This January, I was at a talk at SMX Israel by John Mueller – Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst – about how to recover from a manual penalty. The session’s moderator opened the talk by asking the hundreds of people seated in the room to raise their hands if they had ever been affected by or had a client that was affected by a manual penalty. Nearly the entire room raised their hands – myself included.
Setting the Plot
I am the head of SEO at yellowHEAD, an online marketing agency. One of our clients, whom we are very lucky to have, is a company called Ginger Software. Ginger has a set of context-sensitive grammar and spell check tools that can be integrated with e-mails, browsers, Microsoft Office, and more. When we began working with Ginger, they were in a great state from an SEO perspective. I won’t get into traffic specifics, but their site has an Alexa ranking of around 7,000.
Ginger was getting traffic from thousands of different keywords. They had links from news portals, review websites, forums, social bookmarks – all part of a really great backlink profile. Ginger could be in a whole separate case study about the benefits of a content strategy. They have put months of work into online tools, sections about spelling mistakes, grammar rules, and more. These things have attracted great traffic and links from around the world.
The Plot Thickens
Given the above, you can imagine our surprise when one day in my inbox I found the dreaded notice from Google that gingersoftware.com had a site-wide manual penalty for unnatural inbound links. We quickly set up a call and went through the tooth-rattling ordeal of explaining to our client that they weren’t even ranked for their brand name. Organic traffic dropped by a whopping 94% - and that for a website that gets 66% of its traffic from Google-based organic search.
I’m not going to highlight where they got the penalty … because I think you can tell.
Full Disclosure
Before we go on any further with this case study, I should come clean. In the years of my working in SEO, I have shamelessly bought links, posted crappy blog and forum comments, and run programs that automatically build thousands of spam links. I have bought expired domains, created blog networks, and have ranked affiliate sites with every manner of blackhat technique.
With that off my chest – I will say with as clean a conscience as possible, we did absolutely nothing of the sort for Ginger. While everyone at yellowHEAD has experience with all manners of SEO tactics, in our work as an agency we work with big brands, the presence of which we are categorically not willing to risk. Ginger is a true example of a site that has ranked well because of an extensive and well-thought out content strategy; a strategy driven by creating valuable content for users. When analyzing Ginger’s backlinks, we were amazed to see the kinds of links that had been created because of this strategy. Take, for example, this forum link on the Texas Fishing Forums.
I was positive that this link would be a spam forum comment or something of the sort. Turns out that it’s a page on a fishing forum about Zebra Mussels. Someone got confused and called them Zebra Muscles; a veteran user corrected them by linking to Ginger’s page about muscle vs mussel.
The Plot Thickens… More.
As we dug deeper into Ginger’s backlinks, we quickly began to find the problem. Ginger had recently accrued a large number of extremely spammy links. Bear with me for a little bit because these links require some explanation. GingerSoftware.com was being linked to from random pages on dozens of different websites in clearly spun articles about pornography, pharmaceuticals, gambling, and more. These pages were linking to random marginal articles on Ginger’s website like this page always using the same few keywords – “occurred,” “subsequently,” and a few other similar words. The only thing these words had in common was that Ginger was ranked in the top three for them in Google.
I had to blur most of the text from this page, as it was inappropriate.
Now, needless to say, even if we were trying to rank Ginger’s site let’s call it ‘unconventionally,’ we wouldn't have done it to unimportant pages that were already ranking in the top three from articles about pornography.
Now here’s where it gets REALLY interesting
Further investigation into these pages found the same exact articles on dozens of other websites, all linking to different websites using exactly the same keywords. For example:
Link to Wiktionary.org
Link to TheFreeDictionary.com
Link to Thesaurus.com
So – What the $#@!%!#$^ are these links?!
As I mentioned in my disclosure previously – I am no newcomer to link spam, so I happen to know a bit about what these links are. These articles were, first and foremost, not created by us or by anyone else at Ginger. They were also not posted with Ginger Software or any of the other websites linked to in those articles in mind. These articles were posted by spammers using programs which automatically build links (my guess is GSA Search Engine Ranker) in order to rank websites. Each one of these articles linked to some spam website (think something like the-best-diet-pills-green-coffee-beans-are-awesome . info or some nonsense like that) in addition to linking to Ginger.
These programs find places on the internet where they can automatically post articles with links. As a way to ‘trick’ Google into thinking the links are natural, they also include links to other big websites in good neighborhoods. Common targets for these kinds of links include Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and other such websites.
Ginger was not the victim of negative SEO, but was simply caught in the crossfire of some spammers trying to promote their own websites.
We Had Doubts
Once we found these links, we honed our search to find all of them. We were able to do this using Ahrefs, which is a fantastic tool for any sort of link analysis. We organized all of the links to Ginger by anchor text and went after all of the ones with the aforementioned keywords. We removed as many of these links as possible, disavowed the rest, and filed for reconsideration as described above.
As confident as we were on the face of it all – we had serious doubts. We knew how important it was for Ginger’s business to get over this penalty as quickly as possible and didn't want to get anything wrong. We couldn't find any other “bad links” besides these ones but we kept thinking to ourselves “there’s no way that Google completely slapped a website due to some spam links to these random pages.” There had to be more to it than that!
Ginger themselves handled this situation incredibly. Where they could have yelled and gotten angry, instead they said, in a sentence “Ok – let’s fix this. How do we help?” With Ginger’s help, we mobilized dozens of people inside their company, trained them on finding bad links, manually reviewed over 40,000 links, contacted all domains which had spam links on them, disavowed everything we couldn't get to, and submitted the request for reconsideration on December 17th, only five days after the site got penalized. The extreme sense of urgency behind this came both because of the importance of organic traffic for Ginger Software, and because the upcoming Christmas and New Year’s holidays. We knew that everyone going on vacation would significantly increase the amount of time it took to have the reconsideration request reviewed. You can find a very long and detailed explanation of the process we used to clean up Ginger's links here.
