Google Penalty

[vcasebourne]

Hello thereIt has just been confirmed that my site is suffering for a Google Penality. The odd thing is that it is just for my set of key keywords and not the whole site.

It seems in 2010 that a rouge SEO company I used sent loads of spammy links but I have lots of other good links too.

What is your advice moving forward? Will it drop over time? Do I set up a new site (this has been established over 10 years) or try and get better quality links to compensate for the spam ones?

Thanks so much! Kindest regards

Victoria

[KarlBantleman]

I agree with Gary, you should definitely go through all your links and be really ruthless in terms of which are the poor quality links. Anything that is on an article or directory website you can probably get rid of (apart from directories like Yahoo, DMOZ etc) and submit your disavow file to Google.

If it is only your target keywords that have dropped then you have been lucky to escape a site-wide penalty but there is a good chance that this will be on its way so if you can clean up your profile sooner rather than later, it should help.

[gazzerman1]

Do you have a Manual Penalty? How have you confirmed you have the penalty? Is there an option to send a reconsideration request in Web Master Tools?

Removing those links is always the best thing to do. However I would start by putting them all in a disavow file first so that Google can start to ignore them as dofollow links. Meanwhile you can start to remove them.

However if you have a Manual penalty, you will have a lot more work to do. Let me know and I will guide you.

[GPainter]

You can remove the "spammy" links but make sure they are in fact spammy as removing all low end links can also hurt your rankings and may not have been doing you any hard in the first place. You can also as you mentioned build some good links and help counteract it.