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Talk about nice timing. Marie has posted about this very issue today on Moz: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase

I recommend that read to everyone who has doubts similar to mine.

Hi guys,

one of our websites has received a partial manual penalty from Google, visible in our webmaster tools panel. That website was SEO-ed poorly via external agency, using very old-fashioned, spammy solutions.

We have X keywords that are filtered (drops in rankings such as 2 -> 48), and X keywords that our website still ranks well for (stays top 3, etc).

Question: after we remove all the traces of SEO implemented by previous SEO manager (so we remove some bad stuff from the web, and disavow the rest of bad stuff through webmaster tools), we expect drops in positions for keywords that were previously filtered (because not many links, if any, remains). How will that process affect our previously not-filtered main and long tail phrases?

We wonder if there's a point in removing that manual penalty. Our website still receives solid portion of organic traffic, because Google didn't penalized all of our phrases supported by bad SEO. Any tips or suggestions as to what path should we take from here?

Mind you, this is an e-commerce website. We fear that removing the penalty will result in removing most of the existing organic traffic, and our sales will suffer tremendously.

That was exactly what I was wandering about. Thank you for straighten this out for me.

Hi guys,

I've sent a disavow file via webmaster tools. After that, should the backlinks from domains listed in that file disappear from the list of links to my website in webmaster tools? Or does webmaster tools show all the links, whether I've sent disavow file or not?

Thank you Keri, problem solved.

Hi guys,

in OpenSiteExplorer -> Top Pages, there are no page titles displayed in a raport for certain domain, and "HTTP Status" column shows: "Blocked by robots.txt".

I tried to find out what the ID of Moz crawling bot is, and on this page: http://moz.com/community/q/seomoz-spider-bot-details someone says it's: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot).

However, my robots.txt doesn't have such entry. Take a look:

Automatically banned scanners and crawlers section

User-agent: 008

Disallow: /

user-agent: AhrefsBot

Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot

Disallow: /

User-agent: metajobbot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Exabot

Disallow: /

User-agent: Ezooms

Disallow: /

User-agent: fyberspider

Disallow: /

User-agent: dotbot

Disallow: /

User-agent: MojeekBot

Disallow: /

Section end

What could be the problem here, then? Why does the Moz bot think I'm blocking it?