Google Penalty - Has It Been Lifted?
-
Hi,
We have been trying to remove a ‘partial’ google penalty for a new client by the way of removing unnatural backlinks over a period of time and then submitting a reconsideration request, and uploading a disavow file etc.
Previously Google listed the partial penalty in the ‘manual actions’ section of webmaster tools, making it possible for us to submit a reconsideration request.
Having just logged in however we get the message ‘no manual webspam actions found’. So there isn’t any way we can submit a reconsideration request.
Does this mean that the penalty has been lifted? Or could it still exist? If the latter is there any other way to submit a reconsideration request?
Many thanks in advance, Lee.
-
Thanks Lee.
-
Well that explains that then Marie! Many thanks
I have read your article (impressive!) and everything now makes sense, we can stop wandering!
I'll share your article on Twitter shortly (@webpresenceUK).. the least we can do.
Thanks again, you really have helped.
Lee.
-
Your penalty probably expired. This has been happening frequently so I wrote about it on Search Engine Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2345875/Did-Your-Manual-Penalty-Disappear-It-Probably-Expired.
You still want to make sure you do a thorough cleanup as these penalties can either return (if you haven't cleaned up) or the problems that got you there can contribute to problems with the Penguin algorithm.
-
Thanks again Karl,
Their backlink profile now looks limited, but natural if the disavowed links are taken away.
We are outreaching to build quality links to address the balance, and participating on social media etc.
It wasn't an alogorithmic penalty as it was listed in the 'manual sections' of WMT's.. and there's no duplicate content.
It's all guess work at the moment, we have no idea if our disavow file has been considered, or if the penalty still exists! Organic traffic has increased slightly but that may just be down to our recent on-page and off-page work.
All the best, Lee.
-
What does your link profile look like without the websites that have been disavowed? Is it quite bare now? When we undertook penalised websites we carried on building high quality links to try and put the balance in our favour, have you done likewise?
It does seem odd how the message is no longer there and they are saying there is no manual action. Have you considered an algorithm penalty maybe? duplicate content? That's a possibility.
-
Many thanks for the response Karl, appreciated!
No such message, no. I thought that google would have sent us this kind of message too, they have in the past.
The last response we received from them was in April saying that the reconsideration request had failed as there were still artificial links pointing to the site. We've spent a lot of time and money trying to get them removed since, but are now unable to send a new reconsideration request.
The only thing I can think of is that Google are eventually taking notice of our disavow file, but that's only a guess.
If anyone else can shed some light on this that would be great, we're just not sure if it's worth spending more resources on the link audit and removal process.. if the penalty has been lifted there isn't much point.
Very confused!
Lee.
-
Google usually gives a message saying they've lifted the penalty, something like "previously the webspam team took action on your website but we've now lifted this..." Did you not get one?
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
-
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
Starting over after a Penguin Penalty
Hi, Has anyone tried starting a new domain after being hit with a Penguin penalty? I'm considering the approach outlined here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain. In a nutshell, de-index the OLD site completely via Google's Removal Tool, and then relaunch old content under new domain. This seems to have merit, unless Google keeps a hidden cache of content (or uses other sources like Wayback Machine). My concern is doing the above listed approach, but Google still passes the old links to the new domain. We have great content, but too much spam (despite me removing a lot of the links + disavow). Any feedback based on experience would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14401 -
Google ignoring Canonical and choosing its own
Hey Mozzers, We have several products that all have upto 6 different versions, they are the same product but in a different specification. As users search via these specifications (within our website) it is beneficial to keep all 6 products as different listings on the website. In google however it is not. So we kept all 6 listing but chose 1 to be the google landing page, the only different between them all is the technical specification + occasionally size. But 95% of the pages are the same. Let call the products A, B, C, D, E, F, we made all the canonicals point to C because this is out best selling version of the product. However, google has chosen E to rank instead. What is my best move here? Should i accept the page google has chosen and change the canonicals the point to that version or should I be stubborn and try to get google to change which version it ranks. As always many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Google serving wrong page...
Hi, When you Google: "Los Angeles divorce attorney", you will see this site on the 5th page of the SERPS: www.berenjifamilylaw.com/blog/. For some reason, Google is serving the BLOG page as opposed to the homepage. This has been going on now for several weeks. Any tips on how to fix this? Obviously, the Homepage is more relevant and has more links going to it, so not sure why it's happening. Would you just leave it alone? Would you use robots.txt to block Google from crawling the BLOG post page? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Google Places - Advanced Question
Hi All, Ive found multiple threads about previous issues but I haven't found any tailored to my specific question.I know there are a large amount of factors so I wanted to see if any other individuals had ran into this previously. We are currently in a centralized position in a major city. We are discussing moving the main office about 15 miles away into another city, moving us out of the main city where we have been for the past 3 years. The city where we are currently located has a lot more GEO search volume compared to the new city search terms and variants of. If we move will our local rankings drop when someone searches in the city where we were previously? How long would it take for this ranking to fall? Or would we still rank because we are moving a short distance away and have a large amount of citations there? I know we would need to change over all our online directories, on page etc..Any other suggestions on a smooth transition? I know there are many factors that go into this and any past experience, guidance and/or assistance is greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PRKEL0 -
Effect of I-Frame on Google Rank
My commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) allows visitors to search for office space listings. The site sources listings through a third party and they are displayed in an i-frame. The i-frame directs visitors to listing pages such as: http://listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com/getspace.mpl?sp_id=A0173921&cust_id=offspldr Atleast 10,000 of these pages have backlinks to my site. My question is the following: Could these tens of thoudands of alpha numeric URLs be detrimental to my sites ranking on Google after the Panda/Penguin updates? SIte traffic dropped from 7,000 per month to about 3,300 after the April Google update. Rewriting content for dozens of pages and adding a blog have only somewhat mitigated the negative effects of Panda/Penguin. Could Google be viewing these links from the third party lisitng provider as a negative when they viewed these links as a plus before? Any downside to removing the third party links and parsing these listings from landlord websited and displaying them as part of my site with their own URL, title tag, description tag? Obviously the new URLS would not be alphanumeric. If these links have not caused the drop in traffic last April, what could be responsible? Thanks in advance for your opinion!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Is there a way to contact Google besides the google product forum?
Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall. We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help. We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened. We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously. We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties. Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit). We have made countless changes (please see below). Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered. Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed. At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year. Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords. Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did. We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes. We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming. For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point. The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working. We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business. Thank you! Changes Made: 1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly 2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file. 3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file. 4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content. This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar:
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes. Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products. We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less. 5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic. 6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow. We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual). 7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile. For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url. 8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did 9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects 10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1. Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords. We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse). I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself. Our website is trophycentral.com0