Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links

[halloranc]

Hi,

We are in the process of trying to remove a partial manual penalty for unnatural links. I would like to do a complete link audit of our site, where can I get complete data on sites linking to my website? Webmaster tools only appears to show the top 1000 domains.

Thanks

[MarieHaynes]

You'll get way more than 1000 links from WMT.  It says you get links from the top 1000 domains but it's usually quite a bit more.  I have had some spreadsheets from WMT that contain over 30,000 links.

John Mueller (Google employee) once said that WMT was all you needed in order to remove a penalty.  So, for over a year that's all I used.  However, in the last couple of months since Google has started to give examples of unnatural links when a site fails, many of those examples are not in WMT!  I think what John meant was that you could see the patterns in WMT such as articles, directories, etc. and then use those patterns to find additional links.  But, if you don't have a list of all of the links that you have made then that is not going to work for most people.

So, now, what I do is combine the links from WMT, ahrefs.com, majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer.  It's a pain.  I've written a script that combines them for me but it still takes me quite a while to put them together.

With that being said, I have removed penalties from some sites by just using the WMT links.  And then I've had other ones that Google has been really nitpicky on and has not removed the penalty until we addressed every single self made link.

[AndrewClark]

I would recommend using Majestic SEO in this instance. So long as you are working on a website which you can verify as your own, you will be eligible to free link data from Majestic SEO. They can explain better than me:

http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/site-explorer-goes-free/

I hope you find this information useful.

[onlinechester]

It isn't free but Link Detox is quite handy for showing links/ showing which links need to be gotten rid of.

[dencreative]

Hello, you should be able to find more links than a 1000 from Google Webmaster tools. It's also worth trying Bing and majestic as mentioned above. This is a great resource to get you on your way...

http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-create-an-excel-spreadsheet-to-remove-link-spam-post-penguin

Cheers,

Bill

[GPainter]

moz or majestic should all let you do that