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Todd - Thanks for your message.  On the bright side - a quick response to my request. Today I received a message back that Google removed the manual penalty for outbound links.  Apparently they agreed with us.

Again, many thanks. M

Todd - Great answer. I do appreciate the time you've taken to compile this list. I hope I can reaward a best answer because this deserves one.

Frustration is putting it mildly but thanks for the empathy. You wouldn't know this but I've actually torn down the entire site and rebuilt it trying to find these alleged "unnatural" and "manipulative" outbound links. I removed/disabled registration on the directory for many months and that had no effect. I've killed much of the income stream and have had people question why so many parts are disabled for so long to the detriment of the reputation of the site. I've invested a colossal number of hours reading, learning and inhaling SEO. The question unfortunately becomes whether to abandon a great site and many years of work because Google has us perpetually in the penalty box and the cost of trying to guess in the dark why this happened is far above any potential benefit. Anyway - I'll answer your chart:

1. Great suggestion: Already done but I'll run it again for the last time.

2. Will do although I know that the one way out of the site to an affiliate contains all nofollow links and I confirmed this numerous times. I'll kill that revenue stream and deindex about 80 pages to so we can kill almost every outbound link, even the pages with nofollow links too.

3. No warnings in GWT except the single one years ago about unnatural outbound links. GWT did let us know once that there was a "big traffic change" for a "top URL" on our site. No kidding Google. That's what happens when you slam a site with a manual penalty, lol.

4. We have virtually no widgets on the CMS. Most are basic functional, created by donnacha at Wordpress (who is beyond reputable), custom developed or absolutely clean.

5. Every business listing is noindex and nofollow (except mine, which has one link on one page to my own personal blog - I'll kill that one too.) If you look in a search, everything directory page is robots.txt blocked as well as noindexed. But I'm going to delete every single entry in our directory - and that's lots of them. We'll kill it again to prove the point.

6. I don't know what you're linking to. Our publishing section is dead because of my hunting this issue instead of launching yet another part of the site. I've had to cut the amount of content produced by well over 50% just to deal with this. There are only 4-5 authors on the site at the moment, almost all work is mine. None of the authors are follow links and I am absolutely sure.

7. There are virtually no website urls in the profiles in the forum. I disabled that ability and regularly clean out every profile from links (e.g. home page) using mysql queries. Nobody except super moderators can have a signature. Mine is an internal nofollow link. If there is another one or two, both are nofollow but I'll kill that link as well for this, much to my supermod's likely chagrin.

The thing that kills me is just finding out that I've made a colossal effort chasing a possible algorithm issue to find out this is a manual action - and nobody will tell me how they could possibly think I'm engaged in an outbound links scheme. So it goes. Speaking of which, I'll let you know how it goes. Many thanks.

Todd - Thanks for your response.

The very troublesome aspect of this is the manual action taken by Google about something someone may have been clearly mistaken about. They have forgotten about it and the issue hasn't resolved over time like Matt Cutts insists it should as per his blog. But the kicker is this -- if more than a dozen very smart and experienced SEOs, webmasters of very large community sites and even people in the Google Webmaster Help forum can't find any reasonable problem, then we can't assume that the webmaster is always to blame.

As of right now, the only links any of us have identified are three links - yes, three links. Let's say there were seven just to be on the safe side. Let's be reasonable... do I really need to explain this? If this happened to your client's site, you probably would be thinking "are you kidding me?"

Google needs to explain exactly what issue it was that one of its employees found that was reason enough to manually decide give us a prolonged prison sentence. Until we spot truly "wrongful conduct" there isn't any crime for which to ask forgiveness. All I'd be doing is tap dancing about a handful of links that no sober person would confuse as a questionable or irregular link building scheme. I want to know what will have lifted this manual penalty, even if it's "oops".

Thanks guys, I thought those 3 links were nofollowed. I'm getting rid of our_ one singe page_ that gives credit to the three companies that help us that have a total of three outbound hyperlinks. It's absolutely insane to even think this is the problem among 100,000+ pages of unique content, carefully moderated and created over 15 years. This is why Google owes us a full and complete explanation for the manual penalty, which appears to have lasted for a very long time.

