Google Manual Action (manual-Penalty)- Unnatural inbound links
-
Dear friends,
I just get from Google two "Unnatural inbound links" notifications via Google Webmaster Tools, the first is for our WWW version of the site and the second is for the NON-WWW version.
My question, I should send two identical reconsideration request for WWW and NON-WWW or treat them as different sites?
Thank you
Claudio
-
Somos vecinos, por favor contactame a editor (at) freesharewaredepot (dot) com y
skype fsd.network (at) live (dot) com asi podremos intercambiar conocimientos o nuevos tips (todos los dias algo nuevo)
Un abrazo
Claudio
-
Asi es Uruguayo en US
Feel free to contact me (linkedin/twitter/etc.), I had similar experience and can offer some help (free, of course )
-
Dear Federico,
I agree 100% the procedure recommended by you, and also I want to share with you:
1. Sources where we get links: Webmaster tools, SEOMoz, and link magestic, so you will get a hughe list of links, so we are working on this list, also google know that the problematic links are usually abandoned blogs (which register the domain only for one year) and in general doesn't provides any contact info, even if you contact the hosting people, in general they say "No response from the owner of this account" ....
So we try to remove the possible, and fill the disavow and comment to Google Team the job done.
At this time you was responding to my question with a 10++
Thank you
PD.: Do you speak spanish ? I'm from Argentina
-
Claudio,
Alright then you have it right (the www/non-www thing).
First go over all your shady links and try to have them removed or no-followed. There are online tools that can research contact forms, emails, etc from those links, like Link Detox from LinkResearchTools (I think it is).
Run a full report and include all the links that are downloadable from Webmaster Tools, and those from OpenSiteExplorer. By doing that, it will analyze every possible link you have. Then filter all the shady ones, and send an email (a template of course) to each webmaster (if there's no email, try searching for a contact form). Point them where's the link that should be removed in their sites, make their job easy so they actually do it.
Once all have been contacted, wait a couple of weeks for the results, run the report again and create a disavow file with all those links that were not removed.
Wait a couple of weeks.
Get on the reconsideration request (same for both www/non-www); again send them proof of your work, share the spreadsheet you created while removing the links, the emails, some responses, show some removed links, etc.
It could take a while to get your rankings back if the reconsideration is approved, but unfortunately I've read cases where their rankings were never returned.
-
Dear Federico,
You're right in all, our site is freesharewaredepot (dot) com it has the non-www redirected (301= to the www and also we use canonical, and google webmaster tools continue for years showing us both versions and even sending us both manual actions notes.
My question is "I have to send different reconsideration request treating both sites as different?"
In my opinion, I should to send the same (identical) reconsideration note for both.
Only to share our knowledge, we are in the hard task of link removal with a success of only 5%
Let me know your ideas
Claudio
-
Prior to send the reconsideration request, have you fixed the issue? Have you contacted Webmasters asking to remove those links? If yes, did you submit the non-removed links using the disavow tool?
If all that is done, then one more question before sending that request, why are you serving both www and non-www? If you are, then it will create a duplicate content issue, and if you are not, then one reconsideration request from the site actually needs to rank should be fine (but it won't hurt sending the same to both if the content is actually the same and the backlinks were the same).
Keep in mind that a reconsideration request isn't just a letter, it must show your efforts in correcting the issues, copies of emails, spreadsheets of bad backlinks and their status (contacted/removed/disavowed), etc.
Hope that helps!
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
-
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Google showing 10 million less links than October
I've received no messages from Google about 'iffy' links whatsoever, and the links they're reporting in Webmaster Toosl have declined by 10 MILLION since October. We did go through a CMS upgrade in December which I believe had some impact, and then I set a preferred domain at the end of last month, but we were bleeding links before then. Any idea what could have happened? We don't engage in any link building schemes whatsoever, and like I mentioned, I've received no messages at all from Google regarding a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aggie0 -
Google Places
If you rank on google places, I have noticed that you do not rank on the front page as well. I have a site that ranks on front page for it's keywords; however, because they are (1) on google places, they don't show up when someone is localized to that area. They show up on google places but not on front page. If you turn of localization, they are first in serps. How can I get around this? Two separate sites? One for Google+ (Places) and one for SERPS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Google Listings
How can i make my pages appear in google results such as menu, diner, hours, contact us etc.. when some searches for my keyword or domain take a look at this screen shot Thanks UbqY4kwA UbqY4kwA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vlad_mezoz0 -
How do i know if my domain has given penalty by Google and why?
I have problems with my website to google search results. Some of the important keywords frequently and sharply rankings vary a lot lately. For example; 07-14-2012 Term1 Position #12 07-20-2012 Term1 Position #38 07-24-2012 Term1 Position #10 07-26-2012 Term1 Position #40 I wonder what is the cause of this incident? Is there any Penalties? If there is then how do i know this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ersaky0 -
Link Acquisition - link building
When using Site Explorer to find out my competiters links so I can do some link aquisition SEO do I look for the "inbound" links or or "linking domains"? Also, what filters should I choose? I want to make a spreadsheet as Rand suggested in his video and start to prioritize my link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | musicforkids0 -
Have we suffered a Google penalty?
Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss1984
David0