Google Manual Penalties:Different Types of Unnatural Link Penalties?
-
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?
-
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
-
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 -
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.
-
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.
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
-
Recovery from manual penalty, several sites sell same products
We are still struggling with the consequences of a manual penalty. Here the history we got a manual penalty in September 2013 on our main site kinderwagen.com for unnatural links we cleaned up our link profile and the penalty was lifted in February 2014 we did nothing in terms of link building until December 2014 from December 2014 we started to build natural links, we mostly gave away our products for reviews, that way we built first one content link per month now 2-3 content links per months we expanded our social acitivities on facebook and google plus we started a blog in the beginning of this year and rewrote our guide section For now the results of all this have been very modest. We are basically still stuck where we were after the penalty. In contrast our sites in other languages where we do similar activities perform quite well. There is one difference in Germany (where this kinderwagen.com is) we have other niche sites which partially sell the the same products. We made sure that every product is indexed only once, however it might still hurt the main site. Does anyone have experience in a similar situation or advice what we could do? Thanks in advance. Dieter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
How Do You Do Link Building??
I am starting to use the Moz pro tools like optimizing on page SEO for keywords and looking for opportunities. I know link building is a huge part for getting rankings on keywords in google search. Where do I start and how do I do the link building process for specific keywords I can rank for?? Thank you in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise1 -
Google and JavaScript
Hey there! Recent announcements at Google to encourage webmasters to let Google crawl Java Script http://www.googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/rendering-pages-with-fetch-as-google.html We have always put JS and CSS behind robots.txt, but now considering taking them out of robots. Any opinions on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
Community question- Penguin 2.0 link types?
What type of links do you think Penguin 2.0 targeted most - anchor text abuse , directory links, paid links, low quality guest posts, article directories etc????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
On-site links
Hi everybody, There's a lot of information about getting sitewide backlinks, but so few about on-site optimization. Is there a maximum of links to put on a page ? Is there a maximum of link that a page should receive ? etc ... ? So, what is the optimal strategy ? And I'm only concerned about on-page and on-site link, not backlinks commming from other sites. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPilon0 -
Natural Link Profile, low and high value links, really?
I cant really get my head around this one. I've read a few times when building links make sure you pick up so low value links as well. So here is an example (and lets say each link takes half hour to get): I got 5 hours of link building and this is what I have managed to get with the time. 1. 10 high value links all with PA/DA 50-60+ 2. 5 high value links with PA/DA 50-60+ AND another 5 low value links with PA/DA 10-. Surely #1 beats #2 hands down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
We are a web hosting company and some of our best links are from our own customers, on the same IP, but different Class C blocks..
We are a web hosting company and some of our best links are from our own customers, on the same IP same IP, but different Class C blocks. How do search engines treat the uniqie scenario of web hosting companies and linking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FirePowered0