Disavow Issues

[EffectiveSEOUK]

Hi

We have a client who was hit by Penguin about 18 months ago.

We disavowed all the bad links about 10 months ago however this has not resulted in an uplift in traffic or rankings.

The client is asking me whether it would be better to dump the domain and move the website to a fresh domain.

Can you provide thoughts / experience on this please?

Thanks.

[MarieHaynes]

Just wanted to clarify (for the sake of others who may read this post) that the question was in regards to Penguin and I think in your situation, you're dealing with manual penalties.  With Penguin, there is no reconsideration request.  You've got to clean up the best you can and then hope that things improve when Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm.

It's still up for debate whether removing links (as opposed to disavowing) is important for Penguin.  My current advice is that if a link is easy to remove then do it.  But, otherwise I disavow.  While you're right that it is important to show Google your efforts in regards to link removal for a manual penalty, no one is going to look at your work for an algorithmic issue.

I asked John Mueller in a hangout once whether disavowing was as good as removing for Penguin and he said, "essentially yes".  However, because there are potential problems that could come up with the disavow tool (such as improper formatting or taking too long to recrawl to disavow), if you can remove the link that's not a bad thing to do.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Paul,

I realise it's been a couple of weeks since this was submitted, but I wanted to follow up. At my former agency, we went through a few reconsideration procedures for new clients. We managed to be successful with all of them, but some took quite a long time (August - February being the longest).

We have found that disavowing alone is not nearly enough to make a difference - it is far preferable for the links to be removed. Unlike Claudio below, we have had a far higher rate than 5%, but it all depends on where the links come from. Sometimes it's hard to even find a live email address to contact webmasters, and some people want payment to remove links (worth doing if the payment is not too high). We crafted templates and _always _followed up within two weeks if we did not get a response from first emailing someone for a link removal with another specifically crafted email template.

It's true that if you cannot remove links, it is still worthwhile demonstrating to Google that you attempted to do so, with email screenshots or at least a list of the sites you contacted. They want to see effort. They want to see that you removed, or attempted to remove, the vast majority of the bad links. It's time consuming and tedious, but it's worth it if you get the penalty removed.

As I said, the longest process we went through was over six months, but the site in question had a TERRIBLE backlink profile that was the result of years of abuse by bad link builders. We're talking removing thousands of links. However, it came through - the penalty was removed and the client's rankings are on the rise.

I hope this helps. The short version is: remove remove remove. You won't maintain a penalty if there are no more bad links holding the site back, and those links aren't helping it rank anyway.

If you'd like some advice on how to decide which links to remove and which to keep, please let me know. In the meantime, check out this post from my former colleague Brandon at Ayima. It's a good resource for link analysis.

Cheers,

Jane

[MarieHaynes]

Does the site have a good base of truly natural links?  There have been very few reported cases of Penguin recovery.  But, the ones that I have seen recover are ones that have had some excellent links left once the bad ones were cleaned up.

[gazzerman1]

Did you have a manual penalty? Did you get it revoked? or did you assume you had a Penguin issue and were proactive about it to avoid a manual penalty?

[SharewarePros]

Recovery from Link Penalty (manual or algorithm) procedure:

1. Collect inboud links from Google Webmaster Tools + Moz link explorer + Link Majestic.

2. Include all domains in a Excel worksheet.

3. Contact site owners asking for link removal (usually 5% of sucess, but the effort counts for Google).

4. Wait several weeks for the removal of the links.

5. Fill a disavow file and upload it to Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

6. Wait for 3 or 6 weeks and start a link building campain starting with a few links per week and increase it if you can (only natural links comming from authority sites related to your niche).

Recovers from Content problems.

1. Look for repetitive title and descriptions, use Google Webmaster Tools and Moz.

2. Look for pages with similar or identical content and fix it.

3. Look for pages with less than 200 words of convent and add content or simply remove them (404).

4. Add new fresh and original content.

Google will consider your effort and it will be increasing your rank step by step.

I hope it helps

Claudio