"Unnatural links to your site" manual action by Google
-
Hi,
My site has been hit by a "Unnatural links to your site" manual action penalty and I've just received a decline on my 2nd reconsideration request, after disavowing even more links than I did in the first request. I went over all the links in WMT to my site with an SEO specialist and we both thought things have been resolved but apparently they weren't.
I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse.
Thanks,
Yael -
Yes. It will often take me 3-6 weeks to do a thorough job on a manual penalty. I can do it faster if I dedicate all my time to it, but yeah...it's time consuming.
If you don't get example links it usually means that you have a large number of unnatural links still not addressed.
-
Thanks Marie for your input and advice. I didn't get any examples from Google despite asking for them twice. As you've suggested I'll create a spreadsheet with the list of domains, contacts etc. It's tricky to understand which domain needs to be taken down and which is valid, I don't want to make mistakes and dig a deeper hole for my site if and when it comes out of penalty.
I did get a sitewide manual action so I just hope to get it resolved as quickly as possible. Obviously contacting dozens or hundreds of sites would take some time to complete.
-
I'm working now to get as much information as I can to understand and cope with the issues that caused the penalty. I'm sure I can get the best advice here on Moz. Which site link auditing services would you recommend?
-
When you failed on your first two requests, did Google give you any example links? Those usually hold the key to why you are not passing.
Also, when you get a manual action it is vitally important to make attempts to try to remove links and not just disavow them. If you have links that can't get removed, then you need to show some sort of effort. I usually include a Google doc spreadsheet with the domains and the contact info and notes on how many attempts I have made at contact. Sometimes, if I have a site where I can't get any links removed I'll make a comment as to why. But usually, there are some that can still be removed. For example, you can report spam domains to Blogger or Weebly and they'll probably remove them.
It may be a good idea to have someone else review your links as well to see if there are more that could be removed/disavowed. Sometimes it is obvious which links are unnatural, and sometimes it is not.
I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse.
If you have a sitewide manual action then yes, when your penalty is removed you should see a good return in rankings for brand terms. But, if it is a partial match then you may find that not a lot changes unfortunately. I wrote an article on Moz about this which you can read here: https://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase. Sometimes with a partial action I'll see some improvement, but sadly it is usually not dramatic. With that said, if your site has a really good base of truly naturally earned links then you have a good chance to see good improvement.
Hope that helps!
Marie
-
"Your seo specialist" may have got you into the pickle... have you also obtained independent advice and run a deep site link audit?
-
Hi Ishai,
There are a few steps I typically run through in this instance to get the issue resolved.
Firstly, rather than just submitting a disavow file, spend some time actively trying to remove as many links as you can without paying for them. Fixing a penalty isn't as simple as submitting a text file and Google wants to see that you're actively trying to fix the problem before they will lift the penalty.
It's often said they don't read the comments in your disvow file but I always add these in anyway. I mention what I've done to resolve the issue (contacted all possible low-quality sites requesting the links be removed) and even having a separate section for the particularly dodgy sites that want me to pay for removal.
Being able to demonstrate that you're legitimately trying to fix the mistake rather than waving the magic Disavow wand goes a long way to them removing your penalty.
Another tip that you may or may not be aware of - always disavow at the domain level rather than individual links. This way, if some of the dodgy directories shuffle their site structure and link to you from a different page, the links are still disavowed.
The syntax for this is simple: domain:badwebsite.com
This info is all covered in Google's Search Console Help section
EDIT: I should also mention, just pulling Link to Your Site from Search Console isn't going to give you a very comprehensive list. Consider combining this list with an export from Ahrefs or Moz's Open Site Explorer as this will give you a better idea of exactly what sites are linking to you.
Frustratingly, Search Console only seems to show a selection of referring domains.
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 WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note: I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jtollaMOT0 -
Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
Hello everyone. I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios. Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format: PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page Short description text "more info" link that takes to the same product page again As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter! Here a typical category page from my site; http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links: "Download Free Sample" (text link) "Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text) "Look inside this title" (ALT image text) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) "This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text) "PDF" (text link) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about. Here is an example of product page on my site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Unnatural Inbound Links Warning in GWT
Hi all, A bit of a long questions so apologies in advance but please bear with me... My client has received an 'Unnatural Inbound Links' warning and it is now my task to try and resolve through a process of; Highlighting the unnatural links Requesting that the links be removed (via webmaster requests) Possibly using the Disavow Tool Submitting a Reconsideration Request So I downloaded my clients link profile from both OSE and GWT in CSV format and compared - the amount of links returned was considerably more in GWT than it was in OSE...? So I set about going through the links, first filtering into order so that I could see blocks of links from the same URL - I highlighted in colours; Red - Definitely need to be removed Orange - Suspect, need to investigate further Yellow - Seem to be ok but may revisit Green - Happy with the link, no further action So to my question which relates to, is it 'black & white' - is it a case of 'good link v 'bad link' or could there be some middle ground? (am I making this process even more confusing than it actually is?) As an example, here are some 'Orange' URL's; http://www.24searchengines.com/ (not exact URL as it goes to the travel section which is my clients niche) - this to me looks spammy and I would normally 'paint it red' and look to remove, however, when I go to the 'contact us' page; (http://www.24searchengines.com/texis/open/allthru?area=contactus) and follow the link to remove from directory, it takes me here; http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/help/update.html DMOZ??? My clients has a 'whole heap' of these type of links; http://www.25searchengines.com/ http://www.26searchengines.com/ http://www.27searchengines.com/ http://www.28searchengines.com/ ...and many many more!! Here is another example; http://foodys.eu/ http://foodys.eu/2007/01/04/the-smoke-ring-bbq-community/ ...plus many more... My client is in the 'cruise niche' and as there is a 'cruise' section on the site I'm not sure whether this constitutes a good, bad or indifferent link! Finally, prior to me working with this client (1 month) they moved their site from a .co.uk to a .com domain and redirected all links from the .co.uk to the .com (according to GWT, over 16k have been redirected) - a lot of these 'spammy' links were to the .co.uk and have thus been redirected, should I even consider removing the redirection or will that have severe consequences? Apologies for the long (long) post, I know I'm heading in the right direction but some assurance wouldn't go amiss! 🙂 Many thanks Andy <colgroup><col width="1317"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing
| |0 -
Site wide links Concept
Hi All, All type of site wide links are bad for Google or it depends upon other factors as well? For example if you talk about GoDaddy or any other service provider company they put their links on the footer of other websites so in this condition, Google will harm their rankings or not? Also elaborate the best practices for site wide links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Broken Links from Open Site Explorer
I am trying to find broken internal links within my site. I found a page that was non-existent but had a bunch of internal links pointing to that page, so I ran an Open Site Explorer report for that URL, but it's limited to 25 URLs. Is there a way to get a report of all of my internal pages that link to this invalid URL? I tried using the link: search modifier in Google, but that shows no responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
SEO Link on Clients Site
Hey SEOMozzers, Quick question. In light of the possible 'over-optimisation' penalties pending from Google should we be looking to remove the SEO links to our site from our Clients websites? I appreciate that including a link to our site from an anchor text that includes 'SEO' in it may be like waving a flag to Search Engines saying we are carrying out SEO on our Clients sites. Obviously we would sooner risk a drop in our SEO keyword rankings than risk a penalty of any kind for our Clients. What is the recommended practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0