Google Manual Penalties:Different Types of Unnatural Link Penalties?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Hello Guys,

I have a few questions regarding google manual penalties for unnatural link building. They are "partial site" penalties, not site wide.

I have two sites to discuss.

1. this site used black hat tactics and bought 1000's of unnatural backlinks. This site doesn't rank for the main focus keywords and traffic has dropped.

2. this site has the same penalty, but has been all white hat, never bought any links or hired any seo company. It's all organic. This sites organic traffic doesn't seem to have taken any hit or been affected by any google updates.

Based on the research we've done, Matt Cutts has stated that sometimes they know the links are organic so they don't penalize a website, but they still show us a penalty in the WMT.

"Google doesn't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. However, because we realize that some links may be outside of your control, we are not taking action on your site's overall ranking. Instead, we have applied a targeted action to the unnatural links pointing to your site."

"If you don't control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google's perspective, the links already won't count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you're able to get the artificial links removed, submit areconsideration request. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action."

Check that info above at this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604772?ctx=MAC

Recap: Does anyone have any experience like with site #2? We are worried that this site has this penalty but we don't know if google is stopping us from ranking or not, so we aren't sure what to do here. Since we know 100% the links are organic, do we need to remove them and submit a reconsideration request?

Is it possible that this penalty can expire on its own? Are they just telling us we have an issue but not hurting our site b/c they know it's organic?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

I would download all of your link data from;

• webmaster tools
• ose
• majestic
• maybe ahref too

And pull it together and comb through it for bad links. I think you'll really have to look through them to see what's going on. Maybe something was missed? First you need to confirm there actually are no spammy/bad links

In a removal / disavow situation the goal is to remove/disavow ONLY bad links - which there could only be 10 out of 100's - so you should sort through them.

-Dan

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

You say that all the links to the second site are "organic".  What do you mean by that?  Do you mean that the client never purchased links, did blog comments, did forum posts, engaged in article syndication, has followed links in guest blog posts... The list could go on and is pretty extensive.  Are you saying that none of the links have been manipulated in anyway?

Also, have you analyzed the link profile for the site?  Something is causing Google to think you are trying to manipulate things.  Have you figured out what they may have an issue with?

Did you have question about the first site?  I don't see one.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[DavidKonigsberg]

In my opinion if you get a warning about action to specific links and you have Basically a clean backlink profile and your rankings are not hurt you dont need to do anything. You should focus your energy instead on creating great links with natural anchor texts and providing a great web experience to your users.

[DougWalker]

Even if the penalty doesn't seem to be affecting things right now, I would definitely go through the "sustained effort" Matt talks about in the video and start contacting the webmasters to have them removed. Matt also mentioned that "we might take action on some of those anchors." Have you seen traffic to any individual pages that have these links pointing to them decrease at all? What if in a future update these links to start to affect traffic.

Even though overall traffic seems to be OK now, I'd say better safe than sorry, go through the effort to get those links removed and do the reconsideration request. That way, they won't become an issue in the future.