Unnatural Links From My Site Penalty - Where, exactly?

[seoagnostic]

So I was just surprised by officially being one of the very few to be hit with the manual penalty from Google "unnatural links from your site." We run a clean ship or try to. Of all the possible penalties, this is the one most unlikely by far to occur. Well, it explains some issues we've had that have been impossible to overcome.

We don't have a link exchange. Our entire directory has been deindexed from Google for almost 2 years because of Panda/Penguin - just to be 100% sure this didn't happen. We removed even links that went even to my own personal websites - which were a literal handful. We have 3 partners - who have nofollow links and are listed on a single page.

So I'm wondering... does anyone have any reason to understand why we'd have this penalty and it would linger for such a long period of time? If you want to see strange things, try to look up our page rank on virtually any page, especially in the /gui de/ directory. Now the bizarre results of many months make sense. Hopefully one of my fellow SEOs with a fresh pair of eyes can take a look at this one.

http://legal.nu/kc68

[seoagnostic]

Todd - Thanks for your message.  On the bright side - a quick response to my request. Today I received a message back that Google removed the manual penalty for outbound links.  Apparently they agreed with us.

Again, many thanks. M

[toddmumford]

Hi Michael, best of luck. I am sure that you can get the site back to where it needs to be with some clever thinking and a reinclusion that speaks about how much time and effort you have put into the website in order to make it 110% compliant (even though we know it already largely is

Let us know how it goes!

-T

[seoagnostic]

Todd - Great answer. I do appreciate the time you've taken to compile this list. I hope I can reaward a best answer because this deserves one.

Frustration is putting it mildly but thanks for the empathy. You wouldn't know this but I've actually torn down the entire site and rebuilt it trying to find these alleged "unnatural" and "manipulative" outbound links. I removed/disabled registration on the directory for many months and that had no effect. I've killed much of the income stream and have had people question why so many parts are disabled for so long to the detriment of the reputation of the site. I've invested a colossal number of hours reading, learning and inhaling SEO. The question unfortunately becomes whether to abandon a great site and many years of work because Google has us perpetually in the penalty box and the cost of trying to guess in the dark why this happened is far above any potential benefit. Anyway - I'll answer your chart:

1. Great suggestion: Already done but I'll run it again for the last time.

2. Will do although I know that the one way out of the site to an affiliate contains all nofollow links and I confirmed this numerous times. I'll kill that revenue stream and deindex about 80 pages to so we can kill almost every outbound link, even the pages with nofollow links too.

3. No warnings in GWT except the single one years ago about unnatural outbound links. GWT did let us know once that there was a "big traffic change" for a "top URL" on our site. No kidding Google. That's what happens when you slam a site with a manual penalty, lol.

4. We have virtually no widgets on the CMS. Most are basic functional, created by donnacha at Wordpress (who is beyond reputable), custom developed or absolutely clean.

5. Every business listing is noindex and nofollow (except mine, which has one link on one page to my own personal blog - I'll kill that one too.) If you look in a search, everything directory page is robots.txt blocked as well as noindexed. But I'm going to delete every single entry in our directory - and that's lots of them. We'll kill it again to prove the point.

6. I don't know what you're linking to. Our publishing section is dead because of my hunting this issue instead of launching yet another part of the site. I've had to cut the amount of content produced by well over 50% just to deal with this. There are only 4-5 authors on the site at the moment, almost all work is mine. None of the authors are follow links and I am absolutely sure.

7. There are virtually no website urls in the profiles in the forum. I disabled that ability and regularly clean out every profile from links (e.g. home page) using mysql queries. Nobody except super moderators can have a signature. Mine is an internal nofollow link. If there is another one or two, both are nofollow but I'll kill that link as well for this, much to my supermod's likely chagrin.

The thing that kills me is just finding out that I've made a colossal effort chasing a possible algorithm issue to find out this is a manual action - and nobody will tell me how they could possibly think I'm engaged in an outbound links scheme. So it goes. Speaking of which, I'll let you know how it goes. Many thanks.

[toddmumford]

Hi Michael,

I can sense your frustration but business and marketing are unforgiving. And while I do agree with your sentiments the best thing you can do is be absolutely 100% thorough in your approach to the problem.

I would recommend running the Screaming Frog and Xenu and re-evaluating.

Here is a handy checklist that you can do through to ensure you are covering bases, if you have not already.

1. Run Xenu Screaming Frog and examine in detail. Look for any pages which have outlinks and scrutinize those outlinks and ensure they are nofollowed. Be sure to include all subdomains, even subdomains you believe are noindex at the robots.txt level.

2. Check page code on 20 random pages in each subdomain to ensure that there are not hidden bits of code you might be missing that contain an external link. Check CSS and javascript while you are at it just to be certain

3. Check GWT to ensure that there are no warnings or alerts as to any hacking or suspicious page activity.

4. Thoroughly audit any and all widgets to ensure they do not contain outlinks, and if they do, assess as necessary based on authority of destination website and relevance / commercial natural of link.