Despite the speed with which we were able to submit the request, it took nearly a month to hear back from Google. On January 15th, we received a message in Google Webmaster Tools that the penalty had been revoked. We, and the staff at Ginger, were ecstatic and spent the next few days glued to our ranking trackers and to Google Analytics to see what would happen. Rankings and traffic quickly began to rise and, as of the writing of this article, traffic is at about 82% of pre-penalty levels.
Lo and Behold – Rankings!
The (Very) Unofficial Response from Google
Getting over the manual penalty, in some ways, was almost as surprising as getting it. The fact that all we did was remove and disavow the negative SEO links and the penalty was removed indicates that, indeed, the penalty may have been caused entirely by those links.
At the manual penalty session of SMX, towards the end of the talk, I crept slowly towards the front of the room and as soon as the talk was over, as unexpectedly as a manual penalty, I pounced to the front of the speakers’ podium to talk to John Mueller before everyone else. I explained to him (in a much shorter version than this article) the situation with Ginger and asked if they were aware of this at Google and what they plan to do about it.
John responded with something along the lines of the following:
“You mean like when somebody creates spam links but also links to Wikipedia? … We have seen it happen before. Sometimes we can tell but sometimes it’s a little bit harder… but [if] you get a manual penalty from it you will know about it so you can just disavow the links.”
I have to say, I was pretty surprised with that response. While it wasn't exactly an admission of guilt, it wasn't a denial either. He basically said yes, it can happen but if it happens you will get a manual penalty, so you’ll know about it!
So What Does It All Mean?
One wonders if Google understands the impact a manual penalty can have on a business and if they truly accept the responsibility that comes along with handing out these kinds of punishments. Ginger, as a company, relies on search traffic as their main method of user acquisition and they are not unique in that sense. There are a few important takeaways here.
1.) CHECK YOUR BACKLINKS
No matter who you are – big or small, this is crucial. This kind of thing can happen, seemingly, to anyone. We have instated a weekly backlink scan for Ginger Software in which we look through all of their new links from Webmaster Tools, AHREFS, and Majestic SEO. If we find any more spam links (which we still are finding), we try to remove them and add them to the disavow list. Time consuming? Yes. Critical? Yes.
2.) Negative SEO is Alive and Real
It has been my thinking for a long time that links should not be able to hurt your website. At the most, a link should be discounted if it is considered bad. The current system is dangerous and too easy to game. With Ginger, it was obvious (to us at least) that these links were no doing of their own. The links were in absurd places of the lowest quality and linked to low-benefit unimportant pages of Ginger’s website. If this was actually a negative SEO attack, imagine how easy it would be to make it look like it was the company’s doing.
3.) Google is making themselves look REALLY bad.
The action that Google took in this case was far too drastic. The site didn’t receive a partial penalty, but rather a full-blown sitewide penalty. According to the keyword planner, for the top four branded terms for Ginger, there are 23,300 searches per month. In this case that became 23,300 searches per month where people could not find exactly what they were looking for.
Google has an amazing amount of work on their hands staying ahead of the spammers of the world, but they have also become the foundation of the business models of companies worldwide. To quote from FDR and Spiderman (who can argue with that???), “with great power comes great responsibility.” We can only hope that Google will heed these words and, in the meantime, we will be happy with the fact that Ginger are back up and running.
Unfortunately this is all to common. At Virante we have worked with multiple companies who have suffered negative SEO attacks. Sometimes Google ignores the links, sometimes they don't. What is most interesting, though, is that most of these negative SEO campaigns are poorly executed - using spammy techniques that Google can easily ignore.
What is far worse is this emerging trend of more intelligent negative SEO. Things like building 100 high quality paid links to a site with exact match anchor text for a few grand and then sending an email to a Googler requesting to buy a link for the site. Or better yet - using methods like identifying the current techniques used by the site and then pushing all of them to the extreme. Did you make an infographic the right way, and not submit it to all the paid infographic sites? What is to prevent your competitor from doing that for you?
It is a brave new world. Instead of making SEO harder, Google has actually made SEO easier, because now I can impact not only my own rankings, but my competitors' as well.
Very well-said Russ.
Google changed the rules of the game overnight with the release of the first Penguin update back in 2012, surely knowing about the collateral damage that would cause. It seems that with new rules (where bad links do harm rather than being ignored) they've managed to outsource to the website owners one of Google's biggest headaches: Dealing with webspam.
As you very correctly said, the main thing they've managed to change is that it is now easier than ever before to take a competitor down. So where before it was Google's responsibility to police the web, it is now each online business' responsibility to do so if they want to maintain their rankings and traffic.
Yes even when they are going about their business and doing nothing wrong
Another technique we saw last year was a sudden spike of linking root domains, more than 3000 in two weeks, coming from a dodgy news network and targeted some of the TOP 10 websites ranking for a very competitive keyword. Two weeks later the links disappeared, but it probably triggered a manual review from Google (WTF just happened?!), which resulted in a manual penalty. The website's link profile was not worse than the other top players', but they obviously found paid links.
I reckon the goal was to trigger a manual link profile review, because every website has paid links in this industry.
Solid points Russ. This is downright scary:
Things like building 100 high quality paid links to a site with exact match anchor text for a few grand and then sending an email to a Googler requesting to buy a link for the site.
I can't understand why Google just doesn't revert back to the good old days of simply "ignoring" bad links and rewarding the good ones.
They can't keep going like this. It doesn't benefit anyone, except the spammers.
I think if you take a minute to think about it you'll find that the spammers aren't the only ones who benefit. If someone gets drop kicked from the SERP's and they want to continue their business while waiting for their disavow, the only realistic solution is from Google, called Adwords. Just saying it's possible Google knows about this as a problem and doesn't care. Worst case scenario they reinstate you and send you an email after a month. Best case scenario they have moved someone off free and onto paid advertising.
