Should I Disavow More Links

[Eavesy]

My SEO website got hit with a very severe penalty about a year ago and it was totally banished from the rankings for all of the money terms like SEO, SEO company and search engine optimisation (before the penalty I ranked in the top 10-15 for all of those phrases, top 3 for SEO company). I was probably hit for being listed in shed loads of paid directories, low quality free directories, footer links in client sites, keyword forum signature links and articles with keyword rich text links.

A month or so after I got hit I started trying to clean up my link profile, I got rid of all of the client website links, I changed the link text on the majority of forum signature links and article links, I managed to get rid of about 50 directory links and the ones that I could not get taken down I disavowed - about 150.

During that time I sent 2-3 separate reconsideration requests and I got this message each time:

"Links to your site violate Google's quality guidelines"

After doing all of that work and being rejected I pretty much gave up - things just seemed to get worst, not only was I no longer ranking for the money terms, but all of my blog posts tanked as well.

I got my site redesigned and switched to Wordpress - I used 301 redirects and everything but they totally didn't work. My organic traffic went down to less than 50 hits a day - before the penalty I was getting over 300 a day.

Then on Saturday just gone, almost exactly a year after I got hit with the penalty I noticed my site ranking in position 23 on Google.co.uk in the UK for the competitive phrase SEO company from being absolutely nowhere and I do mean nowhere.

This sign has given me hope and the motivation to get rid of the penalty altogether, update all of my articles, get rid of bad advice in old blog posts and get rid of the rest of the bad links.

Thing is that I am nervous to go getting rid of more links and disavowing, what if I do more harm then good? Do you think the penalty has been removed and I should just leave the rest of the bad links or should I continue trying to clean things up?

By the way, my website is http://www.seoco.co.uk

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi David,

It sounds like you have had a partial recovery and looking at your other replies below, that the manual action you have applies to the links themselves which means Google have reduced their value and your rankings accordingly. So whilst they may not be actively hurting you, it is always good to have a clean slate and remove manual penalties if you can so that you know there is nothing holding you back from ranking.

In terms of your actual question, if you have links that are clearly outside of Google guidelines, you may as well get rid of them if you can. They're probably not helping and if you are able to get rid of them, then it may help prevent any future problems if Google tweak how they treat those links.

It sounds like you have recovered a little though with your ranking returning, so removing other links may not be a high priority for you, but like I said, it's good to get a clean slate and be sure that you can move forward building good links with nothing else holding you back.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

[MarieHaynes]

That's a tough one.  At one time, John Mueller (Google employee) said that WMT links were all that you needed in order to get rid of a link related problem.  But, when Google started giving example links for failed reconsideration requests they commonly would give links that are not in WMT.  Sometimes they can be found in ahrefs or majestic but sometimes they can't be found in any of the backlink checkers!

I use WMT (both sample and most recent), OSE, Majestic and Ahrefs.  You can also get links by registering for Bing WMT and Yandex as well.  Plus, you can look at your GA referral data over the last few years which may find you more.

If you kept any records of where you had made links then that can help as well.

[Eavesy]

I have another question, because I have over 1000 domains linking to my site in webmaster tools I cannot see all of the domains linking to my site, how do you recommend I get around this? I have already gone through all of the links in Open Site Explorer.

[Eavesy]

Thanks Marie, I think I am going to take your advice and keep going with cleaning up bad links.

Most of the organic links use my company name "The SEO Company", my domain name "Seoco", my name "David Eaves", or the name of the article/blog post, but there are a few that simply say "SEO company".

[MarieHaynes]

OK, so now that you know you have a manual action, you know that you've got work to do.  Some people would argue that if you have a partial action that you don't need to do anything because Google has already discounted those links.  So, in other words, if you take action to remove the warning message it's not like Google is going to start counting them already.  But, I would disagree.  If you have a manual action, in most cases it's almost a blessing because if you do the work to get the warning lifted then you will have also done the work needed to escape the Penguin algorithm.

If what you are saying about self made links is true then aren't you breaking the guidelines by having a link to your real estate website in your moz profile?

