On the 15th of August 2012, our agency's website (which was in the middle of a complete redesign) was hit with a manual penalty by our friends over at Google. This came completely out of the blue to us, as we're a fairly small agency that has never taken part in any unorthodox link building techniques. We offer link building services to our clients and pride ourselves on carrying out only high quality and white hat work.
I should point out at this point that our clients have never received any unnatural links warnings. Since we lifted our penalty, we've also helped many new clients get manual actions revoked and back into Google.
We straight away knew that we had been hit by Google's Panda 3.9.1 update (see comments for updated algorithm information)
After looking at a lot of experts discussing this issue on the Internet, I could see a mixed bag of suggestions on what people would recommend we do. I first of all started by sending in a reconsideration request explaining that I believed there was a mistake. As the majority of our work comes from word of mouth, we've never taken part in any SEO, but this was something we were planning on starting very shortly.
I later received a reconsideration request response that said the following:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider https://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team.'
In hindsight, I should have realised that this was never going to work.
I read many articles on the Internet from top SEO experts and looked through the SEOMoz guides on how to clear up link penalties, but the general opinion was that if you had been hit by a manual penalty, that there was a very slim chance of having this reversed.
I then decided to look at our backlinks using OSE (Open Site Explorer). By doing this, we were able to see a list of all of the anchor text variants and types of links coming back to our website. It became clear fairly quickly why we had been hit.
Silly mistakes
When developing websites for clients, we always include links in the bottom right footer of the client's website. Usually, this is something along the lines of "Web Design Yorkshire | Pinpoint Designs". These two blocks of text include links to the homepage of our agency's website. When looking at the webmaster guidelines, it's pretty obvious that we should never have been doing this, and most likely the cause of our penalty.
At this time, we had around 65 domains pointing at our site, with over 1500 links showing anchor text that was similar to "Web Design Yorkshire", "Website Design In Yorkshire" and so on.
Luckily, we manage the majority of our clients' websites, so it has been very easy for us to remove these. We updated the footer of each website to remove the anchor text "Web Design Yorkshire" and saved the changes. We also created a Google Docs file that included the URL of each website along with the changes we had made so that we could include this in our next reconsideration request.
The second reconsideration request we sent had a lot more time spent on it. Instead of telling Google what they had done wrong, we wrote a long request that had the following structure:
- Who we were and what we do
- Why we believed we had been hit
- What we had done to rectify the issue (a link to the Google Docs file was attached)
- How we knew it wouldn't happen again
- An apology
- My name / contact details
Note: If you are sending in a request because an SEO company has managed to get you banned, it's wise to let Google know the company's name and the work they've carried out. Any information you want to provide them should be added in a Google Docs document and a link attached.
At this point, we had just launched our brand new website, so I explained to Google that we had just relaunched and that we were pushing quality content out to all of our users.
The second reconsideration request came back unsuccessful, and my hopes started to fade as to how we were going to get back into the search engines. I then decided that I would contact SEOMoz via a private question to ask for further clarification and any more tips they could provide. I received a response from Carson Ward, an SEO Consultant from Distilled, who helped by providing a little more information.
Carson said that footer links were indeed the problem. There were a ton of links that said "web design yorkshire" and similar, and this triggered the Penguin penalty. He recommended using more branded and varied anchor text, avoiding site-wide links, and, as a last resort, either removing or nofollowing footer links on sites we had designed.
- Use branded anchor text the majority of the time. It looks a lot more natural to link back using your brand name. The safest example would be "Web design by Pinpoint Designs". The slightly riskier "Web design by Pinpoint Designs" can be a bit more beneficial.
- Mix up the anchor text - use different variations so that no single anchor is overwhelmingly common.
- Avoid site-wide links, especially with exact-match non-branded anchor text.
Now that you've already been flagged, you could try doing the above and seeing if that's good enough for Google. You could also just nofollow or remove the links. These footer links are already devalued, but you'll lose a little bit of ranking power by nofollowing/removing them.
He also indicated in a second email that Google has sometimes been stubborn on reinclusion requests, and that it might be necessary to jump through some hoops to get back in their good graces.
It became clear that I would have to up my game If I wanted to ease Google's fears of us spamming them, so I got to work in trying to clear everything up properly. I decided to spend a month getting my head down and working on removing everything. Before setting all the links to no follow, I wanted to give it once more chance.
We wanted to avoid the Disavow tool at all costs, as the links pointing to our website were not bad quality.
What worked
We logged into Google Webmaster Tools and looked at the links pointing to our site, we then went through each of these sites to make sure that any anchor text pointing to us was only brand based keywords. It occurred to me that during this point, the only links we really had were from clients websites, so Google wouldn't really see us as a website worth promoting.
I then started writing articles for our website's blog - these revolved around social media, SEO and website launches for our clients. I wanted to build quality content on our website and had a positive attitude of trying to write engaging articles. We decided not to write articles every day, but longer length articles that were posted out once per week or so.
Once this has been sorted, we started pushing our Twitter page. We followed local design agencies and people that we personally found interesting. We always try to engage with people and tweet about articles that we believe are interesting. We even wrote an article on our blog about social engagement and tried to provide useful information to people where possible. It was obvious this was working, as our Twitter account started growing very quickly and we were getting favourites, retweets and replies to our posts!
Finally, we decided that we should start doing some actual SEO work on our website in the same way we do for our clients. We're a big fan of guest blogging on sites that are related to your industry, so we started out by writing articles about subjects we are interested in. This includes email marketing, social media, SEO, user interface design and so on. We then used some great web tools to find guest post opportunities and got in touch with the blog owners.
An important point here is that we only linked back to our website using variations of our brand name. This was either 'Pinpoint Designs', 'Pin point designs' or our domain name. We wrote around 15-20 very high quality blog posts and submitted them to different guest blogs varying from PR2 - PR6 domains. We only posted to higher quality blogs, and made sure that they were reputable (as some blog owners only want your articles to boost their ranks for affiliate purposes).
All sites were checked out by domain authority, PageRank and a visual check to make sure they didn't look 'spammy'. We also made sure that the niche fitted our website as best as possible.
Useful websites
Citation Labs - Garrett's tools are fantastic. I really cannot express how easy It is to find quality blogs. We used the Link Prospector tool in order to find high quality blogs that were related to our industry.
Blogger LinkUp - Again, this website is amazing for a site that is free of charge. Enter in your email address and once a day (or once every couple of days) you will receive an email with guest post opportunities. You can then email the authors of the sites to write guest posts for them.
We then went for reconsideration request number three. I put together a fairly short reconsideration request that was based around our previous request. I explained that we had worked on building quality content up across the Internet and that we were interacting with people on social media. I explained that we realised that we'd made silly mistakes and also included a link to our previous work. By this point, a lot of our links had updated in Webmaster Tools and the percentage of non-branded anchor text to branded anchor text had decreased which was positive.
Only three days later, we received the following email:
Summary
Starting out as a fairly small company, our website wasn't the site we wanted it to be. In 2012, we decided that we would revamp our website and start promoting ourselves across the UK. We've been growing quickly year on year, but we very rarely acquire work via our website. Just as this had happened, we received a penalty from Google.
After working with some companies who have received penalties from doing blackhat work, I would recommend the following tactics:
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Start by building up a list of all the links pointing to your website - This is extremely easy. Login to Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools and use other websites such as Ahrefs or Majestic SEO. Pull together a list of URLs and Anchor text pointing to your website and try to make sure that you always have more branded anchor text than non-branded. In the Google Panda updates, it should become apparent fairly quickly why you've been struck with a penalty.
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Work to remove those links hard! - Removing links isn't easy, there are numerous sites out there that will help remove links from you, but it's a fairly slow process. One of our clients had been using SENuke to build links to forums. We wrote a small script that logged into all of these forums using the username and passwords which luckily they had, and updated the info box to remove the links to their site. Unfortunately, if you don't have the luxury of having the passwords to hand, you'll have to contact the owners one by one.