If this is considered problematic, Google might as well penalize 99.99% of websites, including moz.com - all dofollow, lol!!!

http://moz.com/community/recommended

It would appear this "manual action" against our site is an error that has never been corrected automatically and plagued us for a long, long time. I'll await to hear what Google says if they eventually get around to reconsidering our site. Thank you guys for scouring this large site in all directions and confirming what I've found and now making the argument airtight.

Sheldon - Thanks for the suggestion. I actually posted in the Google Webmaster Help Forum on this issue several months ago - both the zero page rank and loss of all +1s. The best anyone could find (from some smart SEO experts there who were generous with their time) were the handful of links I mentioned and nobody had answers. This new manual actions information from Google helps greatly in an unfortunate way - it seems to confirm an ongoing anomaly that appears to be a manual Google action for outgoing links that has never been lifted. The only warning I've ever received was about outgoing links from my site - and that was a long time ago.

I appreciate you guys giving the look over that it appears everyone has confirmed independently. Perhaps it's long overdue to camp out on Matt Cutts' doorstep, lol.

Sheldon - I will look into the redirect issue. Regarding the directory, no, it is not fully deindexed although virtually every entry is deindexed. Search for any name (other than one) and you won't find any of them. Robots.txt blocks those pages and every page has a "noindex" on it. But most importantly... there are virtually no outbound inks. None!

Yes... this is a puzzling issue that has hit us for many months and nobody has been able to solve it. There is a zero or no page rank at all on every page in the site - thousands of them. The primary domain was a 6.

Anders - thanks for spotting that but it's not the problem. That was installed 2 days ago - actually, not even that long ago. The error message predates that plugin. In addition, I think those are only 10 pages in total right now -- but thank you for reminding me that this is still there.

Apparently there is a discussion on it at Wordpress.com. Incredibly devious.

Anders - Thanks. Yes, I used Xenu. The penalty is on the entire site.

Dates of noticeable traffic changes:

• Mid June 2011 (Panda - extremely significant)
• Mid August 2011 (significant)
• Mid March 2012 (slight)
• End April/Beginning May 2012 (significant)
• Mid August 2012 (somewhat significant)

The only warning was practically the same warning a while ago. That's it, nothing else. An earlier reconsideration request back in August 2011 resulted in no response from Google and was done because actions taken to combat Panda as recommended did almost nothing.  All concerning outbound links from the site. Even back then we didn't have any link exchanges or anything that seemed remotely related to the warning.

The only thing that helped us - removing Google Analytics for 1.5 month's time. During that time traffic increased noticeably and traffic grew until the End of April issue.

Todd - Thanks for your response:

1 - Yes, I can confirm that the message is from my site, which is what puzzles me. Google just released its manual actions field in Webmaster Tools and that was my first experience with it today. I suspect that this action may have been taken a very long time ago but let's hold off on that for now:

Unnatural links from your site
Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes

2 - There is only one directory on the site. http://legal.nu/kdlu

Apparently Google suppresses some of the results (and it recognizes robots.txt blocks the pages) but has included about 10K entries in its index if you add the additional results. Every page has a noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file in the subdomain also has a disallow. Regardless, there are virtually no outbound links. Other than 2 entries, most do not have outbound links to websites and, if they do, every link is nofollow. So I don't see any outbound there.

3 - There were 2 personal websites and 1 partner website - yes, a total of 3 sites - that's it. They were removed at least 2 months ago. They represented my professional personal blog, the website of our development company and the website of our hosting company. This was the most anyone could guess that might even be an issue so it was removed entirely, as innocuous as it seemed.

4. I have no idea how long but it could be a penalty since Panda. Panda came and virtually nothing made a difference. You could add good original content and there would be marginal gains although Bing and Yahoo reported gains. The odd part is that the directory grew in traffic while the best content on the site dropped. Thus the whole directory was deindexed. Go figure.

Other information:

Ranking drops - about 5 months ago all page rank from the site went to zero or unable to be ranked and now only two pages are ranked. Every +1 on the site was gone. http://legal.nu/kdlv - check this link. It gets a good number of page views every month. The pagerank cannot be determined. The site used to rank very, very well. Several pages lost their Facebook Likes too but not all across the board like the Google +1s.