5. Ensure any business listings on the website are nofollow

6. Nofollow any links (for now) from any areas where you published articles (I noticed here that you do allow for this option)

7. Nofollow signature links in the forums, if they are not already. Nofollow profile page links in the forum, if they are not already.

When you run these reports and checks, make extensive notes of what you are doing. Google is looking to see that you have put exhaustive effort into the process. Since you have control over link on your own domain, the level of scrutiny is higher.

On a side note, some of your important business pages seem to be hanging up on an internal redirect. The about us and privacy policy in particular appear to have a closed loop redirect.

Wishing you the best of luck!

Best,
Todd

[seoagnostic]

Todd - Thanks for your response.

The very troublesome aspect of this is the manual action taken by Google about something someone may have been clearly mistaken about. They have forgotten about it and the issue hasn't resolved over time like Matt Cutts insists it should as per his blog. But the kicker is this -- if more than a dozen very smart and experienced SEOs, webmasters of very large community sites and even people in the Google Webmaster Help forum can't find any reasonable problem, then we can't assume that the webmaster is always to blame.

As of right now, the only links any of us have identified are three links - yes, three links. Let's say there were seven just to be on the safe side. Let's be reasonable... do I really need to explain this? If this happened to your client's site, you probably would be thinking "are you kidding me?"

Google needs to explain exactly what issue it was that one of its employees found that was reason enough to manually decide give us a prolonged prison sentence. Until we spot truly "wrongful conduct" there isn't any crime for which to ask forgiveness. All I'd be doing is tap dancing about a handful of links that no sober person would confuse as a questionable or irregular link building scheme. I want to know what will have lifted this manual penalty, even if it's "oops".

[toddmumford]

Hi Michael,

I would suggest running Screaming Frog and re-running Xenu again on the entire domain and all sub directories. Ensure that outbound links that are not editorial in nature (freely given and relevant to the user) have nofollow applied (even on sections where robots.txt are set to limit / prevent indexing). Every outbound link needs to be scrutinized. Nofollow first, ask questions later.

Take 20 pages in different sections and also hand check page code. Look for iframe injections or other unusual patterns or outbound links. Nofollow any outbound widget links, or if not possible, then remove those widgets.

Once done, develop the reinclusion.

Before reincluding be sure to be extremely thorough in your explanation to Google. Explain how the outbound links you had, you felt were editorial. Document and explain in detail how you have remedied the entire situation and comply with guidelines and understand those fully.

You might consider referencing this URL in the reinclusion request, which shows more proof that you are trying to clean up any possible areas.

Panda could still be influencing the website, but taking care of the manual penalty is definitely the right place to start.

Hope this helps,
Todd

[seoagnostic]

Thanks guys, I thought those 3 links were nofollowed. I'm getting rid of our_ one singe page_ that gives credit to the three companies that help us that have a total of three outbound hyperlinks. It's absolutely insane to even think this is the problem among 100,000+ pages of unique content, carefully moderated and created over 15 years. This is why Google owes us a full and complete explanation for the manual penalty, which appears to have lasted for a very long time.

If this is considered problematic, Google might as well penalize 99.99% of websites, including moz.com - all dofollow, lol!!!

http://moz.com/community/recommended

It would appear this "manual action" against our site is an error that has never been corrected automatically and plagued us for a long, long time. I'll await to hear what Google says if they eventually get around to reconsidering our site. Thank you guys for scouring this large site in all directions and confirming what I've found and now making the argument airtight.

[Doc_Sheldon]

Good catch, Anders!

[AndersS]

Hi!

One more final suggestion: Add nofollow to the links at http://www.thelaw.com/partners/

Perhaps they are considered to be problematic.

Good luck in getting traffic etc back to normal.

Anders

[seoagnostic]

Sheldon - Thanks for the suggestion. I actually posted in the Google Webmaster Help Forum on this issue several months ago - both the zero page rank and loss of all +1s. The best anyone could find (from some smart SEO experts there who were generous with their time) were the handful of links I mentioned and nobody had answers. This new manual actions information from Google helps greatly in an unfortunate way - it seems to confirm an ongoing anomaly that appears to be a manual Google action for outgoing links that has never been lifted. The only warning I've ever received was about outgoing links from my site - and that was a long time ago.

I appreciate you guys giving the look over that it appears everyone has confirmed independently. Perhaps it's long overdue to camp out on Matt Cutts' doorstep, lol.

[Doc_Sheldon]

Michael- You're definitely facing an odd situation here... makes no sense. Have you tried posting an inquiry on the Google Webmaster Help Forum? I'd say there's a good chance you can get a Googler's attention there and maybe get a hint as to where the problem lies.

[seoagnostic]

Sheldon - I will look into the redirect issue. Regarding the directory, no, it is not fully deindexed although virtually every entry is deindexed. Search for any name (other than one) and you won't find any of them. Robots.txt blocks those pages and every page has a "noindex" on it. But most importantly... there are virtually no outbound inks. None!