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If you can't remove links - If you can't remove links, use the Google Disavow tool. That being said, don't use it unless absolutely necessary. If you're having to use the disavow tool on thousands of links, then you're in trouble!
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Write good quality content - Show Google that you can write good content! Make sure that all the content on your website is unique, up to date and interesting. Spend some time working out anything you are not happy with and show them that you are an authority site that they should promote. Get involved with the community, grow your social media accounts organically and tidy up your image.
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Spend time on your reconsideration request - Google must receive hundreds, if not thousands, of reconsideration requests each and every week. Rather than sending in a paragraph, spend some time telling them what you've done wrong and most importantly, be honest. Tell them why you think you've been targeted, what you've done to rectify it and how it won't happen again. Apologise for the mistake(s) and hold your hands up if you're in the wrong. Add in information from Google Docs to show what links you've cleared off and let them know why you're worth it!
- Don't get involved in the first place! - This is always easy to say in hindsight, but don't get yourself into the position where you need to clean up your websites rankings in the first place. We were initially targeted because of a bad choice of anchor text. Once we were targeted, we had to make sure we were squeaky clean before having the penalty revoked. Only stick to ethical link building practices and stay on Google's good side!
This is really helpful, not just for recovery but for avoiding the problem to start with. Thank you. A lot of solid info to use.
Can you please explain a bit more what you meant here?: "The safest example would be "Web design by Pinpoint Designs". The slightly riskier "Web design by Pinpoint Designs" can be a bit more beneficial." I don't see why it's different, therefore more beneficial.Thanks much.
Thanks for the message!
Sorry, I think that's the formatting that's confused you there. It was supposed to look like this:
The safest example would be "Web design by Pinpoint Designs". The slightly riskier "Web design by Pinpoint Designs" can be a bit more beneficial.
Basically, the safest version would be just having our brand name 'Pinpoint Designs' as the anchor text pointing back to our websites URL. The slightly riskier version of having the full 'Web design by Pinpoint Designs' as the anchor text would provide more benefit as it's got the keyphrase 'web design' in it, but that's partly why we got the penalty in the first place.
I hope that clarifies things a bit!
Lewis
The software apparently does not like underlines -- they were in there when I set this to publish, I promise. :) I've edited the post to bold the areas that would be anchor text, to help reduce confusion.
Hi Keri,
Thanks for sorting that!
I thought It was in there too so was very confused when I saw Lee's message.
Thanks again,
Lewis
Hi pinpoint designs,
Thanks for clearing the confusing between the anchor text you have mentioned. Really that was informative.
While I think this is a good case study with some actionable advice, I think there's a few bits of misinformation in the article that could potentially lead to confusion for people reading through.
First, Panda 3.9.1 was rolled out on Monday the 19th of August.
Second, a Panda penalty does not involve unnatural links. Panda is broadly to do with on-page factors, particularly content quality. Unnatural link warnings involves the Penguin update (but not exclusively, you can get warnings without being penguin-ised).
For anyone reading this far, I'd implore you to read Ryan Kent's excellent identifying link penalties blog post and also visit MyTrafficDropped.com and take the quiz there. Both resources will help you diagnose any Google penalties and also offer further actionable advice.
Good tips there with some great links.
As stated to Jon above, we may have been wrong about the Panda 3.9.1 penalties, but it certainly was a manual penalty that we received. We did jump to conclusions after looking on the internet and finding that other people were finding their links and traffic dropping to their site.
As did so many others - the important thing here is that you got the penalty removed and I think in this post you offer a number of tips that people should consider if/when they have to go through this process themselves.
For instance, with the SENuke example - I think it's a great point to get people to look for footprints, signs that reoccur in an unnatural link profile. Generally, if you're finding patterns like this anyway, it shows either an automated link profile or an unnatural one.
I think you're a little confused about the different penalties
a) They didn't roll out Panda 3.9.1 specially for your site 4 days earlyb) Unnatural link notification isn't a manual penaltyc) Panda isn't a manual penaltyd) Unnatural link notification isn't Panda
You might be correct with us not being hit by Panda 3.9.1, as this was officially announced on the 20th of August. There were however reports of people getting hit earlier, and due to the close proximity, we assumed it was that.
I guess the main focus of this article wasn't the penalty that we received, it was more how we overcame it and how people can avoid this in the future.
@Jon Parker - Actually an unnatural link notification is definitely a manual penalty, Matt Cutts mentioned this at SMX Advanced mid last year. (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-manual-action-message-15258.html)
If you had problems with unnatural links, you've been hit by penguin, not panda.
Penguin targets links and panda targets bad content and other on-page "tricks".
Yeah, that was an oversight in the article. I knew we hadn't been hit with bad content etc originally and obviously new it was down to links because of the message from Google. When writing the article, I just looked for the algorithm changes closest to the date we were hit and used that, probably should have read into that a little bit more but you live and learn! :)
It's most important that you recovered.
If you ever need to check if algorithm update affected your traffic, use this tool: Panguin Tool
I hope you wont have similar problems in the future ;)
HI Bojan, thanks for providing the link of Panguin tool. Good one
It's interesting... we've seen something similar from a few web design firms that contacted us about being penalized, but they received NO messages in their Google Webmaster Tools account. We helped them remove/change the site-wide footer links from the websites they had built and presto--they're ranking again (even better than before getting whacked). Just wondering why some companies get a message from Google and others don't.
That's a pretty strange one! I've never heard of that before but I guess it's pretty obvious when you get hit with a penalty. A lot of the penalties Google gives out now are automated, so I guess by clearing things up, you'll notice things come back again within a few weeks.
This user was lucky to have access to most of the sites where his bad links were placed. For most, the going wont' be that simple. Cyrus Shepard has a great review of some of the tools out there that can help speed the process.
Yeah, there's a good set of resources there.
We were lucky as you say to be able to access post of the sites where the bad links were placed. This post I guess just highlights that many of the issues that you can face in terms of penalties can be easily avoided. It was our own fault and not the fault of an outside agency, but it was something as simple as a footer link with the wrong anchor text that got us the penalty.
Thanks for the input! :)
Lewis, great article. I have a couple of clients who need to read this badly.
I saw you used the "web design by" example when talking about diversifying backlinks and using branded backlinks. There is an article that might interest you that has an ingenious way to bridge the relevancy gap for webmasters. I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on that strategy.
Using Footer Links to Diversify Your Backlink Profile (@SEWatch)
https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2239260/Using-Footer-Links-to-Diversify-Your-Backlink-Profile
Hi Matt, Thanks!
That article is really very interesting, I haven't read it before but everything in there does make sense. I think my opinion on that is that it would probably work on the basis that you have other diverse links pointing to your website (as every good SEO campaign should do).
I know that we were originally hit because we literally only had footer links with the same anchor text. I guess if we'd have mixed that with other high authority links, we might have got away with it (as many of our competitors are).
The PHP method of adding in a nofollow link on all other pages but the homepage is very good. We've used similar code on many of our clients sites, but instead of doing that, we've simply only had a follow link on the homepage and removed the credit entirely on the rest of the site (that was really just to stay on the safe side!).
Very interesting read - I'd like to look into that strategy further and test it out. My only reservations are whether Google would see the internal page of the web design company and thinking that the 'bridging of relevance' is almost trying to trick the system? Apart from that though, it sounds like a great idea!
Thanks for sharing that!
Super helpful post for those whose sites have incurred a manual penalty from Google. Thank you for providing a detailed account of events and steps to recovery!
No problemo! Glad you've found it helpful!
So happy that things worked out, Lewis, and I hope that my answer did help a little. Thanks for sharing your experience about recovering. You offer some great advice that a lot of people could learn from. :)
Hi Carson, Thanks for the message!
Yeah, things worked out in the end and your answer certainly helped out. I thought we were going down the right track but it's always good to get a second pair of eyes looking over things incase you miss something!