That's about all I know. Backlinks disavowed (some are the remnant of 15 years on the web, scrapers, people with blogrolls of sites, some others were there and not our doing but we disavowed those that were gone, which was only a few hundred entries in total.)

I can't find the outbound links that it appears Google may have penalized us for a long time. Neither has anyone else, at least nothing substantial and most benign at best. Thanks for the look over.

This is a good question. I think "spammy" needs to be defined since sites like ours, up for many years, have links in numerous places that cannot be "fixed" because at the time there was no such thing s "nofollow" and the like. To punish for old links would seem harsh although it might be done. Our problem is that we're listed on long pages of "link resources" that many are saying is spam and penalty but this is what was done in the 90s and 2000s by people wanting to put up useful websites. Here are a few I saw on possibly relevant articles that appear knowledgeable:

• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271305/Google-Penguin-2.0-Casualties-Why-Sites-Got-Hit
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-penguin-beginning-to-flex-its-muscles/63416/

I find Barry's articles very helpful and ostensibly honest: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-upcoming-penguin-panda-link-networks-updates-151273

To begin, it's difficult for anyone to tell you what the problem is with your site without providing your site. It's a horrible feeling (I know) but that will give you the best answers, unless you prefer to pay for that privacy by hiring an SEO consultant to manage the issue. You may want to post some of the links here if you don't want to post your site and see what the group says. Regarding blogrolls - another issue that affects the 2000s and it's crazy for Google to think we can "clean" that which never really needed cleaning and only the large companies with staff will survive. Hopefully there will be clarity. Best of luck.

PS - If it makes you feel any better, your traffic drops are small in comparison to some others.

_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty.  A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update.  The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back.  Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links.  This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.   _

Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories.  You definitely got slapped.

Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.

As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.

The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)

I'll be honest. I run a legal site and it is large and one of the oldest online. Despite the fact that it would be an incredible shame for it to disappear and not be updated thanks to the miserable way Panda and Penguin are dealing with it, I don't think Google cares about this issue that concerns a minority of sites and that there is no avenue for us to practically do anything. Nor do I think people will revolt, despite the fact they like me and our honest and very helpful site a whole lot. This is because most will get something similar elsewhere, say "oh, that's really a shame what Google is doing to them" if they even realize what's going on (and they don't except a few people here) and go on their way.

Our junk competitors have caught up with us and surpassed us in some respects solely because we've been dealing with Google issues that should not exist since Panda 2.2. All the advice made no difference and still we're dealing with people saying what it "might" be but nobody sees any huge issue that would take down our site. It's incredibly painful but Google collects Adsense revenue whether it's us or someone else. Until they get hit in the pocket or someone else takes them on in the search engine business, you're better off focusing on fixing the problem - if it's at all possible - or just accepting that life isn't fair, this completely sucks and you'll have to find something else to do. How bad can it get? 18 years after our first true "website" Google has given all of our content a page rank of zero - yes zero. This has gone on for weeks. We'd get better results scraping our own content!

Thanks guys, I thought those 3 links were nofollowed. I'm getting rid of our_ one singe page_ that gives credit to the three companies that help us that have a total of three outbound hyperlinks. It's absolutely insane to even think this is the problem among 100,000+ pages of unique content, carefully moderated and created over 15 years. This is why Google owes us a full and complete explanation for the manual penalty, which appears to have lasted for a very long time.

If this is considered problematic, Google might as well penalize 99.99% of websites, including moz.com - all dofollow, lol!!!

http://moz.com/community/recommended

It would appear this "manual action" against our site is an error that has never been corrected automatically and plagued us for a long, long time. I'll await to hear what Google says if they eventually get around to reconsidering our site. Thank you guys for scouring this large site in all directions and confirming what I've found and now making the argument airtight.

While I'd love to comment (and I know you're hesitant to provide a URL), I don't think that you'll get any truly useful advice that would help since there could be so many reasons why you'd encounter issues after a site design change. The useful advice comes from those who will analyze your site, see what changed and determine what changes (or open items poorly done or overlooked) might be a good indicator of how your rankings dropped. Everything else is speculating in the dark. There is no substitute to taking a good look, IMHO.