of disavowed links. I also printed all the emails I sent in PDF format and uploaded that as well to Google Drive. I shared both documents and included them in the reconsideration request.
Don't forget: the Google team will not open documents from anywhere else than Google Drive.
-
It took me about 50 to 60 hours to go through approximately 6,800 links. What a f*cking pain.
Here's how I did it if ever it helps someone:
1. I gathered all the back links from the following sources:
- Google Webmaster Tools (Sample Links + Latest Links)
- Link Detox (http://www.linkresearchtools.com/)
- ahrefs.com: Make sure to include sitewide links and nofollow links too (you can't be too careful)
- opensiteexplorer.org
2. I merged all the backlinks into one single Excel spreadsheet and removed the duplicates.
3. I uploaded the backlink list in CSV format into Link Detox (http://www.linkresearchtools.com/). It verifies if the links are still there and gives you back lots of details about each link like text anchors and the destination url.
4. You will be able to export 3 reports from Link Detox: Healthy Links, Suspicious Links and Toxic Links. Merge all 3 in one single spreadsheet.
5. I identified the obvious links first by sorting the Link Detox spreadsheet by anchor text. You can easily spot the exact match anchors.
6. Next, sort the spreadsheet by destination URL. You know the URLs to the pages you've spammed
7. Finally go manually through all what's left. Have fun!
8. When you're done putting all the bad links in another spreadsheet, rerun the Link Detox report by uploading the full link list as well as the list of links to disavow. This will allow you to see what's left and if you forgot anything.
I identified about 1,500 bad links from nearly 1,000 unique domains and emailed each of them when possible (about 300 - 400 emails sent).
It took two reconsideration requests before the penalty was finally taken off. The first time, I only used the links found in GWT and Link Detox. The second time around, I used ahrefs.com and opensiteexplorer.org also. I found about 100 more links the second time.
-
How long did it take you to do this?
How many RR's did you submit as well?
-
Congrats Man. You are one the few lucky guys who has done this.
-
Feels good, doesn't it!
I have two reconsideration requests in the queue right now waiting for a response. I keep refreshing WMT all day long to see if "Message(1)" is going to appear.
Congrats!
-
Congratulations!
I am sure getting the manual penalty revoked involved some hard work. Keep us updated on how long it takes for your search performance to improve.
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
-
Paid Manual 10 Guest Post EDU Back-Links - GOOD or BAD idea?
Hello, I know **Fiverr **has been a topic of discussion for a while in regards to cheap and bad SEO work. Most of the threads I found here refer to buying 1000's of EDU backlinks - but what about 10 manually placed that seem legit? The seller states in his GIG "I have guest posting privilege at Different University websites. I will write and publish a post there with a dofollow backlink to your website, using your anchor text. The article will contain one relevant, contextual link to your website, using a suitable anchor text. There would also be a few other links to authority sites (not your competitors’ sites) to make everything look professional and natural." Could anyone give me advice as to something like this is worth it - or did the seller simply reduce the number from 1000's to 10's to avoid suspicion? I mean even if 1 of the links is valid - surely it makes a difference? or am I still high on the fiverr dream? I dont expect an instant PR or SERP increase, Im simply wondering if something like this is harmful or beneficial, and to what extent.
Link Building | | Danish78640 -
Having problems with spam score
Hi I am having problems with the spam score of my links. Although I have removed the "bad ones" and disavow them in many cases, it is still showing a bad score. My site is https://www.way2net.com/ Is there any way to improve this faster? Thanks!
Link Building | | way2netseo0 -
My All Site Spam Score Increase 0 To 72
I am having 7-8 Sites there were no spam score on my sites before today, But Now When I Logged in today I got that there is lots of spam score on my all sites, and I did not do nothing like spammy content, or get spammy links. Why This Increased? Can anybody here Describe it.
Link Building | | Nishantkumarss0 -
Do spam text links count for negative seo?
I run a high-PR (or whatever we're calling it now) website builder. When you sign up, your URL is a subdomain of the main site (like yourname.foo.com). My site is lucky enough to be on the spammers radar, so they frequently create sites to get more back links. A while back, I caught onto this and neutralized their links (even though they had nofollow tags) by only displaying them as plain text instead of anchor tags. Spammers continue to sign up and create sites, even though their links are now text. My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively? Or do they know something I don't?
Link Building | | watilo0 -
Spam links - what would you do?
Hello, A few months back our website was hacked which we noticed quickly and got fixed. However, there still is a lot of dodgy backlinks, linking to the spam pages. They come up in Webmaster Tools, Moz and SEM rush. According to the Moz Spam tool, a few of them have been given 7 flags which Moz suggests gives a 30% chance of being penalised by Google. The website has great rankings (position 1-3 in most targeted keywords) so I am scared of doing something that will harm the rankings, however I also aware that Google may do an update which could take these spam links into account. I have no experience of using the disavow tool but from reading up about it, it should only be used as a last resort. So my question is - what would you do?
Link Building | | N2Digital0 -
Using Bing's linkfromdomain: operator I'm finding spam links
Hi I've recently discovered Bing's linkfromdomain: operator and have been testing it on a few of my wordpress sites which are running the DIVI theme from elegant themes These are new sites with little or no content yet I was a bit alarmed when the results showed site I definitely had not linked to eg slickdeals dot net
Link Building | | briandee
2521.gen778 dot com
9gag dot com
flowers.ftd dot com
www.jmldirect dot com
pubs.rsna dot org is this an error from the Bing linkfromdomain: operaror because when I run the domains through xenu these sites do not show Hope someone can help0 -
Recently recovered from Link Spam Penalty
Our ecommerce site recovered from a manual link spam penalty about a month ago, but the organic traffic is still very low. We are working on getting high quality links and high quality content for our site. Some people are saying that even if you recover from the penalty and build high quality links, etc.. the site will never recover. Is this true?, we are very discouraged by what others are telling us. ? I d appreciate any help or suggestion we can get here. Thank you.
Link Building | | orion680 -
New domain ranking higher. Looks like spam backlinks.
A new site has appeared in our industry, and has taken the number 1 spot that we had for some time (years), in addition to some other great rankings above us for good keywords. The site to my eyes is no better than ours, but what it does have is lots of links from different root domains. However these root domains are spam, as far as I can see. You know the type, nonsensical blog comments, even links in nonsensical content on other sites. You couldn't make any sense out of the text if you tried. I think this is the reason this site is ranked above ours now. His domain and pages have higher mozTrust and mozRank already, despite it being a brand new site. I realise the importance of incoming links, especially from different, good quality individual domains, but my question is, do we join him by getting spammy links everywhere?
Link Building | | freebetinfo0