It's certainly taught us some lessons and I'm really pleased with how successful this post has been!
Thanks again! I owe you a beer! :)
Thanks for distribution your special approaching on a hot theme.
It's most significant that you improved.
This is truly useful, not presently for improvement but for avoid the difficulty to begin with.
Thank you. The Great Post…
Thanks for sharing Lewis, we're still trying to remove an algorithmic penalty for a client who got hit before they came to us. The one hugely valuable takeaway from this for me is the use of Google Docs and a link to show them what you have done.
The one other thing that we have done is to create a separate Gmail account specifically for this work and sent the username and log in with the reconsideration request so Google can see that we have been doing the right things for the client.
I'd be very interested to know just how long it took in total from the first penalty notice to the lifting of the penalty?
Thanks,
Jonathan
Yeah, Google definitely like to see that you're putting effort in, so if you can build up a list of what you've done etc, then it will certainly help. Google did say they won't open files stored in other locations as they can't be trusted, so make sure you stick with Google Docs.
Creating a separate Gmail account specifically for the link removal certainly is an interesting idea. I don't know if Google would login to the account due to the time incurred each time etc, but Google docs is a quick way to share a file and I know they look into it. I assume you also use the Gmail account for all of the contact with the blog / site owners where you're trying to remove links? That's probably not a bad idea as you're getting away from using your company image etc.
I just sent this link out to another comment above, but you might find it helpful for link removals in the future - https://deletebacklinks.com/ - It's inexpensive and has a database of sites where they can remove links instantly.
It took 6 months from the date we got the penalty to having it removed. However, it wasn't something that we started straight away and it we did wait over a month for the first reinclusion request to come back. It was a good few days of solid work and just a lot of waiting!
Hope this helps and thanks for the comments!
Thanks Lewis,
Interestingly I've just tried the delete backlinks with our clients url and it can't find any!
When we started the client had 60,000 backlinks but are now down to 18,000 and that is dropping like a stone as we remove all the forum posts by the last SEO with anchor text keywords....
Six months sounds like an age but we're now three months into the process so maybe this is a common thing.
Thanks for sharing - as soon as we get a result we will share our top tips as well!
Jonathan
Ahh, Delete Backlinks doesn't always work, but it's certainly a good place to look to remove the odd backlink. They're growing their database at the moment and hopefully in the future, it'll have a lot more URLs in it.
Woah, 60,000 backlinks certainly is a cleanup operation! With a client like that, I'd almost be more tempted to tell them to swap their domain if it's really that bad. Obviously it depends on the site / what the links are like, but it's a pretty big cleanup you're having to do.
A lot of it was a waiting game along with us not starting the work (6 months was the date we got the penalty - the date the manual action was revoked). I would guess that it was around 4 months from when we started the work, but the majority of that was waiting for updates from Google.
Hopefully the post has helped you a little, but if you've any questions about anything, let me know and I'll try to provide any input I can!
Lewis
"They're growing their database at the moment and hopefully in the future, it'll have a lot more URLs in it."
hmmm...
I like how you handled it, admit a mistake and then fix it. Maybe the reason you got the penalty lifted was by accepting responsibility and demonstrating that you are willing to go above and beyond the call in order to rectify the situation.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. When doing the first reinclusion request, we kept it very short and immediately got a message back saying that they weren't going to lift the penalty. We then started doing research and found that something like 25,000 unnatural link warnings had been sent out. The chances are that Google is receiving more reconsideration requests than they can handle, so we needed to make ours stand out.
Rather than trying to say 'we haven't done anything' (which I'm sure they hear all the time!), we put our hands up, said we were wrong and started finding ways to fix it. I'd read on another site that documenting all the changes you've done is wise, but a webmaster video done by Matt Cutts said they'll only open Google Docs files. I kept a record of everything we'd done and submitted the reinclusion request to Google.
As you'll see, we got the penalty lifted in the end. I think Google basically want to be sure that you've gone out of your way to fix it. If they made it easy for people, there wouldn't be any point in giving the penalty in the first place as they'd just be creating work for themselves.
Hopefully, I will not ever need this but am keeping the link so I can have a good blueprint on how to proceed.
Thanks for sharing what did happen and how you rose from the ashes for your client on it. Having the resources to have it lifted makes the difference in the end...glad you clarified Lee's question above since I was stumped. Important for me a small biz owner and having 'web masters' doing work for me too in the future...
I think the most important thing to take from the post is really not to get involved with penalties in the first place. It really was a complete pain to get reincluded in the search engines and we've been working with a few clients since to lift their penalties. Once you're on the radar, you have to be squeaky clean before Google let you back in.
My advice to anyone would be that if you're building links, only build the ones that are from high quality sources and only post out quality that you'd be happy to associate your name with. Spinning articles, posting spam on forums and sending out low quality or duplicated content doesn't help anyone. If you've got an article that's good, then post it and it will naturally get shared and syndicated around the web! :)
Thanks for commenting! :)
The hardest part of being a new and a small business owner is figuring out the right things to do and not making those mistakes. Getting good advice can be a challenge and a lot of work. Super important to have a webmaster that has a good reputation. Obviously, even with good intent the lack of understanding can be detrimental.
Hi jborgueta,
I think one test that you might apply to any proposed action in assessing whether it is the 'right thing to do' is ask "can you think of any reason aside from SEO why this could be a good idea?" e.g. adding user value or something.
If not and you don't understand the SEO angle either, then it's probably best avoided, in my view.
Im helping a client recover from the Penguin update as well. He has hundreds of thousands of comment spam links with the same 3 words as anchor text. Th old SEO for their site was very irresponsible and must have created a bot to do this level of spamming. Either way one thing that helps is going to webmaster tools and downloading latest links to a csv. We broke the links out into sections dead links, anchor text 1, anchor text 2 and anchor text 3, and non related site links. We first got rid of all the dead links. We then moved onto the anchor text links (3 terms all comment links) we combed through these to get rid of them. Lastly we took the remaining list and started to narrow down on links that were unrelated to the website. As I like to put it they weren't in the websites neighborhood. It took a long time to go through the remaining links, but it was necessary because we didn't want to harm our client, but at the same time we had to remove the links that were causing the penalty. Anyways...its a pretty tedious process, but it must be done responsibly and with great patience.
So then for links to remove do you think it should only be links that are found in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)?
As I could have many links outside of GWT is it possible all 'spam links' they have ignored and I won't find in GWT when I download?
or
are they All there and should only consider removing links from here since this is what Google views
I don't think you should only remove bad links that are spotted in Google Webmaster Tools. Personally, I would have looked through AHrefs, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools and created a master list of links. I would then remove duplicates and go through them to find the spam links.
Google probably won't pull in all of your links, but if you're doing a link cleanup process, you're better to clean everything up so that you're squeaky clean. Google will most likely be able to see more than they show you anyway, but even if they can't, you don't want to be reincluded and then receive a penalty a month later from the other links you didn't clean up, I imagine lifting a second penalty is fairly hard going!
Kind regards,Lewis
I'm not sure if this was already asked, but figured I'd ask it: did the Pinpoint Designs site have any decreases to traffic, noticeable ranking decreases, conversions affected, etc...? Didn't really see that in the post and was curious. While it's never great to get those letters, I've heard of many sites getting the warnings & effectively have a "penalty" but not having it affect their traffic or rankings at all.
I suppose the fact that you said there was a penalty would lead someone to believe there indeed was a drop seen in traffic/rankings/etc... but wanted to get a straight answer from the source. :)
Thanks for your message!
Yes, we did suffer a considerable drop in rankings (from rank 2 on some keywords down to disappearing out the top 100 results). That obviously impacted on conversions, traffic to the site and overall just slowing down on enquiries. Once we had the penalty removed, we noticed that we went up to about page 3 within a couple of days and climbed steadily after that with the SEO work that we're now carrying out.