Very true. I've long suspected this was a tactic to increase their bottom line, by 'forcing' more businesses to move to paid traffic. Until other search engines obtain enough market share that Google isn't the monopoly it currently is, I think the only thing one can do is try to diversify organic/inbound traffic as much as possible. I've been able to diversify traffic to the point where G only accounts for 36% of organic traffic - a large chunk still, yes, but less than the 50-90% that is more typical.
I also long ago stopped using Google as my primary (or even secondary!) search engine, to avoid contributing to the monopoly.
It seems one of the main reasons Google doesn't want to simply ignore bad links is that it would make linkbuilding and SEO pretty much risk free - i.e fling enough muck and see if some of it sticks sort of thing. They do have a terribly difficult job and it can't be easy making the decisions they do...
Google is destroying small businesses in the USA with these policies. Negative SEO is real and Google isn't doing anything about it. Just like it never addressed the Google Proxy-hijacking issue. My site has almost completely disappeared from Google due to negative SEO and proxy-hijacking. Perhaps we should all pay more attention to Bing and Yahoo, which seem to ignore these spammy techniques for the most part.
Negative SEO is such a pain in the *EVERYTHING* these days. If you search Fiverr, the number of gigs claiming they "may have negative seo effects" has grown exponentially in the last 12-18 months. If you are a timber decking company, there's no chance you're going to have an Ahrefs or Moz subscription and see the links come in - it's insane that it can work so well. And recovery? Great, someone spends $5 on you, you're spending $5k+ on an SEO to fix it.
I found this article very interesting. Google has said repeatedly that they are very good at detecting negative SEO and simply discounting it. That being said, I am sure that there are cases where they have been wrong.
What I have found is that a good number of clients who come to me for penalty removal claim to have been the victim of negative SEO. In a small handful of these clients I have found evidence of what I believe could be negative SEO, but in each of these cases, the site deserved the manual penalty regardless because prior to the negative SEO there was a good amount of unnatural linking going on that was perpetrated by the company itself. It's possible that the negative SEO was the last straw that tipped the site off to Google as needing a manual review, but the negative SEO alone did not cause the problem.
I've yet to see a site that was penalized without reason, but I'm sure it can happen occasionally.
I just had a look at the backlinks for gingersoftware.com, not because I want to call anyone out, but because I do believe that it's possible that the negative SEO attack was not the only source of unnatural links. These are probably links that Google would consider unnatural. Were they part of the attack?
https://www.content4reprint.com/writing/how-to-learn-and-correct-your-english-grammar.htm - published august 2010
(additional examples removed per author's request)
The first examples could loosely be called guest posts, but really they are article syndication with keyword anchored links back to the site and would definitely be considered unnatural by Google. The directory submissions are definitely unnatural.
While it's certainly possible that negative SEO was done, I think that there's a good possibility that the negative SEO just brought to light other unnatural linking that was already in place.
Hey Marie,
Thanks for this - it's actually very interesting. My first question would be where did you find these? We used Ahrefs and GWT to get all the backlinks and did not come across these. Had we come across them, needless to say - we would have removed them. That is, in fact, something I will work on now.
As far as it's relation to the post though - the point stands that these were NOT removed nor were they disavowed. As such, it would seem that they were not part of what caused the penalty (regardless of whether or not they should have been)...
Hi Yon,
I found these links by having a quick look at ahrefs.com sorted by anchor text. Not sure why there weren't there on your first pass. I have seen some cases where ahrefs will randomly find old links that hadn't been found previously, but not usually this many.
(Edited to add - MajesticSEO and OSE will often find additional links as well.)
So why did Google not require you to remove them? There are a few possible reasons. It's possible that these links are not in the Google index and perhaps are not passing PageRank. I'm not completely sure on that one, but I could see it as a plausible explanation. This is probably not it though.
Webmaster Tools usually gives you just a sample of the bad links. I have one client who has 82 backlinks showing in WMT but thousands of spammy comments that are visible on other backlink checkers and then Google gave us examples that are not in the backlink checkers at all. Why would they make that particular client jump through hoops, and allow you to keep links like this? I think a lot of it has to do with how serious a spammer Google views you as. For my client, they engaged in years of very obvious spam. (I'm just the penalty remover by the way - not the original spammer. ) For your site, Google probably sees you as a first time offender and doesn't require as much from you in order to lift your penalty. Some sites can get their penalties removed much easier than others.
What I don't know is whether "difficult to find" links like this are likely to hurt you in the Penguin algorithm? I wonder sometimes if this is the reason why we don't see more Penguin recoveries as there could still be unnatural links in the index that are hurting the site in the eyes of Penguin. But, my personal thought is that Google won't lift your manual penalty if you still have enough bad links present to cause you to have Penguin trouble. I don't have proof for that...it's just a personal theory.
Google can't expect (most) sites to remove 100% of their bad links because often there are a LARGE number of links that are going to be really hard to find. I would love to see Webmaster Tools include very single link that exists to a site, but that just doesn't happen. Unfortunately I have seen plenty of examples of cases where a site has unnatural links that are in the Google index but nowhere else to be found.
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The real question that I would love for you to answer though is whether these unnatural links were made by the site itself as opposed to negative SEO. It's not to condemn you by any means. Many of these links are ones that a good number of SEOs would have made prior to recent times. But, I think it's important to distinguish that there were (or were not) unnatural links present prior to getting the negative SEO attack.
I still maintain that I have yet to see a site get taken down by negative SEO that had a squeaky clean link profile prior to the attack. I certainly could be wrong though!
Very well said Marie, maybe GINGER themselves made their own mistakes but not being told :)
It's hard for Google to get everything but they tend to focus people with really terrible SEO. It's a shame that the spammy methods worked to begin with...
I found the same thing. I have been digging into lots of Negative SEO Sasquatch sightings, both in auditing client sites, and in general since the massive attack on my own site started about a year and a half ago (and still going). It did not work on my relatively unknown (as in not a big invincible brand) site, and it became clear to me while looking at other cases, that there is a lot of fear mongering going on, but not much relevant data in most of the case studies.
