Will a Google manual action affect all new links, too?

[barberm]

I have had a Google manual action (Unnatural links to your site; affects: all) that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links. I have been spending the past few weeks cleaning things up and have submitted a second pass at a reconsideration request. In the meantime, I have been creating new content, boosting social activity, guest blogging and working with other publishers to generate more natural inbound links.

My question is this: knowing that this manual action affects "all," are the new links that I am building being negatively tainted as well? When the penalty is lifted, will they regain their strength? Is there any hope of my rankings improving while the penalty is in effect?

[JimJ]

Hi Maria

What do you mean by "Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link" -- Is there an issue with linking back from directories to your site?

Does this apply to submitting my website to social bookmark websites using a specific anchor text that am optimizing for?

Thanks

James

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Michael,

"You are correct that it wasn't a single press release but 3-4 that all had the same circumstances."

It's quite unlikely that a few press releases are the sole cause of your penalty, although it is possible.  But I think you may have more links to clean up.  Here are two examples:

http://healthmad.com/health/when-las-vegas-gets-the-best-of-you-6-ways-to-get-back-on-your-feet-in-sin-city/ - self made article

http://www.cannylink.com/healthhospitaldirectories.htm - Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link

[barberm]

Interesting. I hadn't seen these links before and have never purchased links. I'll download the list from open site explorer and review and disavow these and similar. Thanks for pointing these out!

[Jonathan1979]

Agreed.  Ordinarily it wouldn't matter, but once subject to manual review they would be.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Looking in Open Site Explorer, I'm seeing several suspicious links in the report.  These are links from sites that have nothing to do with medicine whatsoever, all with targeted keywords in the anchor text.  When I click to view the page and look for the actual links, I'm not seeing anything.  So, it seems the links are no longer there.

If the report from Open Site Explorer is correct, it looks to me like someone was purchasing links and has now removed them.  Did you purchase links?

Some of the suspicious links are:

• afghan-network.net/Bookshop/persian-books.html
• learnscratch.org/resources/why-learn-scratch
• www.tiltshift.com/

If these links are also in Google's link profile, I could see why the site is penalized.

[Jonathan1979]

I suspect you missed some and Google are being well... Google.

Ahrefs do a 7 day money back guarantee.  You can even find a 50% off coupon around for the first month.  Some people will even need to check majestic as well.

No one site will get all the links unfortunately.

[barberm]

Agreed. But given that I had those removed in quick order and it has been several weeks since they have considerably dropped, any reason why they wouldn't have removed the manual action. I am essentially back to a pre-PRWeb profile.

[Jonathan1979]

Just looking a bit more, but you could have been flagged for manual checking because from around the beginning of August you had a huge spike of links.  Based on Matt Cutts previous statements about Prweb, they would have seen it as possibly spammy.

From August you went up to nearly 125 referring domains, before dropping back down to 36 now.  Prior to PRweb, you were at around 30 referring domains.  I suspect this spike is what caused a manual review.

[barberm]

I don't know if that makes me feel better or not, but you basically confirmed my thoughts. I may do what you indicate and disavow everything, but I am going try one more time and cut a lot more deeply in actual link removal first.

Meanwhile, of course, I am top 5 for all my major terms in Bing and Yahoo. Joy!

Thanks

[Jonathan1979]

I have to say on my first quick look I cannot determine why you would have got a manual penalty.  Your link profile does not look spammy, and I wonder if google are specifically targeting sites that use PRweb.

With Ahref's I only see 77 dofollow backlinks, and to be honest you could probably be very brutal when it comes to dissavowing these links and starting again.

It is strange that the two methods of link building (prweb, and infographics) are two methods that Matt Cutts has recently (in the last few months) said that should be nofollow links.

But I cannot give anything definitive based on what I am seeing.

[barberm]

I disavowed in the same day I submitted a reconsideration request, but I did also include it in my documentation. I also included multiple emails to publishers and contact form submissions, as recommended to me.

[barberm]

Sure. http://www.urgentcarelocations.com

I just added the footer links to each state profile this week and see how those could be considered "spammy." They weren't supposed to be implemented with "urgent care" after every one of them. I doubt that is an issue here, however, given that they keep referring to unnatural links.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Sometimes it takes a little while for the disavow tool to remove links.  So, you may need to give it some time if you just did that.  You can always include the disavow request in the documents for your reconsideration request.  Beyond that, I'd take a closer look at your other links to see if there are other links causing an issue.

[Jonathan1979]

Thinking about it Kurt, I have to agree that it is odd that a manual penalty has arisen from this.  Michael, if you would like to share a link to your site, perhaps we can have a look and see if there is something obvious happening.

[barberm]

I have disavowed the URLs now. The major offender was streetinsider.com. I was able to remove URLs on two other offending publisher sites. Even with the disavow, however, Google didn't remove the manual action. Going to try out removeem.com to see if their tools/service can assist.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Bummer about the rejection.  You said that you were having trouble getting the press releases removed (and I assume the links), have you disavowed those links?

[barberm]

Thanks Kurt. You are correct that it wasn't a single press release but 3-4 that all had the same circumstances. In fact, it was the same 2-3 publishers that removed the nofollow tags. The real crummy thing is that those publishers refuse to remove the links so I am having to resort to disavowing them.

While I have been working through a couple of reconsideration requests, I have built some pretty strong links, but Google seems to have capped me at page 5.

I actually got a negative response back from Google this morning following my latest reconsideration request. It provided no specifics as it did in the past only that my "Site violates Google's quality guidelines" and references the manual action of "Unnatural links to your site." I'm on round three now. I only have about 300 total inbound links nearly all of which are purely natural or nofollow. What a mess...

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

That stinks that those publishers did that.  I'm a little suspicious that this would happen from a single press release.  Usually, it takes Google a bit more than that to trip a manual action.  Are you sure there aren't other links, maybe other press releases, that are suspicious?  I only ask because Google usually responds to a pattern of manipulation, not a single action.

In regards to your actual question, natural links typically aren't "tainted" by a previous penalty.  In fact it would probably work in the exact opposite way.  With manual actions Google thinks that you are trying to manipulate them.  In order to get the manual action removed, Google is looking for you to clean up the old links, apologize, and demonstrate that you have changed your ways.  So, getting new links that are completely natural demonstrates that you have changed your ways.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[barberm]

Yes. The publisher (streetinsider.com, amongst others) are technically violating PRWeb's copyright terms as they are altering the content prior to publishing. PRWeb isn't very happy, but has been unsuccessful at getting the articles removed (which isn't helping my reconsideration request).

[Jonathan1979]

Ditto.  I saw a competitor use PRweb, and was tempted.  However, I felt the potential for spammy links not the direction I wanted my SEO to go in.

This just reinforces the issue.

[ChristopherGlaeser]

manual action ... that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links.

Seriously?  I've been thinking about trying PRWeb for product announcements but this makes me rethink that strategy.