I think this is a great article. We all have the fear to suffer this kind of penalty in the future and thus this kind of information might come in very handy when the time comes...
I really appreciate this and I have made my notes. Nevertheless, I'd like to ask the same as Robert Chapman, could you answer him ?
Hi Christian,
Glad you liked it! I've just responded to Roberts question here, so hopefully this helps! If you'd like anymore information, just ask and I'll try my best to answer it!!
Thanks!Lewis
Hey, Great post. You've summed up the whole issue perfectly. It was pretty industry standard at one point, especially in Web Design and SEO, to include a keyword rich footer link in all the sites a company has created/optimised. Personally I've witnessed the rankings for a lot of different search terms fluctuate every day, and sometimes even more frequently than that. I'm currently in the midst of reworking a lot of old links so understand where you're coming from. Thanks
Thanks for the message and glad you enjoyed it! Sounds like you're doing the sensible thing of cleaning things up earlier rather than later!!
Thanks for the message. Yeah, this post has done really well considering it's my first. Very pleased with everything so far!
Theme Authors are an interesting one, they're usually just brand orientated, so they may get away without the penalties. To be honest, I don't really know on this one, but it'd be interesting to find out if they've received penalties with the recent Google updates or whether they're still ranking properly. I guess it would be fairly easy to figure out but I guess the easiest way to avoid it is stick to brand terms only, homepage links that are nofollow.
I'd certainly be interested in doing a bit of guest posting on your site. I'll send you a PM now!
Hi Friend,
Your Article is very helpful to get the understanding of How Google Search Engine actually treat our websites. This is obvious that it has to index millions of search result considering their own Violation Policies. This Article is like a self learning Study with a very good explaination and conclusion at the end. Even I had to go under Google Violation thing for my site hindiguitarsongs.com..But for mine it was saying that the site content is inappropriate. I tried sending reply to this email, but no response. The situation today is that I have not monitor my site progress and the site is no longer exist due to hosting plan expired. But I will try making the best copy for my site and get back to where I started.
Keep Posting such Articles...
One thing I will say if you ever use the disavow tool make sure you have researched and know what you are doing with it. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen!
Great article and some brilliant tips!
I couldn't agree more.
The disavow tool is an absolute final resort. I would generally never recommend someone use it as I'm still yet to hear of someone having a manual penalty revoked with the help of the Disavow tool... That being said, it's obviously there for a reason and maybe it's more for a 'pre-penalty' saver than a 'post-penalty' saver?
I disagree with your comment to never recommend using the disavow tool. In your site's case, you had control over the unnatural links pointing to you, so of course you would not need to disavow them.
I have removed several penalties from sites before the disavow tool was available, but I had a few clients for which we could not get the penalty lifted. These sites had links from places like article sites, low quality directories and bookmarking sites where it was very hard to reach webmasters and have links removed. Even though everything was documented well, we were not able to remove enough links to satisfy Google. For these sites though, once the disavow tool came out, we resubmitted, explaining (and showing) that we removed all we could and then disavowing the rest. Once this was done, the penalty was revoked.
For some of these sites we were only able to get 10-15% of the bad links manually removed, but because we tried and then disavowed what we couldn't remove, Google was satisfied.
I didn't say I would 'never' recommend using the disavow. I just said I would 'generally never'.. I would use it as an absolute last resort. In the case of this article, yes, we had control over the links so we wouldn't disavow them, I completely agree with that. Generally though, I think you have to demonstrate that you've tried absolutely everything you physically can to remove the link before putting the disavow tool into action.
The disavow tool is supposed to be used as an absolute last resort which I'm sure you would agree with.
I personally have never worked on a campaign for someone where the disavow tool certainly helped to get them back into Google. Until your comment, I've never actually heard of something using the disavow tool as the clincher for getting back into Google. I've never actually heard of a reinclusion request being successful where only 10-15% of bad links were removed, that's a very good effort!
This post infuriates me! I'm glad the poster got his penalty removed... but the fact is that his site should have never been penalized in the first place has been lost.
This guy never spammed anything! What happened to Google just not counting the links? Who do they think they are issuing penalties. A few years ago, Google assured everyone that "incoming links cannot hurt you". Now they are putting good websites out of business at the whim of some kid employee doing grunt work. The guys issuing these penalties are brilliant young people, most likely bored to death that they are doing incredibly boring data work. And no amount of free food at the google complex can help that.
Do no evil? My ass.
I understand your pain greenbergb and your message is definitely not lost on me. If you Google "sorry google but you are wrong" you should find a piece I wrote about this not long ago. In it I argue that there is a much better, fairer and simpler system that eventually uses market forces to drive the behaviour Google wants to see and clean up backlink profiles.
At the moment Google have created this mess with backlinks but their approach to cleaning it up in unacceptable.
Hi Brian,
Firstly, sorry for creating an infuriating post!! :)
Secondly, I agree with most of your points. Google are do powerful now that they really can make or break a business. If a business is at number 1 for a search term that brings in thousands of pounds and Google decide to penalise you, you income can disappear overnight.
The way that we looked at this was that Google are looking to improve their algorithms in order to stop people tricking their system as best they can. They're trying to cut out the crap content / websites, and deliver their users the best websites for their search.
Unfortunately, they're dealing with millions of websites and have to apply an algorithm to bundle the sites as best they can. We obviously were caught in this particular section and someone who manually reviewed the sites (may or may have not looked at the site) and decided to hit the penalise button!!
It was a very annoying thing to deal with, and as we're a legitimate company, I also think we shouldn't have been penalised, but I guess the link building tactic we were using made us fall under this umbrella and that caused us issues.
Apart from that, I agree with everything you've said! It's a pretty annoying situation to be in but I guess that's where we're at and currently we can't do anything about it except for comply... :(
I totally agree with your last point but it is extremely difficult. Look at the gun debate as an example. Some states have no banned certain types of guns or ammo. People who went to bed as law abiding citizens woke up as felons, not because they did anything wrong, but because what once was allowed was no longer allowed.I feel like Google is the same way. For example, guest posting is widely considered white hat. I bet you anything Google is going to come down on that hard and soon. This is mostly because the way people do it is horrible and is just like using link networks. If you do it right, great, but even if you do it wrong, you can improve rankings. Tomorrow Google could decide it is no longer allowed and bam, down you go. So hard to stay ahead of the game, but you are right, we should all be trying to do it.
Yeah, I completely agree with this. You've probably seen the recent SEO community that people are warning against a Google update that is in progress targeting lower quality guest posting. The general thought is that the next update is going to target people who are doing low quality guest posting and penalise their sites.
If you think about things logically, it's fairly easy for Google to start weeding out sites that are manipulating them via guest posting. If you go to somewhere like 'https://myblogguest.com/', It's very easy to get a guest blog on really really low quality sites. Most of the content that goes around there is low quality, spun content that will have a huge footprint when posted on a site. (The posts being prefixed with things like 'Guest Post', 'Sponsored Guest Post' etc).
Unfortunately, I have to agree that Google probably are going to come down pretty hard on Guest Posting. The best way to stay ahead of Google now is to play by the rules, work on building up great content that gets lots of reads, shares, likes and that is informative and helpful. Guest post on real sites that have real visitors and give real benefit to their users. Posts like that will never get harmed as they're helpful. Unfortunately, if you can automate something, it's likely to get hit by one of the upcoming search engine updates.
I think I am having this type of problem. My site has an exact match domain, would the exact match keyword phrase be considered a branded keyword?
Good question - There's lots of writing up on the EMD side of things but It probably depends on a number of factors. There's a good article below from Cemper about the Google EMD update:
https://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340
It probably depends on the niche your in, and whether your content is actually good, or whether you're just using the exact match domain purely to rank high for that keyword. If you've got good content, a lot of interaction with your visitors and you're providing a good service via your site, then I would say that building links to your domain keywords would be absolutely fine.