It is irresponsible to shout "Beware the Negative SEO Boogieman", while using a site with a history of link spam as the example "victim" - all while offering little info about the history of the site. It creates much confusion, discourages people from doing SEO in a sensible manner, and encourages people to try the fiverr game. But I suppose it is good old fashioned link bait. It also gives shady SEO's an excuse when they fail: "It must have been negative SEO! Booooo!"
This would be nice to believe (that G is good, or that other things led to the penalty instead of just the negative SEO), but I know from first-hand experience and experimentation how easy it is to negative SEO a site (even an established, decade old site) straight out of the SERPs. It's wishful thinking to take G at their word about anything, especially in this, where it's been proven time and time again how effective negative SEO can be.
It may not accomplish much, but I would also try to find out who is posting the spam links and ask them to quit. Like you said they probably weren't targeting your site in general. There is probably 2-3 outbound links on each of those articles.:
The process:
If they are nice they may try to mend their link building tool to remove you from the list of scraped URLs.
Optional: Report to Google.
If you are still getting these crappy links it is worth a shot to see if you can get them to stop.
That's based on the assumption that it wasn't a pure attack. Those who perform negative SEO are often pretty good at hiding their tracks. Leaving a footprint that obvious is amateur, but I think your process is solid for finding the noobs ;)
This is an interesting argument against Google that they should be more careful with attacking companies but in this reality we all have to understand every side of the argument. Google's side is they have to deal with spam, its fundamental to their business model and a serious challenge. They have to act in this way and their hands are tied.
The REALLY IMPORTANT argument is that companies should wake up and protect their assets and use tools to monitor their own back links for signs of spam or negative SEO. Full Disclosure : I work at THE LINK AUDITORS and we have a tool that costs £29 pound that does EXACTLY this job, while the article poster (YON)
seemingly has spent thousands of man hours delving into and cleaning the links as mentioned above, the truth is with our tools this could have been managed with one click and 10 minutes of work for about £30 a month.
Man, you are lucky you got the penalty removed on the first try. I've sent 3 reconsideration requests, and bug G still won't budge. I've removed a ton of links (removed 3700 out of 5700 I can find), disavowed all the rest, but since I'm not a big SEO company I guess they figure I have lots of time on my hand to manually remove links. Yes, I'm guilty of building some spammy links (not personally, but hired some link building companies), so I'm not looking for sympathy. But I just wish they could recognize the disavow file after removing more than 65% of my links. Oh well.
Negative seo is real but I've faced it just once in 40+ penalty liftings. Maybe clients weren't "big"?;) I've heard very often that's negative seo done by competitors. Ok it could be but when I asked for history of seo/sem and all previous reports, I sav not negative but BAD seo/sem. Toxic, spammy, low quality links made by xrummer, senuke (?) services, etc. I told clients that's wrong but they replied "they (seo agencies) said it's common and normal technique". Right.... but not now after 04.10.2013.
Google Webmaster Tools don't have all links so going to ahrefs and majestic is very good move.
Update: one example of "unnatural" wasn't on link list in gwt... And that's my fault, Google?!
I think the BBC got an "unnatural links" notice too a while back (they posted about it in the Google forums), and most likely for the reame reason as Ginger - they were linked to by spammers in an attempt to make the spam legit.
Stuff like this is very worrying. What if you are a company that relies 100% on online sales and you are not (so to speak) SEO Savvy. You could be attacked by negative SEO overnight which could wipe rankings, traffic and most importantly sales.
If you don't know anything about SEO you could just put it down to the market place or something. Not everyone can be clued up on what negative SEO is.
That's a good point. I used to work with much smaller companies than Ginger - they had websites but didn't even have Webmaster Tools accounts. Those kinds of small companies would have no idea if something like this happened.
"they had websites but didn't even have Webmaster Tools accounts"
Nowadays there's no excuse for not having a Webmaster Tools account. That said, I know that, and you know that, but does your standard business owner (and website owner) know that? Probably not. So seeing Mueller's comment that says "oh yeah, just check Webmaster Tools" is great for us, but not-so-great for the non-savvy...
Exactly
I think webmasters need to determine first the benefits of integrating google's products to their websites.
And then you would be forced to fold your business or move to Adwords.... tell me where is the downside for Google? :-)
sure, maybe a lot of companies can't ranked good after the manual penalty. This company need Google adwords for survive
"What if you are a company that relies 100% on online sales and you are not... SEO Savvy."
Then you're wildly irresponsible.
Where did this idea come from that it's completely acceptable to not know anything about the primary source of sales for your business (and not retain someone who is)?
Ian the companies that I have seen hammered were successful businesses that took their business online late or small business owners who simply do not have the time to study it. I think that if a business is 100% online and very successful they are very likely to be SEO savvy but that is just one type of online business owner there are many many more.
It's part of the human nature when something went wrong on their projects that's the time they will investigate and think of possible ways to make it right.
Ok, I'm going to play the devil's advocate here, and will probably get jumped on for it.
However much I don't like seeing legitimate businesses/websites getting penalties they don't deserve, I can't help but get annoyed when people 'blame' them for getting a penalty...or the penalty was too harsh....or that Google is *negative adjective here* for ruining their business (I'm not saying the business in question here was ruined, but the argument stands in any case).
People / businesses need to realize that Google is just one of many streams of traffic/income. And for the most part, the traffic you get from Google is not traffic that you necessarily deserve or are entitled to. The sole reason you get traffic from Google is due to their popularity/success and you should be grateful for any traffic you get from them. They don't (or shouldn't) care that you spent X amount of dollars or hours last quarter on SEO. That was not their choice, they can't control that.
I understand that there's a lot of businesses that ride on Google's traffic, and getting a penalty can seriously make or break their bottom line. But just like the above, you made the choice to build a business in the first place that relies heavily on Google traffic. Google can't help that.
