Google Manual Penalty - Dilemma?

[Sandicliffe]

Hi Guys,

A while back, my company had a 'partial match' manual penalty from google for 'unnatural links' pointing to our site.

This glorious feat was accomplished by our previous SEO agency for quite heavily spamming links (directories, all kinds of low quality sites).

That being said, when the penalty hit we really didnt see any drop in traffic. In fact, it was not long after the penalty that we launched a new website and since our traffic has grown quite significantly. we've doubled our total visits from prior penalty to now.

This previous SEO also did submit a couple of reconsideration requests (both done loosely as to fool Google by only removing a small amount of links, then abit more the next time when it failed - this was obviously never going to work). Since then, I myself have submitted a reconsideration request which was very thorough, disavowing 85 Domains (every single one at domain level rather than the individual URLs as I didnt want to take any chances), as well as getting a fair few links removed from when the webmaster responded. I documented this all and made multiple contacts to the webmasters so i could show this to Google.

This reconsideration request was not successful - Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously. But really, my main point is; am I going to do more damage removing more and more links in order to remove the penalty, because as it stands we haven't actually noticed any negative effects from the penalty! Perhaps the negative effects have not been noticed due to the fact that not long after the penalty, we did get a new site which was much improved and therefore would naturally get much more traffic than the old site, but overall it has not been majorly noticed.

What do you guys think - is it worth risking drop in rankings to remove the penalty so we don't face any future issues, or should I not go too heavy with the link removal in order to preserve current rankings? (im really interested to see peoples views on this, so please leave a comment if you can help!)

[MarieHaynes]

That's the problem...it's often hard to tell whether a link is natural or not.  For example, a local directory listing might be ok, but it could be unnatural.  If it helps, I wrote a Moz article that describes different kinds of unnatural links: http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines

[Sandicliffe]

Thanks for your response, you've clarified a lot for me here.

Essentially, so long as only the unnatural links are removed I should not harm my sites ranking?That is, so long as Google agree on which links are the unnatural ones!

I better get to work auditing all of these links - see you again in afew years! haha.

[MarieHaynes]

"Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously."

This made me chuckle.  Google is a strange animal.  John Mueller has said many times that looking at your links in Webmaster Tools is enough, but I will often get back example unnatural links that are not in Webmaster Tools.  This is one of the reasons why when I do a backlink audit I combine links from a number of different sources including OSE, ahrefs and majestic.

Now, I have seen sites lift penalties by just going on their Webmaster Tools links but really it's best to get them from multiple sources.

BUT...even when I combine every possible source I can find I will quite often get example links back from Google that don't exist on ANY backlink checkers.  These are tough.  But usually they are clues that can help you to find more links.  For example, often when this happens it's a scraped version of a press release that is given.  What I'll do is take a chunk of text in quotes and search for it on Google and often I'll find 3-4 additional links that weren't in my audit list.

Another thing you can do is download new links from GWT as often new ones will pop up even if they are years old.

Are you going to do more harm to your site than good?  That depends on how good you are at auditing links.  If you're only getting rid of unnatural links then you won't hurt your site and you may even see an improvement in rankings either immediately, a few weeks after the penalty is lifted, or when Penguin refreshes.  But, if you're guessing at your disavow decisions then yes, if you disavow good links you're going to do harm to your site.

Best of luck!

[Kingof5]

Keep doing what you're doing. As long as you know how to properly identify if a site/link is good or bad, you shouldn't hurt your site. Better to do this work now and prevent another penalty in the future than to put it off.

RE: total backlinks - I recommend combining and deduping Open Site Explorer, Webmaster Tolls, Majestic, and AHREFs for the most thorough picture.

[seovp]

It will often take multiple requests for Google to remove a manual penalty to ensure you put enough effort in to cleaning up your link profile.

What tools did you use to find your links? It's best to use a combination of tools to find all of the possible links to your site. The amount of links you remove/disavow is relative to the size of your link profile, some sites have had to remove or disavow 1,000s of domains.

Ensure the links that you remove are exact match links or those from directories and guest blogging etc.

It's best to remove more links than not enough as even having poor links will result in Google marking you down. If you're not thorough enough, there's every chance you could get penalized again in the future. Also make sure your recon request is clear and simple and clearly demonstrates the work you have done to remove or disavow any offending links.