On the other hand, if you're literally just building links all day long to those keywords, your content doesn't change, it's low quality, spun, poorly written and doesn't benefit anyone, you're probably going to find that you could be penalised. The whole point of the EMD update was to penalise sites that were churning out poor quality content, so if you don't fall under that umbrella, then hopefully you'll be fine!
Again, that's my 2 cents, and I wouldn't say that it's necessarily correct, but there are a number of companies out there that have built their brands on exact match domains and rank perfectly well - one of the biggest being 'GAME'.
Thank you for the great response and the link.
I will admit that in the beginning I was building bad links, but I quickly learned my lesson and went "legit" I spent a few months fixing links and then mostly recovered, but I think they are weighting me down still. SEO is in my domain and therefore most of my anchor text has SEO and it looks over optimized in OSE link analysis.
I have since re-branded and my plan is to build proper links with my Company name to dilute the SEO anchor texts.
Your article was real eye opener for me. Thanks again.
We are always so busy building links (free or paid) that we don't even bother to see our link profile. Be smart now, understand what Google is doing and saying. No matter if you are an Agency or In house SEO team, don't act when you've been penalized. Link checkup can be a routine activity (may be once in a four or six month).
Stay safe. Don't try black hat.
Hi,
This post is really very helpful to us. I hope everyone will be aware before pass off the situation.
I really appreciate your patience. Keep it up. :)
Thanks for sharing your experience with us, Hats off to your patience, 6 months is not a less period for any SEO. Nevertheless, it is great now that you recovered from the penalty.
Sound advice. I've never had a site penalised, but will keep this on file in case it happens!
Great article.
I'd be interested to know what happened once the manual action was revoked, with the change in Anchor Text, the creation of new content and the blogging did your search traffic return to normal levels or were you in a better position than when you started?
Hi Robert,
The rankings started to rise back up again within about 3 days of the penalty being lifted. Unfortunately, we haven't regained all of the positions we had previously such as the 'Web Design Yorkshire' as we've removed all the anchor text that linked to this. That being said, we're ranking pretty well for some other related terms that we weren't showing for previously, I think that's probably down to the article writing and positive link building that we're now doing though. Search traffic now is much better than it's ever been, but again, that's probably down to the work we've done since the penalty was removed rather than the effects of the penalty in the first place.
Nothing too spectacular, but to be perfectly honest, we've never really focused on Link building for our own site up until when the penalty was revoked.
For clients sites, we've noticed traffic rise within about a week of the links being removed. Usually, the traffic is a bit lower than it was before the penalty (most likely due to the links being removed that were passing juice before the penalty hit) but they've on average probably regained 80% of the lost search engine traffic (a rough guestimate!).
Hope this helps!Lewis
Thank you so much for sharing your experience. After reading your post I realized that I committed exactly the same mistake. I will be correcting my link building strategy!
Glad it was helpful! Better to be safe than sorry!
Thanks for sharing this information this is simply define how can understand that topic such a nice post and i really like it...
Wow! I really enjoyed reading this. This very same subject has been weighing on my mind last couple of years. In actual fact I asked Matt Cutts about it - asking if there were penalties for having links back at you from the websites we built - he never responded.
I am guessing too that a lot of the websites you build are also hosted by you – maybe on the same IP?
My personal thoughts are that Google should not penalise a design company for adding their company name to something they have built – it’s good branding to shout about the sites you build. However, stuffing keywords into that equation becomes another matter.
I’m glad it worked out for you and your hard work paid off – thanks for an enlightening post and one that will become a favourite and provide food-for-thought to agency owners here.
Hi Vinnie,
Good Question! - Yes, many of the sites are hosted by us so they're on the same IP range. Not all of them are, but 50% of the links probably were so it's feasible that it could have looked a little bit like a link network.
I have to agree with you. Web design agencies are in a slightly different situation to most people who are building links. Like you say, I think it's completely acceptable for a company to have their name in the footer of a site they've built. All of our clients agree to this link when they sign up with us (it's in our standard contract) and like you say, it's good branding. Keyword stuffing like you say is a different matter, I think we were probably on the edge of what was allowed to be honest, as our keyword placement probably wasn't wise! It's one of those things that the designers just add into each design, it's coded and then goes up, there wasn't really any SEO thought put into it originally!
Glad you enjoyed the post and thanks for the input!Lewis
Thanks for writing this. I'm always eager to hear of other people's stories when it comes to unnatural links penalties. I wanted to give my thoughts on what you wrote.
"We straight away knew that we had been hit by Google's Panda 3.9.1 update." - As others have pointed out, Panda has nothing to do with unnatural links penalties. I think it's important to mention this again as it could really confuse people. Panda and Penguin are algorithm changes and are completely separate to unnatural links penalties which are a manual action taken by Google. A reconsideration request won't help you at all if you have been affected by Panda or Penguin. Also, you won't get a manual warning if you've been affected by either of those.
(As a little aside, I wanted to tell you that the main reason why I got into doing unnatural links penalty removal and diagnosing reasons for traffic drops is because I made the same mistake on a forum once. I told someone with a probably Penguin issue that they should file for reconsideration. I was corrected by a senior member of the forum. I then realized that these issues are complicated and I basically dedicated my life to understanding the difference. I have been obsessed with these things ever since.)
"but the general opinion was that if you had been hit by a manual penalty, that there was a very slim chance of having this reversed."
I'm going to disagree here. It's not difficult to get a penalty reversed if you know what you are doing. I've only had one case where I failed...and then with a little bit more work that penalty was removed as well.
I find it very interesting that your second request was denied and your third request was successful. On one hand it sort of makes sense that if you had started to make an effort to attract good, natural links to your site that this could please Google. But on the other, building good links doesn't remove the unnatural links that were there and I would think that the penalty would still exist. I am wondering if there was something left out in the article. You mentioned that before sending your second reconsideration request in, you did the following, "We updated the footer of each website to remove the anchor text "Web Design Yorkshire" and saved the changes," but that your reconsideration request failed. But then, after consulting with Carson ward, he said the following: "Carson said that footer links were indeed the problem. There were a ton of links that said "web design yorkshire" and similar, and this triggered the Penguin penalty. He recommended using more branded and varied anchor text, avoiding site-wide links, and, as a last resort, either removing or nofollowing footer links on sites we had designed."
OK...I have a few questions and comments after reading that quote.
First of all, it sounds like when you first said that you updated the footers to remove anchor text, you weren't thorough enough as Carson said your footer links were still the issue. I am guessing that being more thorough on removing all keyword anchor text is what eventually got your penalty removed and not the extra link earning you did for your site. (That's not to negate your efforts at making your site a better place - That's all good stuff.)
Next, you mentioned that Carson said that "this triggered the Penguin penalty." Again, Penguin and a manual unnatural links warning are two separate things. You can definitely be affected by BOTH. However, your warning had nothing to do with Penguin.
I have seen sites that got manual penalties removed but still did not rank and this is because once the manual penalty was removed, they were still being affected by Penguin. Hopefully when Penguin refreshes again these sites will recover.
I'm interested to know if your rankings returned after you changed your anchor text to branded text and got your penalty removed.
Hi Marie,
Thanks for the message. I think the assumption that we'd been hit by Panda 3.9.1 was all to do with the timings. A penalty came out very soon after and on the 15th of August, there was lots of talks on the internet about people looking rankings. On the 19th / 20th, it was announced that Googles latest Panda update had been released and I guess we'd just bundled ourselves in with getting hit there. To be honest, I only added the penalty information into this article, and didn't really look into it at the time as I knew it was down to the links as we only had a holding page up on the site at that moment in time so it obviously wasn't content orientated. That being said, I obviously got this part slightly wrong! :)
Regarding your other points, everything in the writeup is exactly how it happened. I was a little confused as to why we hadn't had the penalty reversed on the 2nd time, but after building up the content, we were allowed back in. As I say, we haven't ever done any link building for the company website, so the only links we had were footer links from clients websites and forum links from active forums I'm a member on. I have a feeling that due to the lack of variation in links, we still looked like we were manipulating the algorithm.