Anyone in SEO should be WELL aware of the fact that any/all traffic from Google can be taken away over night, and a business should be built such that it can weather this type of storm - whether it be permanent or temporary. Legitimate businesses that go bankrupt solely due to losing their Google rankings are the irresponsible ones, and Google should not be at fault here.
Google's first and primary goal is revenue generation (usually from advertisements). They don't (directly) make that money from satisfying SEO's and webmasters. They do that by providing (what their algorithm deems) the best search results for the end user. If your site gets penalized, this is of little concern to them. There are a thousand others that are just as good, if not better, that will take that site's place.
Yes, Google has a lot of power and a lot of responsibility. But it's not Google's responsibility to keep your site in business. They can't control what a billion webmasters do to their websites. They *try* to code the algorithm to return the best results for the users and for their bottom line. Sure, their algorithm isn't perfect, so there will always be innocents targeted. But if your site gets penalized and you lose your business and your shirt because of it, that is certainly not Google's fault.
I'm surprised they give as much support to webmasters as they do. What little they give is not out of moral obligation....it's for the benefit of the web, which benefits them in the end anyway - webmasters building the best websites they can for Google's searchers will only help the quality of their results. Keeping webmasters or online websites in business? They don't have a department for that.
You didn't get jumped on and I am right there with you. Google owes you nothing. They are a for-profit company. Do I disagree with a lot of what they do, sure, but they are a company that is free to make those choices. There are other SEs, you know. :O)
Thanks, Yon, for a helpful post. If nothing else, it tells us to be vigilant, but don't let it keep you up at night. Much of this is out of our control and the best you can do is react accordingly when it does happen.
This also reminds us of the risk of having all our eggs in the Google basket. Diversifying may be next to impossible, but it's probably worth the effort for most.
I am curious about your weekly review of the Ginger backlinks. I'm interested in ways of gaining some efficiency with this type of task. Have you written anything about this process?
Hey Bill - agreed. Once a site hits a certain size, even without Google's traffic it still brings in users and Ginger was definitely at that size.
Regarding the weekly review - it's a pretty simple process. At the beginning of each week, we create an Excel of all of the links created from the past week. We do this using GWT's "latest links" and AHREF's new links area. We go through all of those links, identifying spam or otherwise undesirable links, and then add any new spammy domains / links to their disavow file. At this point of time we're submitting an updated disavow file weekly.
I would love to get a better idea of what the site's links were like before all this happened.
Would it be possible to update this article to include some kind of disclosure of the link profile dating back maybe a year?
Most negative SEO case studies leave that out because it sort of destroys the whole idea when you see that the site already had lots of spammy links.
Not saying that is the case here, but it is difficult to understand an analysis without a better picture of the situation before the incident. And after auditing about 30 NSEO claims that were all spammed-out before the incident, I am very skeptical of "negative SEO is real" articles where you have to take the writers word for it.
During the last year or two, my own site has also endured numerous linkspam bombings (it has been constant, really) with no negative effect on traffic or rankings. And it isn't as if my site had the status/size of Ginger.
My reaction to this is "it's gotta be something else".
Hey Nick,
I completely understand that reaction. We have worked with a lot of sites for clients who came to us with manual penalties and had sites that were just spammed to death by previous SEOs. We did a very thorough audit of Ginger's link profile and were really very hard on each backlink. The thing that confirmed the fear for me is that, in the end, those links mentioned in the article were the vast bulk of the links that we removed / disavowed and, when we submitted for reconsideration, the request was approved.
Until we heard back from Google, I truly was worried that the manual penalty wouldn't be removed because it seemed like it "had to be something else".
Not totally sure what kind of disclosure I could offer about the prior profile...
Yeah, it is kind of hard to get a historical link profile that is easy to put in a post, as there doesn't seem to be a link wayback machine. Majestic's historical data goes back pretty far - maybe a chart from that would be somewhat helpful in the sense that if it shows there was something high like 600K linking domains say a year ago it would be safe to assume that there was a decent amount of spam there, with the penalty being triggered when all those new screwy links were created and discovered.
You say the links mentioned in the article were the "vast bulk" of the disavowed links. What were the links like that were not mentioned?
Try cognitive SEO Their link velocity tool is very useful. I think they still have a free trial.
Very worrying. What's even more so is the vague, non-executive response from Google!
I would imagine that it was an algorithmic flag, then a manual penalty. If think about it, how many of these flags does the webspam team see per day? It's no wonder that Ginger got shafted....
Thanks for sharing Yon, I hope it gets some traction
One wonders if Google understands the impact a manual penalty can have on a business and if they truly accept the responsibility that comes along with handing out these kinds of punishments.
Exactly right. Your client did nothing wrong. Yet Google nearly wiped them out. Why punish the innocent?
We're going through the same thing. Google has just about wiped us out. Why? Who knows.
If I get mugged while walking down the street in broad daylight, is it my fault for carrying a wallet?
I bought a new domain. I foget check it's banklink. and I got penalty by G. I tied to remove penalty. Thanks for tips
small sites are really worried of negative SEOs..!
Our experience shows that negative SEO is alive and it works. Like others in this thread, we gained a client because they had a suffered a massive drop in visits. We identified the problem immediately (manual penalty) and set to work.
The attack was on three core keywords (and their derivatives) that had been driving the majority of search traffic to the client's site. Almost everyday we saw new bad links being added across the www. In fact, we can see that they are still at it - although we have removed the penalty by now, so hopefully they're just wasting their time.
After some discussions with the client we found out that a previous employee had left on bad terms and proceeded to set-up a competing site. We are 99% certain that this person set-up the negative SEO attack. Looks like they hired a spammer based in India or Philippines - as far as we could tell.
But removal of the penalty has come at a cost. We had to remove / disavow some perfectly legitimate links (non-paid for, natural, freely given links by authoritative websites in the client's sector, not KW anchor linked) because they were identified by Google in our initial, failed, re-inclusion requests, as being bad. We spoke to some of these websites' owners about removing or no-following links and they were aghast that they might be considered 'bad sites'. Even more crazy, a couple of them were non-commercial, local govt sites. So whilst the client's site has recovered it's down from its previous levels. Google identifying some of these sites as bad links was, IOO, wrong.