I think in Google's eyes it's mostly about scale and intent to manipulate the search results.  The link that I have from my  Moz profile could potentially be seen as unnatural on a manual review, but the odd link like that is not likely to do me harm.  It's not anchored with a keyword and it's obvious that I have not used links in profiles as an attempt to manipulate Google.  I'm not saying that your profile links are necessarily bad as I haven't analyzed your site, but if you've got lots of them, and if a good number of them are keyword anchored, then they could be causing you problems.  Also, if there are profile links made on sites where you don't actively participate then Google may pick up on this as a manipulating scheme.  (I'm not saying that you have links like this...just throwing it out as an idea.)

My website has hundreds of totally organic links from websites like Techcrunch, Mashable, this site, search engine land and loads more thanks to blog posts and a popular infographic I did

What kind of anchor text are they linking back with?  If it's a money term then this can definitely be a factor in your penalty even if the links are on high quality sites.

Manual penalties and Penguin are created to catch sites that are cheating their way to the top.  They're not created to demote sites that have the odd unnatural link here and there.  I have yet to analyze a Penguin hit site or a manually penalized site that I thought was hit unfairly.

I have far more organic links then almost any other UK SEO company.

If you've got good links beneath the unnatural ones then this means that if you do a good cleanup of the unnatural links then you have a good chance for an excellent recovery.  You may need to wait for the next Penguin refresh to fully see the effects though.

[Eavesy]

I have just checked in WMT and in the partial matches section it says:

"Some manual actions may apply to specific pages, sections or links

Reason

Unnatural links to your site - impact links"

If what you are saying about self made links is true then aren't you breaking the guidelines by having a link to your real estate website in your moz profile? The links I have in forums are signature links and have been earned through participation just like your links on your moz profile - I have not spammed or anything to get them.

My website has hundreds of totally organic links from websites like Techcrunch, Mashable, this site, search engine land and loads more thanks to blog posts and a popular infographic I did, I have far more organic links then almost any other UK SEO company.

Thanks for your response.

[MarieHaynes]

When you get an unnatural links penalty, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to remove almost every single link that was self made.  It's not enough to get most of them...you need to address close to 100%

Just changing anchor text in self made links is probably not going to work. If you control the link then it's probably unnatural and needs to go.

Do you have naturally earned links to your site?  If not, then you may not be able to rank again unfortunately.

The main question that you are asking though is why you have popped back up to position #23.  It's possible that you had a manual penalty that has expired.  Take a look in WMT under Search Traffic --> Manual Actions and see if you still have manual action there.  Even if the penalty has expired though it's important to do the work to clean things up completely because you can get re-penalized again.

I am suspicious that Google has been testing Penguin refresh data as I have seen a couple of my Penguin hit clients make slight recoveries and then drop back down again.  It's possible that when Penguin refreshes you will bump up higher which would be good!

[Eavesy]

Thanks, will bare that in mind

[Stellar_SEO]

While I agree with your advice, I am not sure that getting rid of more links right away is the right thing to do.

@David

Without knowing the entire story of this site, it seems to me that your appearance on page three indicates that the penalties are no longer affecting your site as it has positively improved. I think in this case spending your time trying to get some very authoritative and trusted links would do you the most good. Remember, most sites have spam links pointing to them for one reason or the other but if those links make up only a small portion of the total link profile, they often do not harm the site. If this wasn't the case negative SEO would be the only way people boosted their own sites.

Good luck and keep at it!

[Eavesy]

Hi Bill, with the 150 directory links that I disavowed I sent each of them two separate link removal requests before I disavowed and I marked all of it down in a google doc and sent it to google in the reconsideration requests. The only thing I didn't do was actually send Google a copy of the emails I sent. Are you saying that I need to send Google a copy of the emails I send to each directory owner/website owner?

Thanks for your response by the way.

[billhartzer]

David, whenever you get that message from Google, they're looking for you to make a considerable effort to remove the links, not just disavow the links. So, before you submit another reconsideration request, you'll need to do a few things:

• identify all of the links. Don't just get the links that OSE gives you, get the webmaster tools links, the ahrefs links, and the majestic SEO links, as well

• review all of the links and identify the toxic/bad/unhealthy/paid links (the ones that Google is having a problem with).

• contact site owners to get those links removed. You'll need to document everything, even show the emails you sent as well as when you sent them, etc. etc.

Google is looking for you to spend time getting the links removed, and a disavow will not be enough in order to get a manual penalty revoked.