I decided that to show Google that we wanted to be back on their good side, we'd write some really good an informative articles and then resubmit the reconsideration request in full, obviously making sure to mention all the work previously carried out etc. Third time lucky seemed to work!
Since then, we've always taken this approach. Many of the people we help out with manual link penalties seem to have spam links from Forums, Social Media Comments and other low quality placed. We've never had to use the disavow tool for a client, and really, I always think that's a last resort. We generally remove as many of the links as we physically can, log all the data in a spreadsheet and start writing some really good authoritative gone that we can show Google we've linked to. It's proven a very good strategy for us in the past.
After the footer text and the articles were written, the penalty was lifted and our rankings went back up after 2-3 days. We certainly didn't have any other penalties on the site. Hope this clarifies things a little bit more! :)
Great article. I have had the same thing happen a few years ago due to a third party content writing company's error in trying to interlink numerous blogs with the same text. Luckily I was able to remove the problem and get Google to re-index the blog again.
Great post and great efforts put in to get back the site in Google. I have been removing the spammy links for some of my clients, but it has been a tedious job as it requires ample of time n effort to look into each link and ask each site's webmaster to remove them and everything goes into vain when you find the link is still their...
Anyways hard work always pay back...
Yeah, It's a very tedious job and unlike many of the clients we've done work for, we actually had access to all of the links so could change them fairly easily.
A good tool if you're doing work for clients is - https://deletebacklinks.com/
Whilst you have to pay a small amount for the link removal, it's automated and allows the links to be removed quickly and easily! There's quite a few different systems out there, but this one automates the process rather than paying a human to try and get them removed. Only works on a small number of sites presently but has certainly helped with some of our campaigns.
Hi Lewis, Thanks for sharing Your Agency's story of getting rescued from The Google Penalties. I shall say, Very few lucky ones know the Right way to get the Penalties removed. Overall it ended up with some stress and some hard work for You, that seems from your Post. So my question is , How many number of days did it took for your Website to get out of the Penalty, after You received the first message from Google Guys?
Thanks again for Such useful information!
Hi Ajay,
Thanks for the message.
Yeah, since we got the penalty removed, we've helped 6 other companies. Unfortunately, we've taken on around 10 projects, and 4 of them are still struggling (all of them used forum and social media bookmarking spam which makes it very hard to remove the links).
We got the 1st message notifying us of the penalty on 15th of August. We submitted the final reinclusion request on the 6th of February and the penalty was revoked on the 9th of February.
That being said, some of the reinclusion requests took a month or so before we got a reply. A tip would be to not submit more than one reinclusion request at a time. They can take some time to respond, but they're getting a lot of requests.
Any other questions, just let me know!
Cheers,
Lewis
Hi Lewis, Thanks a lot for Such detailed and Useful reply! One more question which I really want to ask you about is, If a website has thousands of spammed incoming links , how would you tackle such situation?As far as I see getting the Links data from OSE and sorting them would be a long tasks , but if some of the spammed links don't provide us the control to edit them, how could we get it solved? (in one case we might contact those site admins, to get the links removed but if Those website owners neither replies nor takes an action so what Step should we do? ) (what if the Number of site admins to contact is in thousands, is there any Tool you recommend us for sophisticated communication with thousands of Site Admins? )
Waiting for your responses!
Thanks once Again Lewis!
Ajay
No problem!
Regarding your other question, I think that completely depends on what situation you're in. For example:
a) If you were targeted with negative SEO, I think your first port of call would be to contact Google and explain the situation. If you hadn't been hit with a penalty and you'd spotted it, they'd probably explain that you need to use Googles Disavow tool. There is a disavow tool for Bing too which you could use to help you in for that search engine.
b) If it was self inflicted or from an SEO company that had previously been worked on, then unfortunately, you probably wouldn't be as lucky to have the disavow tool work in your favour. Google basically says that the disavow tool is your absolute last resort, and that you should try everything in your power first to remove the links. There's two options you could do here:
1) Move your site to a new domain - This obviously isn't ideal, but in a lot of client situations, it's cheaper and more convenient for them to just cut their losses and start again. A lot of the time, you have to jump through hoops to get on Googles good side again, so I guess it's just weighing up whether it worth it.
2) If you've decided that you are going to clear up the links, but you don't have access to any of the usernames / passwords for the forum spam, then really, you're stuck with manual work. This is an extremely long process, and with thousands of links, it's pretty laborious work! I'd start off by running inbound link reports on OSE, Ahrefs and Majestic SEO, then filtering out the duplicates to get a good list of all the links pointing at your site (You can also look in Webmaster Tools to get an idea of the inbound links too). Once you've got that, build a spreadsheet and start tracking your interactions. At this point, if you're doing the work yourself, it's really a case of visiting the URL of the site and trying to get in contact with the owner of the site to remove the link. You'll probably face a few issues with this:
- Sometimes there aren't contact forms
- Sometimes people don't respond
- Sometimes people are abusive and refuse to remove links
- Some people try to charge you to remove links
If you can't find a contact form, the best thing to do is look for Twitter handles, other forms of contact like telephone numbers, address (probably pretty unlikely as they're most likely blog networks / lower quality sites). You can also do a Whois search on the domain to find out the owner and try to get in touch with them that way.
If someone doesn't response, I usually give them three attempts (log each attempt in your spreadsheet), before I class them as useless. Usually, in that case (that I can't find any contact methods for them at all), I'd put them in a separate list to potentially disavow further down the line. Networks like this don't tend to stay around though and if you're waiting 6 months, some of them might have even disappeared!
If people are abusive and don't remove them or try to charge you, then simply log that in your spreadsheet. Google have a policy where they say people shouldn't charge to remove links. This has mixed views in the SEO world. The argument is 'Why shouldn't a webmaster charge to remove a link if you spammed them in the first place?'. I'm of mixed opinions on this. I usually send a polite email explaining the situation and that I'm working on behalf of the client to clean up their link profile. 9/10 times we get a response, they remove it straight away. You get the odd person who refuses or charges, and we give them one chance before adding them to the report as a company who charges for link removal.
There are quite a few tools out there that you can use to help out with link removal. Here's a few to get you started:
- Removeem - A really good system for tracking and getting in touch with companies.
- Link Delete - Never used this company but have heard good things about them!
- Delete Backlink - Never used this company.
- Delete Backlinks - A good place to start for removing backlinks. They don't always have access to many pages, but they'll remove them at a really low price.
Unfortunately, due to spam regulations, most of these companies don't allow you to bulk email people. So it's a case of lots of clicking and just working through lists!
Really, it's a very long and painstaking process to remove lots of links. The above systems will help you slightly, but you have to weight up whether it's worth it.
I hope this helps!
Lewis
Thanks a Lot Lewis...You explained every piece of detail to me, that's really really much useful for me! This is indeed a long process. Thumbs Up for You! :-)
Hello,
Thanks for such a informative article about Google manual penalty, one of my client site is also suffering from Google penalty from last few months, we have tried so hard to get it revoked but nothing is working out. We have removed more than 80K back links(might be hurting our SERP). But still nothing happened.
Any one can suggest me any thing more to look on to avoid the penalty
80k backlinks is a pretty serious number to get rid of! Your client must really have had some poor link building work done on their site previously. It all depends really on how many poor quality links you have. If the majority of your clients links are poor, then you'd almost be better getting a new domain and putting a forward on from the old domain to the new domain. I've heard of people using this technique without the penalty being pushed across, but that's not guaranteed.
Alternatively, it's really just a case of building up good quality links to dilute the poorer quality links and focusing on removing as many of those links as you physically can. If you get down to a very small number, you could start looking to disavow the links, but I'd use that really as a last resort.