Like Yonatan, we had a good client. It's cost them a bunch of money to fix something they did not deserve to be punished for, but they've backed us all the way. However, apart from picking up such a great client, the whole process has left a bad taste in the mouth. The penalty removal work was beyond boring, involved no creativity, infected one of our computers with a bad virus, and added nothing to the general benefit of mankind. It removed resources away from creating great content or useful apps and helping the client's customers. And it seems so pointless, when all Google had to do was discount any links they thought were bad.
Google may think over this . . . to get back ginger for their brand search term.
Great story. Good thing Ginger had revive themselves and was still optimistic despite the drastic changes. SEO is complicated that's what everyone should know, it's not just about building links but it takes extensive attention to track bad links.
to be honest anything with spam links/comments can be tackled with a lot of admin/manual work. as you said correctly this is a "poor" spam work but demands a great deal of effort. But as with everything in the link building world, the more effort you put to SEO the harder and more sophisticated it becomes. Same goes for negative SEO.
Its one thing send 1000 spam comments/links to a web site via GSA as you mention and another to send 5 masked domains with algorythimc penalty (you will be amazed how people spend a four digit number to buy em these days. They are not stupid, they know how to use them) via a 301 redirect or SAPE links with robot.txt block from majestic/webmaster etc. This requires skills & processes that is beyond the average web master's knowledge so Google should be a bit more helpful and/or tolerant and not treat everything as the same case with a typical "link scheme" message on WBT.
I Really like this case studies, what happen if traffic not come back to previous level? Google is responsible ....
Very informative blog. Thank you. The comments also. Scary for small business clients. and a firestorm for SEO consultants. Is there a another new term coming soon NSEO?
From where to get do follow link from a good domain.. Every good website provide no follow link or you have to buy from some where whether it is a blog or any other off page activity.
Great article and I love Moz - the bad eggs have plagued this industry. [link removed]
An Eye-Opener Post! A Ton of Thanks for taking your valuable time in telling us the adverse effect of negative SEO and showing us how to recover from it with step-by-step instructions. We are also experiencing similar traffic stoppage to the site https://www.penpencileraser.com but we hadn't received any manual penalty from Google. We disavowed some odd links once but it is struggling to show up for its target keyword. I will be really glad if any experts one here could help me with a suggestion..
Personally, my company went bankrupt due to this. Some random company linked to myself (#1 ranked site for a highly sought after term) and the #2, and #3 sites on over 10,000 spam foreign Russian and eastern European sites. I went from getting 4000 + unique visitors a day to 200. My 12 year old e-commerce company folded, jobs were lost. I have a new job now working for a different e-commerce company and a storage unit filled with inventory I'm trying to liquidate. Great Job Google. I didn't have the funds or manpower to try and fight it. 2 reconsideration requests and several months later, I restarted with a new domain, and threw in the towel a few months later not wanting or being able to afford to re-build from the ground up again. Similarly to this article, the bad links to me would make no sense for me to have put them there, if I was thinking they were a good idea, why would I link also to my two biggest copetitors?
Thanks for putting out this type of useful information for folks to learn from. I agree that Google's manner of handling of what it deems as unnatural link building practices (amongst others: hint adwords account) can be extreme. Seriously, Google's got to take another look at the way they're fighting unnatural link building practices simply because of the fact that they can make or destroy a business overnight. Call it a social responsibility. Anyhow, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon though. I don't know- I've been on the receiving end of Google's wrath before and I swear- It's like Google's wild success has gone even to the heads of the everyday folks working there....
Hello Yonatan! I believe that if we don't want our rankings in search engines to decelerate, then it is very important that we check our backlinks. If we find spam links then we need to remove them right away and add them to the disavow list. This is actually time consuming but worth doing.
I think negative SEO is other kind of job. The negative SEO only works bad backlinks, because there is not other mode of work (no on-seo page jobs is possible). So, anyone can create bad backlinks to any website. Be careful with the competition.
NEG SEO is a big part of what I deal with nowadays. I have had a client for about 4 years and in the last 2 years a lot of my work is using the disavow tool. People are creating links to pages that are not real, redirecting spammed domains with penalties, dup article spam, mass link building and more. It's so frustrating trying to deal with it.
It is unfortunate that Google seems to put so much time into penalizing sites but so little to prevent making mistakes like this.
This whole "shoot first ask questions later" approach is incredibly damaging to businesses and shows a rather discomforting amount of carelessness from Google.
I mean, if Google can take the time to manually review link profiles for the purpose of handing out link penalties can't they apply manual reviews to prevent them as well? In a case such as this it is pretty obvious the links are not due to the actions of yellowHEAD or the client, a simple manual review in this case could have easily cleared that up and saved many hours of labor and stress for Google, yellowHEAD, and Ginger.
It's seriously crazy that this stuff goes on. Negative SEO indeed is a real thing. Google has to figure out how to keep the SERP's clean and free of spam but NOT penalize good websites while doing so. Any unethical guy can tank smaller websites nowadays and it just seems wrong.
Yonatan Dotan - This is been experienced from long time people are still hiring Seo for Negative seo's, And We Are all together to face it, Always a weekly or monthly we should check backlinks,
Go for Bing Webmaster and Google Webmaster tool also backlink watch and Moz tools. Even Content and your links which you post should be monitored regularly. Thanks for the blog it made me more active and strick to take some action on such monetizing things
Dear Yonatan,
What a great case study.
I really liked your costumer response and the way you guys handled the situation.
Cheers,
Ohad Gadassi.
Good post! Thanks for the insights.
Unfortunatelly, most smaller companies are not as lucky when it comes to dealing with negative seo. One of my clients is waiting over 3 months for a response from Google...
Really great post, Thank you for sharing This knowledge.Excellently written article, if only all writter offered the same level of content as you, the internet would be a much better place. Please keep it up!
