Can't remove and can't disavow...

[Grumpy_Carl]

Wondering if anyone could help me. A client is suffering a Google penalty at the moment which is harming their performance. That said it is properly the best penalty they could have got..the site has a penalty which is stopping them ranking as high on keywords which they have been spamming links for. I say the best penalty they could have got because, other than these keywords, the site is still performing as well as before in the engines.

Have been trying to clear up the backlinks for the past couple of months and just when I think im winning I discover some 32,000 blog comments on one domain 6 weeks or so ago!! - [http://www. iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265](http://www.iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265) example url, I broke it on purpose as to not make it a backlink

With that many links i will not even try and contact the site, I put in the disavow in google that there is no way I can get these removed and explained it etc, however, they, again, rejected the reconsideration request saying they are still not happy with the links.

At a bit of a loss here. It's starting to look that the best approach will be to write off the half a dozen terms and go a little more long tail.

The site will not rank for (this is an example as would not want to give the client away) door knockers. They used to be first page but now are page four. However they remain page one for terms such as brass door knockers, cheap door knockers, chrome door knockers etc.

In WMT ranking report they have hits from 1200 words ranking in the top 5 in the past 30 days and 3000 in the top ten.

Im a considering trying to up the rankings of these words at the expense of the ones which we cannot seem to get the penalty off.

Any thoughts please.

[MarieHaynes]

What I do is work with the spreadsheets to get it down to one link per domain and then I make a spreadsheet out of that.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks, I think that's part of the problem. We haven't noted progress as well as we could, i'll try the approach contact info for the domains, contact form etc and see how we get on. Be nice if I could get all the links in one spreadsheet but that's proving difficult due to the volume of links and the links on the research tools.

[MarieHaynes]

I hear you.  However, when dealing with a manual penalty, it really doesn't matter how many of the spam links you remove.  What matters most is that you have identified nearly all of the spam links that are there.  Once you have done that then try to get each of them removed, and if you can't remove them then make notes in your spreadsheet and disavow.  It helps if you have in your spreadsheet the email address you could find (or if you couldn't find one, just put "none found"), the whois address of the site and the url of any contact form.  That shows Google that you have made attempts.  Then, disavow the ones that you couldn't get removed.

On average, I tend to get only 15-20% of links removed for my clients and yet we still pass at reconsideration because we have tried.  I had one site where we didn't get a single link removed because they were all on a blackhat network and there was no way of contacting any of them but I showed Google that we tried and they lifted the penalty.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Marie, I agree that it's not just that one domain. We have been putting the leg work in and getting a reasonable amount removed but it's just very hard to get the blog comment spam removed as site owner has not interest in changing half their site

[MarieHaynes]

Even though there are thousands of links from one domain, I can guarantee you that that one domain is not the main cause of your penalty.  If you can't remove the links then add "domain:iimpact.co.uk" to you disavow file and also make note in your spreadsheet that you attempted to contact the site owner but they did not reply.  You need to record your efforts in a Google Doc so that the webspam team can check to see that you are truly trying to clean up the links.

To remove the penalty you've got to address every single backlink that was self made whether that is in a comment, an SEO directory, an article, etc.  You've got to try to get each link removed and where you fail then you disavow the domain.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks for the reply, very interesting read. I have tried to disavow at domain level before but doesn't seem to have helped much. I guess this is because of the sheer volume of links on some sites, I can find over 75,000 links to the domain on just 4 websites!!!! so if i missed one or two of these out then the rejection is understanable.

The big problem seem to be facing is the sheer volume of links. The Moz toolbar is picking up 534,918 links to the site from 1,400 domains which says there are a lot of links on a few domains. Even using OSE, GWT and Majestic i'm only getting a small amount each time owing to limits in the tools.

Will give your approach a try and block almost everything and then send a reconsideration in detailing the previous failures and hope they take pity.

If it were just one link on a site that is fairly easy to remove but they must understand i cannot email a webmaster and say can you remove links from 36,000 of your pages

On a related note. How come the moz bar tells me over 500k links, Majestic tells me 50k links (the max they report) but when I run OSE it says 44 root domains and 88 links

[FedeEinhorn]

I suffered a similar issue. Although I do recognize I bought links back in 2007 - 2010, we were still getting about 10 new links every day, probably from some negative SEO campaign.

Got a penalty as a "partial match" affecting "some incoming links". We worked over a year to clean the backlink profile and still every reconsideration request failed as Google returned some links that were actually discovered after we downloaded all the links from all the possible sources.

What we did to solve this: downloaded the domains from both GWT and OSE, and instead of going link by link and spending at least 2 month contacting AGAIN, we added domain:[domain-to-disavow] and did it for almost 90% of the profile. Even domains that were linking to us honestly, but could possibly be seen as spam (like a link for my own profile in a dev forum).

After sending the disavow file with about 1500 domains, we didn't wait and sent the reconsideration request, with all the previous reconsiderations and their outcome and the decision we made to give it a "last shot". 2 weeks later we received their response, Penalty Revoked.

We started seeing ranking increases from the next day.