As I say, 80k links is a serious number of spam links. You'll have your work cut out to get back in Google's good books. If I was someone working for Google and looking at that link profile, I'd probably assume they'd spam again once they were back in the search engines... I guess you've got to weigh up the likelihood of a Google employee letting a site in with that many bad links...
Hey Lewis, this is a fantastic post. Its great to see someone really stick at the reconsideration request. We were hit last year by a manual penalty in *just going to check messages in web master tools* February. It turned out to be a spam site that had a link to us using a rich keyword for our niche as anchor text on their blog roll (and they had 1000's of pages that were complete garbage). Other than that we were clean, so we were quite lucky. The method of the reconsideration request was the same we used (there about) and I think this is part of why they reconsidered in favour for us.
Thanks Sean! Glad you like it!
Thanks for sharing Lewis! I think this type of open discussion is really important for the SEO community. I've commonly found web marketing companies will include their link in the footer of their client sites. Since this is against Google's webmaster guidelines I've often been frustrated by sites that used this tactic but have obviously not been caught. When a new start-up see's this type of behavior prevalent in the community they're likely to do the same, just as your company might have.
I'm both pleased you were able to identify the penalty and resolve the issue but also that Google is taking some action on sites doing this. Combined with posts like this, and Google's manual action, hopefully the community as a whole will become more aware that this is a bad practice. Of course, if you want to be sure your company is associated with the work you do, then you can always add nofollow to the link.
You're spot on with this, one of our main competitors uses exactly the same anchor text as that and they appear right at the top of Google for the key phrase. They're a much older company with a lot of backlinks that are site wide in the footer (exactly the same as what we were penalised for). The only reason I'm guessing they haven't been hit is because of their domain age and probably from the different types of links they have from other sources too.
The reason we actually started doing this wasn't really as an SEO tactic. We just wanted people to know that we were the company who designed the site and made it obvious. We had variations of 'Web Design by Pinpoint Designs' originally, but then swapped it when we'd seen competitors were doing it.
Like you say, in the long term, it's good to know that it's bad practice. In the future, we'll just build brand based links and most likely put the text next to it with no link associated with it. I'd prefer to be completely safe, then no penalties can be given!
Great post, Lewis. Web designer footer links from client sites is a funny one, because it's only fair enough you link to your own site in doing so, but as you said in the post, you have to be careful about how you go about it.
I definitely agree with your advice to mix up the anchor text and to avoid sitewide links. That said, I think you might be ok with sitewide links if they're the ones that have pure branded anchor text. For example, if you've built a massive site with 50k pages (meaning you'll get 50k links), that might be the time to use "Pinpoint Designs". However if you've also built a few small brochure websites that only have a handful of pages each, it might be ok to have exact match, partial match or mixed keyword/brand anchor text for those. It's all a bit of a balancing act, and making sure that branded anchor text makes up the vast majority of links - it certainly doesn't mean you have to rule out exact/partial entirely...
Hi Stevie,
Thanks for the message!
Yeah, If it's a fairly small site, then It may be worth mixing up the anchor text a bit and trying to get a few of the more targeted keywords in there. That being said, I would be a little bit hesitant about doing this without attaching a 'nofollow' attribute now. I guess the homepage is usually the most valuable link to have, so that's the main one I'd always target.
It's a tricky one, and I guess it just depends how much you want to test Google! :)
Lewis
Personally (and based on several clients we've helped with reconsideration requests on) I tend to believethat the consideration evaluation process at Google is not objective. Google reconsideration requests are left in the hands of the person who evaluates them and that may be based on few links that triggered the manual penalty. If the evaluator had a bad day, bad luck.... If he is the Friday evening mood, he will hit the reject button and you'll cry.
We sent one reconsideration request after removing links from 50 domains only and it was accepted from the first try.
We've sent another one after removing from hundreds of domains; rejected the first time, rejected the second time; hopefully approved the third time :).
Again, Google' evaluators will have access to a tool that will check if the link which triggered the manual penalty are still there. If you removed 99% of your links, but missed just those ones, you will get rejected. No one at Google will evaluate your entire backlinking manually...
My 2 cents...
Yeah, I know you're in the hands of the Google employee who reviews your project, and if they've had a bad day, they may reject with no explanation, so I guess part of it is making yourself stand out to try and get them to read on and realise that you're not a spammy like 95% of the other reconsideration requests they receive.
I agree they'll have a tool that just crawls the URLs and checks to see if text is still there, but I think there is a certain element of human interaction in terms of their feeling against you. If they don't have the feeling that you're wanting to put things right, they'll simply reject. I think the reconsideration request is very important, along with showing that you've put lots of effort in to remove links. I also believe that the articles we wrote contributed to everything and just painted a much stronger picture for us.
I appreciate the comments! :)
Your article sounds almost exactly like a client that I worked with that had the exact same problem although he did not suffer a manual penalty. He simply saw all his link juice disappear overnight. He had done the same thing and had over 1500 backlinks from footer links for his company. Interesting that he only lost link juice and found himself dropping from page 1 to page 5 literally overnight. After cleaning up the links he has engaged in social media, blogging, etc and has seen his ranking slowly returning.
Yeah, we seemed to recover pretty quickly once we'd been reincluded. We do a lot of article writing now, engaging with people on our blog and posting out on Twitter. We're really just trying to do some great article writing now and writing things that are interesting. We did a post on Duane Jackson from Kashflow a while ago was an interesting one. Rankings are improving and we're engaging with more people than we ever have done!
Content is king! Write engaging content - It's better for everyone! :-)
Thanks for sharing your experience and the results. Congrats on your 3rd reconsideration request proving that 1) hard work and persistence pays off and 2.) sometimes the 3rd time is a charm!
Good luck with your website/SEO/agency.
Thanks Rick! :) Glad you enjoyed it.
Very helpful article..After reading this article i got a doubt about my off page seo.. Because we are realestate website.. So we target all type of keywords .Eg: Location+property, delhi land for sale, like thisbut our site name is different. Our keywords are non branded.So is this correct way to submit the links using non branded keywords in all directories.
One of the best things you can do is load up Open Site Explorer and run your domain through it. Take a look at your anchor text and see how much of it points to your domain. Whilst this is very rough, I would say that a large proportion (in my experience, around 50%) of your links need to be revolving around your brand name.
If you're linking the 'location + property, Delhi' in your anchor text across lots of sites, It's possible that you'll face a penalty sometime in the future. That being said, Google's largest update for penalties such as this seemed to happen last year, so you may have escaped the net!
To be on the safe side, you could either 'nofollow' the links, or add your brand in as a followed link so that you're lowering the risk. It's better being on the safe side rather than being handed a penalty and having to do the clean up operation!
Hope this helps.
Interesting post!
I think this is one of those posts that should be called as a quick and short guide to link penalties... I think the idea of working on different areas of inbound marketing as part of link removal activity make sense to me because Google is looking in to my website and if they will find me working hard to got quality links and producing quality content to the audience then in that case Google might lift the penalty!
Great tip!
Glad you've found it helpful!
Yeah, I certainly think that continuing with the link building but focusing more on building great content is a way to assist getting links removed. It shows that you're focusing on moving forward rather than just trying to clear up the rubbish links that google have spotted... That's my 2 cents anyway! :)
Thanks.I'm still waiting (over a month and a half) for my disavow request.That can be quite frustrating. :/
Yes, the reinclusion requests can be very frustrating if you don't receive responses, but all you can do is wait. During the waiting period, you could spend your time trying to remove as many links manually as you can. The disavow tool is really there as a last resort and you shouldn't be using it unless it's absolutely necessary. Google will reject your reinclusion request unless they think you've tried everything to get the links removed.
Hope this helps!Lewis
Yes, Pinpoint you are absolutely correct, if any website get penalize due to unnatural link building then there is only one option to resolve this issue, remove unnatural links by your hard efforts.
Try to send an email to the owner of the website who has listed your links.After this go for the reconsideration request and get tour website normal.
