How to Recover From a Google Penguin Penalty?
-
My web site is hit by penguin penalty and got the mail from Google to my web master tool saying.
"Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxxx.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.
Recommended action
Use the Links to Your Site feature in Webmaster Tools to download a list of links to your site.
Ensure that unnatural links pointing to your site are removed.
When these changes are made, and you are satisfied that links to your site follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, submit a reconsideration request. If you're unable to remove links pointing to your site, please provide as much detail as possible in your reconsideration request.For an updated list of manual actions currently applied to your site, visit the Manual Actions page. If no manual actions are listed, there is no longer a need to file a reconsideration request." -
Sorry for the delayed response. This post at http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal is a good starting point for how to recover from a penalty or manual action.
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
-
Do You Risk A Penalty From Local Paid Directories in 2022?
Hi there, I have a client who wants to advertise in a local directory along the lines of "find your nearest plumber". The directory only has paid listings and they are follow links and they also mention your site or generated landing page may get a nice bump on google. Is there a risk that they may get a penalty for using this directory? The client wants to use it regardless of if it gives them an SEO boost but obviously wants to avoid any penalties at all costs. Thoughts on this? Thanks in advance
Link Building | | Scottlinklater0 -
Is there any Penalty for building in bound inks too quickly?
I was speaking with someone today who was spreading out their link building because they were afraid that getting too many too quickly would incur penalties from Google and Bing. Is this a real thing? I have always been under the impression that if they are high quality links and directories that there was no limit to how many you could add other than the limited availability of the high quality links and directories themselves. I would appreciate some input on this.
Link Building | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Is something strange going on with Google last few days?? Seeing strange results for competitive keywords
I am seeing some very strange results for competitive keywords. If I search on google.co.uk for "website design" which I feel is a pretty tough keyword. I see a site called http://www.techdesigns.co.uk/ If you go to the site its a laptop review site with no mention of website design on the site. They seem to be an Amazon Affiliate They have 23,597 links saying website design but mostly from adult websites. I have seen this on a few result related to SEO but dont want to mention any names in case we upset anyone on the forum. How can they rank for such a competitive keyword without onpage? Surely Panda should have hit this site? Why have they not been hit by Penguin so many adult links? Sorry if this is anyones site on here I am not looking to get you banned or hit just stumps me why this site ranks.
Link Building | | tempowebdesign0 -
5th failed Google reconsideration attempt, can you help? (are scraper/related news sites the issue?)
(sorry for the long question - I thought it would be useful to give the background!) I am really struggling a Google's reconsideration request for my site, and although we thought we had removed almost all the 'bad' backlinks I am still getting no-where... We are really wanting to focus on building our brand, and establishing our site as an authority but this penalty is really holding us back. The latest response from Google: There are still many inorganic links pointing to your site. At this point, we believe we’ve evaluated these links appropriately, and no further action from us is required. In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see. We do not recommend that you submit another reconsideration request until you have been able to make a good amount of progress. Once you’ve been able to get the links removed, please reply to this email with the details of your clean-up effort. My Website: http://bit.ly/KXg8y1 History: This is a new domain - approx 6 months old Old domain received a Google links warning We decided to start a new website, launch a new brand and start from the beginning We 301 re-directed the old domain so we didnt lose customers We then got a Google links warning for the new site We assumed this was related to links from the old site and so removed the 301 redirect on the 20th August Our old sites links still show in Google webmaster tools Reconsideration History 1st re-consideration request: Explained the 301 redirect had been removed, assured we would now be focussing on high quality content/brand building and after 2 weeks received a standard message to say that still had inorganic links 2nd Request: Went through the new sites links (using open site explorer, AHREFs, SEO Majestic and GWM) and removed those we identified as low quality (mostly directories built by an SEO company we had started working with). We complied a spreadsheet with all the links in it (including 301 redirect links) and explained which had been removed, webmaster contact details etc. We also uploaded our template email and screenshots showing contact with webmasters. 3rd, 4th and 5th Request: We went through the new site links and were able to remove a few more links which were thin or could be seen as inorganic, and the end result is that apart from 6 links we have removed all those we have identified as inorganic. Links The old site had some pretty poor links We have done no paid linking, no blog networks, no spammy web 2.0 sites on this site. We've added good quality content to our blog, focussed on social media, published an infographic, and are committed to long-term brand building The links mostly come from guest blog posting. An SEO company (who told us they were 100% content based) built some directory links - but 99% of these have been removed There are some links from Scraper/related news sites (ones that have related blog posts or scrape images etc) Press releases which were picked up and re-published (some of these include anchor text) My Question/s: Do you think Google is still seeing the links from the previous 301 redirect in Google webmasters and including these still? Are these scraper/related post sites causing the issue? (organic links - but some dubious sites) Are sites re-publishing our press releases causing the issue? (organic links - but includes some anchor text I really appreciate your time on this one, I have tried really hard to identify and remove links, but am now struggling! Many Thanks
Link Building | | twhite0 -
Drop in "Links to your site" in Google Webmaster Tools
Last week I noticed a substantial drop in "Links to Your Site" in Google Webmaster Tools on several of my websites. Upon further investigation the reduced links were from our sister sites. It appears that Google has reduced the number of links they are counting from links in our headers and footers from these sites to our main websites. It is not affecting our rankings or traffic. Is Google doing some clean up with what they are showing in webmaster tools for links from related, owned sites? Any cause for concern?
Link Building | | tdawson090 -
Google unranks target keywords
I have read a number of changes in Google (see:http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627)
Link Building | | LeeAnn30
But as of late I am having some problems with my website, and I am curious if anyone of you are also experiencing the same.
The problem is this in SEO it is a SOP that you use your target keyword as your anchor text having the url as the landing page for the page you want to rank for.
But recently the pages I want to rank for specific keywords are going down instead Google is ranking my homepage for keywords I don't want to rank for.
So instead of having my target pages rank it is my homepage that gets shown in Google, now this is what is really interesting the keywords I rank for are not in the meta title, description, keywords of the homepage in fact there are no specific keywords at all in the content!
I checked the backlinks and I have never created any backlinks to my site using those keywords I rank for.
And this is happening at a very fast rate, rankings and pages going down and only the homepage is showing up in Google.
I really want to know your thoughts.0 -
Will Google penalize for redirects related to a company merger?
Company A is set to acquire Company B. As part of the merger agreement, Company A will be redirecting the linking domains of Company B's website (over 1,000 links) to company A's website. Will Google penalize Company A for redirecting Company B's 1,000 linking domains to Company A's website at one time? If so, would it be better for Company A to redirect Company B's 1,000 linking domains in waves?
Link Building | | 5outhpaw0 -
My google rankings went down
I've been working with a company to get some incoming links since April 2011. We are targeting only 2 keywords. For one keyword I was ranked number 1 until a couple of weeks ago. In fact, most of my rankings went down including those keywords that the company was not working on. They are writing 5 articles per month and posting them to their proprietary network. Could those backlinks could harmed my rankings?
Link Building | | cardif0