There's some danger to the fact that some spammers try to blame negative SEO when they get caught. In result, the real victims may be scrutinized without a reason.
Another issue -- link finding subscription tools. Why they are so expensive? Paying $80 a month just to find links is too much for a small business owner. It would be great if Google Webmaster Tools showed all backlinks they find faster than they do now (compared to the commercial tools they are usually behind). Some tools like URLtoDOMAIN can help find and disavow bad links for free, but disavowing links is the last option.
Great information. According to Google's Webmaster Tools I have a couple dozen sites providing excessive (hundreds) of back links but they do not show up on ahrefs.com so I can't find the source pages. Can you recommend any other sites or methods for backtracking to the source - or could it be that Google is wrong!!
To summarize,
1. Continuously check your back link profile. You never know your competitor/spammer may target your website.
2. Seeing what has happened to Yon and his client anyone can target any website very easily (intentionally or otherwise).
Google should provide more details on spammy links via its GWT and there should be some service like Google Alerts which can alert us if a back link to the website becomes active.
Very interesting case study! I feel for Ginger, but as others have said here: how is the average business owner supposed to know about attacks like this? It makes basic internet marketing knowledge a must for entrepreneurs of every kind, even if you're an owner of a deck company as Matt-Antonino said.
Google certainly has the squeeze on pretty tight for those companies who rely on organic traffic. That's for sure!
-Steve
So they must also learn every clause in the tax code, every line of Obamacare, go to law school, what next. How to fix their plumbing, repair the air conditioning, put up electric signs. Why is it SEO they have to learn and they cannot hire an internet marketing specialist who they should be able to trust. Problem with the industry and has been as long as I have been around which is some time.
The companies that "rely on organic traffic" are taking a big chance. They need to diversify their marketing.
So John didn't say anything about trying to contact the websites that carried the links to your website first? He jumped right to "you can just disavow them"?
Contact? You know % of answer is about 1-3 or less?;) Of course spammy/toxic/low quality.
Waste of time, but every successful answer is good reason for Google SQT to lift penalty.
Oh, I agree completely - I would just have expected Google to say "attempt to contact first..."
I did it many times. Waste of time... It's so frustrating You sent 500 emails and got 400 with "inbox full" or "no user" etc:) G knows the problem.
Yes complete waste of time and innocent sites (I know, I know many knew what they were doing and got caught) are being screwed again by SEO companies offering to fix their penalties which are not fixable. Does Google ever think about normal people, normal sites and good people who hire SEO's who are scammers. Why is it only in SEO that a small business owner has to "undertstand" SEO before they hire a vendor. Do they have to study business tax law before they hire a CPA, Do they have to go to law school first before they hire an attorney, learn graphic design before they hire a web designer. This blanket idea that Google has if you have bad links you knew about it makes me want to spit. Can you tell!!...
They want to be in top10 or get traffic. No matter how, but stable and without penalties. On the other side: they (owners) don't want to spend more money so they choose cheaper services but often causing penalties... Nobody will tell me 20$ xrumer blast is "good"...
I'm telling my clients why seo cost and why isn't 4x cheaper. Not everybody understand this difference...
Not to be a conspiracy buff, but what makes you think negative seo is an unintended consequence of Google releasing little furry penguins? If making organic serps less stable/easier to lose could make sites spend their money on adwords INSTEAD of SEO services, isn't it their duty to shareholders to do so? I don't believe for a second that Google is super worried about preventing negative seo, making sure innocent sites don't get hammered... it's been happening for a few years and they know the problem exists and frankly, they don't care. The solution is simple. Discount crappy links like they used to.
WOW! this is absolutely fascinating... and scary. Thanks so much Yon, for sharing in a way that is understandable, what happened, how it happened, and how you dealt with it.
Google, please set something up so that companies are not hurt by this type of activity.
Was the "site-wide manual penalty for unnatural inbound links" the only manual penalty for which you received notification in GWT?
Yep
That is quite the horror story! Way to keep calm and recover from the manual penalty.
I believe the lesson to learn with this article is not to rely on Google for traffic, it can be turned off by your competitors.
All they need is a copy of GSA.
What makes this situation worse is the fact that you have to use a 3rd party tool like ahrefs in conjunction with the disavow tool.
If anyone wants info in regards to GSA - hit me up.
That's rather 5-10% of all penalty removals, but problem exists...
woo that was a great advent season.. thats a to hard hit for these links. Extremly spammy but how much percent? Respect that it got so fast identify and remove the links...
Thanks for sharing this travesty. Makes me SO mad - I for one can't wait till agencies can pay for faster service - I still think that coming someday from Google - maybe sooner with more articles like this.
Thanks for your write up to be more concious to save the site from being penalised by world's largest search engine ..!
"At the most, a link should be discounted if it is considered bad. The current system is dangerous and too easy to game."
I definitely agree with you on this! If a spam bot could do this to a good site with no unnatural backlinks, imagine what someone with malicious intentions could do. I also think you're right about Google exercising too serious of a punishment on backlinks like this.
It's one thing if Ginger was intentionally creating a link-building scheme; it's another matter entirely when a non-living entity does it. Sounds like Google is using a nuclear bomb to kill a fly if you ask me.
One of the main reasons why Yandex excluded links from their algorithms. But I believe most SEs have a long way to go before removing links from theirs. They must think about content and social in a broader perspectives, if you like.
A fascinating, if very scary read. Negative SEO is in danger as becoming as big, if not a bigger problem, as DoS Attacks for a business. DoS attacks are usually short sharp shocks to a company, where as a Negative SEO campaign could lead to longer term damage to a company. If a company loses all their search visibility people's jobs could be on the line. I don't just mean the poor beleaguered SEO but everyone at the company if revenue stops coming in.
I can forsee Negative SEO or as I'm starting to call them "Denial of Search Engine Rankings Attacks" (DoSER Attacks) become a real problem over the next couple of years unless Google helps us out here but discounting rather than punishing the spam.
