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
-
Google shows date in the SERPS for the homepage
Hi SEO's we've build a site and our now trying to rank it but it won't go up despite of regular new unique content and a higher DA than most competitors. All tools like MOZ en Yoast SEO show green lights so we're kinda out of ideas right now. Till we saw the date in the SERPS for the meta description. This gives us the idea that Google sees it as a post and not as a page which might explain the low ranking. However there are no technical causes we can think off for Google to show the date. Any ideas on this matter? Could it be that Yoast SEO is causing this even although we tell it not to show dates? Love to hear from you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Heers0 -
Disavow without penalty
Hi fellow Mozians, I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm. However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have a penalty. This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts. This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc It seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution. If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow. Your help would be much appreciated. Many thanks indeed. watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc0 -
WhoIs penalty
Does anyone know if it's possible to get a penalty on WHOIS data and a shared IP address? We had some bad SEO done (And at ranking demolished) on one of our company websites which has the same WHOIS data and is on the same IP address as another side which is just seems to have taken a knock. Is it possible Google could have associated both and penalised accordingly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces) A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since. Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season. Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability. I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog. I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT. Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword. The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users. So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty? Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scott.lucas1 -
Why is Google Still Penalizing My Site?
We got hit pretty hard by Penguin. There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up and we also had a pretty unique situation stemming from about a year ago when we changed the name of the company and created a whole new site with similar content under a different URL. We used the same phone number and address, and left the old site up as it was still performing well. Google didn't care for that so we eventually used 301 redirects to push the link juice from the old site to the new site. That's the background, here's the problem...... We've partially recovered, but there are several keywords that haven't come back anywhere near where they were in Google. We have higher page rank and more links than our competition and are performing in the top 5 for some of our keywords. Other, similar keywords, where we used to be in the top 5, we are now down on page 4 or 5. Our website is www.hudsoncabinetrydesign.com. We build custom cabinetry and furniture in Westchester County, NY just north of NYC. Examples - For "custom built-ins new york" we are number 3 on Google, number 1 on Bing/Yahoo. For "custom kitchen cabinetry ny" we are number 3 on Bing/Yahoo, not in the top 50 on Google. For "custom radiator covers ny" we used to be #1 on Google, are currently #48, currently #2 on Bing/Yahoo. Obviously, we've done something to upset the Google, but we've run out of ideas as to what it could be. Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks so much for your feedback, Doug B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doug_b0 -
Why does google keep shortening my title?
IRS Problems, Tax Problems <cite>www.taxproblem.org/</cite> We are a Local Houston CPA Firm in Harris County Texas, dedicated to helping taxpayers resolve their tax problems. We mean, “actually resolve their IRS ... Checking the source code doesn't reveal any reason I can see why they would do that. It happens most often, if not all the time, and only Google results So if anyone would check the source code of my main page and can see why and what needs to be done, I can fix it. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemas990 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0