Yes... this is a puzzling issue that has hit us for many months and nobody has been able to solve it. There is a zero or no page rank at all on every page in the site - thousands of them. The primary domain was a 6.

[seoagnostic]

Anders - thanks for spotting that but it's not the problem. That was installed 2 days ago - actually, not even that long ago. The error message predates that plugin. In addition, I think those are only 10 pages in total right now -- but thank you for reminding me that this is still there.

Apparently there is a discussion on it at Wordpress.com. Incredibly devious.

[AndersS]

Hi!

In regards to the "directory"-question, I think what Todd wondered, was if it was some special part of the site that had gotten a penalty, or was reported as problematic.

It appears that you have invisible links in the social sharing plugin on the left side (at least on the article-section) that are not nofollowed. Search in the source code for

.

I found this:

_<div class="wpsr-linkback"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.aakashweb.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-socializer/">WP Socializera><a class="wpsr_linkaw" target="_blank" href="http://www.aakashweb.com">Aakash Weba>_div>

Hope this helps!

Anders

[Doc_Sheldon]

Odd... the first time I pasted the URL you gave in your original post, it took me to lawyers.thelaw.com
but the second time, it took me to thelaw.com. As you said, lawyers.thelaw.com and the many pages I checked had TBPR of 0. But thelaw.com shows TBPR of 2.

By the way, lawyers.thelaw.com hasn't been de-indexed.

[seoagnostic]

Anders - Thanks. Yes, I used Xenu. The penalty is on the entire site.

[AndersS]

Hi Michael!

Have you tried spidering your site (with screaming frog or similar tools), to see if any of the profile pages on the subdomain contains any suspicious outbound links?

Is there a penalty for the entire domain, or just the subdomain?

Best regards,

Anders

[seoagnostic]

Dates of noticeable traffic changes:

• Mid June 2011 (Panda - extremely significant)
• Mid August 2011 (significant)
• Mid March 2012 (slight)
• End April/Beginning May 2012 (significant)
• Mid August 2012 (somewhat significant)

The only warning was practically the same warning a while ago. That's it, nothing else. An earlier reconsideration request back in August 2011 resulted in no response from Google and was done because actions taken to combat Panda as recommended did almost nothing.  All concerning outbound links from the site. Even back then we didn't have any link exchanges or anything that seemed remotely related to the warning.

The only thing that helped us - removing Google Analytics for 1.5 month's time. During that time traffic increased noticeably and traffic grew until the End of April issue.

[seoagnostic]

Todd - Thanks for your response:

1 - Yes, I can confirm that the message is from my site, which is what puzzles me. Google just released its manual actions field in Webmaster Tools and that was my first experience with it today. I suspect that this action may have been taken a very long time ago but let's hold off on that for now:

Unnatural links from your site
Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes

2 - There is only one directory on the site. http://legal.nu/kdlu

Apparently Google suppresses some of the results (and it recognizes robots.txt blocks the pages) but has included about 10K entries in its index if you add the additional results. Every page has a noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file in the subdomain also has a disallow. Regardless, there are virtually no outbound links. Other than 2 entries, most do not have outbound links to websites and, if they do, every link is nofollow. So I don't see any outbound there.

3 - There were 2 personal websites and 1 partner website - yes, a total of 3 sites - that's it. They were removed at least 2 months ago. They represented my professional personal blog, the website of our development company and the website of our hosting company. This was the most anyone could guess that might even be an issue so it was removed entirely, as innocuous as it seemed.

4. I have no idea how long but it could be a penalty since Panda. Panda came and virtually nothing made a difference. You could add good original content and there would be marginal gains although Bing and Yahoo reported gains. The odd part is that the directory grew in traffic while the best content on the site dropped. Thus the whole directory was deindexed. Go figure.

Other information:

Ranking drops - about 5 months ago all page rank from the site went to zero or unable to be ranked and now only two pages are ranked. Every +1 on the site was gone. http://legal.nu/kdlv - check this link. It gets a good number of page views every month. The pagerank cannot be determined. The site used to rank very, very well. Several pages lost their Facebook Likes too but not all across the board like the Google +1s.

That's about all I know. Backlinks disavowed (some are the remnant of 15 years on the web, scrapers, people with blogrolls of sites, some others were there and not our doing but we disavowed those that were gone, which was only a few hundred entries in total.)

I can't find the outbound links that it appears Google may have penalized us for a long time. Neither has anyone else, at least nothing substantial and most benign at best. Thanks for the look over.

[toddmumford]

Hi Michael, to start let's look at a few areas so that we have some supporting information

1. Can you confirm the message is "Unnatural links from your site"? What date did you receive this message?

2. Which directory has been deindexed by Google (url please)

3. When did you remove the links to your personal websites, and where were those links located in the website, and what were the topics that those websites represented?

4. Which penalty do you feel has been lingering for a long time?

Any other supporting information as to the history of the website (suspected penalties, ranking drops + those corresponding dates) would be helpful.