It does also show why Search needs to be fully integrated into all aspects marketing to ensure there are many routes to market for acquiring traffic/custom because for anyone that relies on organic search for their business, they are in an extremely vulnerable position.
Was really worried about this article when Alexa rank was mentioned but this is actually a really interesting case study!
I have a site that the February 7, 2014 lost 20% of visitors. I have reviewed my incoming links and January 6 started to receive more than 1000 spam links.
It is a subdomain and I was just 4 inbound links so I can not have bad history of unnatural links.
No penalty handbook and I have not received notice from google.
I have discussed some of the spam blog and I found links to other sites on the same theme.
It seems clear that this is negative seo by competition.
I uploaded all links to disavow and am now waiting process google them.
Could the negative seo the reason for the loss of visitors?
My site has about 100,000 visits per month
Amazing stuff. kudos on getting your penalty removed first time. I had to go through the process two times as well and I ended up cleaning almost 62% of the backlink profile. All is well which ends well! I got to be extra cautious while building new links.
Yonatan, why are you dismissing it as not negative SEO. That is precisely what it is. Somebody else has taken deliberate specific actions to help themselves and in the process created tactics which will almost certainly hurt another site. Same shit different toilet. Sites being taken down innocently is now an everyday occurrence. Due to Google's incompetence at fixing their algorithm to identify a bad link and discount it as a ranking factor we now have a bigger nightmare than ever.
Oh and the irony of it we now have companies offering link takedown services who sold the links in the first place. Google has created a new wonderful opportunity for every unscrupulous link builder out there and some new ones jumping on the wagon.
There is one solution to this and only one and that is for Google to work out what a good and bad link is and not allow it in the first place. Come on Google grow up and act like a professional business that can keep its own house in order. I am no major expert but I can spot bad links and networks selling them a mile off why on earth cant Google do that they are notorious for their hiring of PHDs use them.
good content, I am looking about this :D
Frankly, I always find discussions like these amusing. The entire website world has been brainwashed by Google to think that they need to do certain things to get websites to rank and to avoid doing other things that will penalize their sites. The simple fact is, Google (and everyone else's) algorithm is horribly flawed and instead of fixing it so that it truly does bring the best results for any given query, they place that responsibility on website owners and SEOs. We are led to believe that we are responsible for sculpting our sites and backlink profiles to match an ever changing set of rules. It's much easier on Google, Bing, etc. to pass the buck to website owners than to take responsibility for their horribly flawed algorithms, isn't it? And we all buy into it, hook line and sinker.
If the links were all going to unimportant pages that you didn't want to rank for anyway, why not just 404 the pages? Seems like it would have been faster/easier?
H ha...indeed but no case study
Don't think that would work ;)
SEO and SEO everywhere
Great Article but when you cannot see a clear trend of spammy links been built on your website and you have nearly all (seem to be) authentic links then real problem comes.
Hey YonDotan...This is a great case study....that means it doesn't matter if we are doing good, we can be hurt if someone else is doing bad SEO. We need to make a best practice to regularly monitoring our backlinks...I am sure most of us are going to get benefited from this great case study.... :)
This is a great post but also a not uncommon occurrence many of us have to deal with. Sadly, negative SEO is alive and thriving. At Rewind SEO I work almost exclusively with helping penalized sites so there's the occasional NSEO case but in my experience it's usually either no penalty or an algorithm penalty. I can't recall seeing a site manually penalized for NSEO that I was aware of. Here's some patterns I noticed which may or may not be wild conjecture (/disclaimer):
Some negative SEO only only has a small impact even with a ton of spam links. The algorithm seems to recognize it as negative SEO if it's completely different from the rest of the link profile. Particularly where it's a ton of porn, pharma, pirated software, and other random spam anchors. So I'm guessing the algorithm can at least recognize simple vanilla negative SEO like this. The times where it works best is when the site's link profile is already questionable. Negative SEO is just more of the same type of links, but on worse sites and bad anchors so that pushes things over the edge. Half the time this is not even intentional negative SEO at all, it's spammers who placed a link on the site (usually blog comment or forum profile links) and they're building massive numbers of tiered links which results in massive spam...
But then there's what I would call smart negative SEO. This involves SEO that looks semi-legit, but clearly bad/manipulative practices. For example, building links with anchors the site is trying to rank for... but massively over-optimizing them (sometimes with just a single main keyword). Another case would be building obvious blog network links to the site using unreadable spun content and over-optimized anchors again. The reason this is 'smart' negative SEO because to Google, it certainly is not obvious if this is negative SEO or manipulative link building. This type of practice would work best in a local market with just a few other competitors--which is the case where I've seen it happening.
Not true I have seen sites removed never to be seen again and they new nothing of the links.
I really enjoyed reading this post and found it very interestign to hear of other peoples experiences with penalties, probably because, at the agency I work at, we have recently had several new clients come on board due to them receiving manual links penalties and seeking our help! I know understand and cam completely sympathise with webmasters who have received such penalties. They do devastate site performance and they do appear overwhelming to tackle, especially when you are looking at a backlink profile of up too 100k links and beyond! But I agree with Takeshi, the key is to stay calm and approach the removal process systematically and precisely; this is not a task you wish to repeat, you'll want to get this done first time!
In dealing with the first case, we formulated a process that we then applied to four others. Our process proved rather effective in quickly and successfully removing these sorts of penalties, so I thought I'd share the process of removing a manual links penalty that we came up with, in order to help anyone else facing the same dilemma.
Time to get answer from SQT isn't constant. I get it after 3 days but also after month...
Next - lifting any penalty (without link building later) not always come with old stats (uu daily, impressions) back.
Good luck with that. My guess is your new clients wont be clients in a few months. Brands seem to get some attention but your clients are not in that category you can forget it. If the links are dealt with the rankings and traffic wont come back so how will they keep paying you and stay in business. I would take on a client that was a brand for link pruning but Mom and Pop I have to tell them I cannot help them.