Thank you so much to share wonderful information among the peoples, it will help a lot.
skifr, that's far too long. Matt Cutts did a video on this on the Google Webmasters channel - you should simply put in another reconsideration request with a note to explain that you have not received a reply. If you have actually been penalised they will respond - we're currently going through this with a client (4th reconsideration request just denied :( ) and each time it takes no more than four days to get a response.
Of course if you have simply been hit by an algorithmic penalty and not had a notice of penalty in WMT then they may not respond at all....
We did wait around 6-7 weeks for the first reinclusion request to come through, sometimes the responses are instant (less than a week) but a lot of the time, especially the first reinclusion request, we have to wait for weeks.
Thanks for sharing your story. Google can sometimes be really difficult to work with to understand the "why" behind the blacklist. Wonder long it was from first being blacklisted to getting everything resolved? Some of the tactics that finally worked (blog, social media, adding content) isn't something that happens overnight.
This is really helpful, not just for recovery but for avoiding the problem to start with!
For anyone looking to lift a manual penalty, Search Engine Watch just posted a great article on why your reconsideration request might have failed. Def worth a read. Check it out here https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308074/8-Reasons-Your-Reconsideration-Request-Will-Fail
This is really helpful, not just for recovery but for avoiding the problem to start with!
@Lewis. Thanks for article. One of my friend has also been successful in lifting a manual penalty from his site. It took him nearly an year and after nearly 5-6 reconsideration requests, he was finally able to revoke the manual penalty.
Google are trying to keep help for recovery on the down-low and i really do not understand why.
JohnMu is doing hangouts and is the only real source of information from an actual Google employee. You can see videos and questions regarding all aspects of reconsideration requests and manual penalties here. https://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/google-hangouts/
Matt Cutts is so vague and often gives wrong information so John is the only one worth listening to.
Hello Levis...Really good informative article. I learn something new form you today. The entire process little bit lengthy but intresting. I also download you excel spreadsheet you posted on your website. keep up the good work :)
Hi Lewis! I believe that Blogger LinkUp is such an amazing website because this is free of charge. We can just enter our email address and once a day or every other day, we will receive an email with guest post opportunities. We can now then email the authors of the sites to write guest posts for them. I have actually been using this website and I would recommend that others must check this site. Thank you for this wonderful post.
Today it's not an easy task to get out of penalty. People who got out of google penalty sometimes still use old techniques... and get algorythmic...
So what I don't get is that Google says it will not trust and ignore these Spam type links so you lose only the value from those specific links.So if someone was hit with a penalty why should you bother to write a reconsideration letter if Google is supposedly just ignoring the value of the poor links anyway?
On the other hand in their message they do state if you are able to remove any of the links you can resubmit --- this is sending conflicting messages.
Back in the day you get your entire site hurt, now it seems like it can potentially just be a few keywords or pages.Does it make sense with the new roll out in March 2013 to still do a reconsideration request?
So, from penalty to getting it lifted how long did this take please?
It took about 6 months in total, but that being said, we probably didn't start work on it until around December anyway as we had a new site that was being built and other work on for clients. A realistic time frame was probably 4 months including waiting for the reconsideration requests to come back from Google.
thank you pinpoint to share your experience with us,i hope your article will help you in future.
Nice to see someone succeed after a penalty has been given. I removed the best part of 80% of a backlink profile and submitted 6 different reconsideration requests over a period of 3 months. All failed.
In the end we started the site on a new domain and had it ranking better than before within 2 months. Should have just done that from the get go!
It's unfortunate that you put in all that effort to remove 80% of the links and still didn't manage to get back into Googles good graces. We've done a few link cleanups for people now and it seems that Google really are wanting people to be squeaky clean before letting you back in the search engines. I would expect that they would like over 90% of the links cleared up with the remaining 10% of the spam links being disavowed. You'd also have to have a fairly strong link profile detailing good work in order for them to see you as a site that's trying to 'clear up your image'.
Like you say, you started a new domain and got better ranks within two months. It really is something to weigh up. We almost decided to swap to our .com extension in order to get around the penalty and start again, but I always like a challenge so stuck with the longer way!
Good luck with your new site!!
Thanks a tons Pin Point for sharing your personal experience to all of us. But I have a query if the website is new lets assume 6 to 8 months old and not much of the work has been done for linking. Gets a penalty, in this case what to understand and how to recover from it.
Regards
Raviraj
Hi Raviraj,
It all depends on the penalty that you've received. If you've identified it's a link based penalty, then I'd load up opensiteexplorer and search your domain to find all the domains pointing at you. It'll probably be obvious what you've received the penalty for after looking in there.
You can also use tools like https://www.linkdetective.com/ to find out the mixture of links that you've got to your site. If you've got a particularly high percentage of spammy links, that could explain your penalty.
If it isn't a link based penalty, then you need to look at the different types of penalties. It could be down to duplicate content, cloaking pages, anything really that shows that your site is potentially low quality?
To get it removed, you just need to identify the penalty, rectify the issues and then submit a reinclusion request. That being said, some penalties are automated and only last for a limited period of time. If you fix your issues and wait, then hopefully your penalty will be lifted.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards,Lewis
I think your story is one that resounds with many other site owners. You didn't set out to manipulate the search engines on purpose, but that's how it ended up looking in the eyes of Google. Google can't see you reasoning, they just see the results. That's why it's so important that you think through everything you do online--you don't want to get flagged for something that was an honest mistake and have to climb your way out a hole you didn't even realize you were standing it!
Yeah, Ironically, Our own website is probably one of the only ones we've never really worked on as we've never really needed an online presence to get work. That being said, It's never good to have a penalty and totally fall off the cliff so we wanted to get this penalty lifted.
It is a shame that there isn't really any reasoning. It's also very unhelpful that you get told you've received a penalty, but you never actually get told what links are causing the issue. It's very time consuming and when we hadn't done any real SEO, it was initially quite hard to figure out where the issue had come from.
@Nick - Yeah right. I suppose you also think Lance Armstrong was just doing what he needed to do to make it a level playing field? ;-) I appreciate Pinpoint coming out and saying, "ok, here's what happened and how we fixed it." But, come on... why do you think they were using the anchor text: "Web Design Yorkshire | Pinpoint Designs" in the footer of every client site?
To manipulate the search results! I don't fault them for doing this, but I highly doubt they were oblivious and that it wasn't an intentional strategy to boost their rankings for "web design yorkshire." They made a mistake and fixed it -case closed. Let's not turn it into a, "we had no idea what we were doing."
@Jben,
I had similar thoughts initially but Pinpoint aren't claiming that they weren't trying to improve their rankings for these search terms. The real issue is that it is genuinely not always clear to webmasters at what point otherwise natural attempts to market your business start to breach Google's guidelines. Some would use that tactic simply because they've seen others do it and they might have no idea they're running risks of breaching Google's guidelines. Does it look artificial? I think one could have an opinion either way. If I look at businesses advertising offline e.g. on vehicles they will always advertise the nature of their business i.e. the target keywords in addition to the name of their business (if the name doesn't reveal it already). Google I guess would argue that you have to study and observe their guidelines (a bit like 'ignorance of the law is no defence') but it's a complex web so I have sympathy with some webmasters who run into problems.
Thanks for sharing your personal insights on a hot topic. There are still a lot of webmasters who are unable to overcome it. However, I've personally tried the reconsideration method previously but no success so far. One of my clients had tons of low quality links pointing back to his website and we contacted hundreds of webmasters manually so i know exactly how terrible this whole process is.
At the moment, the focus is shifting to Guest blog and i believe people will be over-using it in future. Shall we anticipate another penalty for it?
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of webmasters who are struggling to remove penalties. We took on a client in the USA recently who was hit with a manual penalty due to spamming forum sites and using social media bookmarks.
They had over 40k links pointing at their site from lots of different forums. They'd been using Fiverr.com to get their backlinks up and it had been working for years. Suddenly, their traffic and income stopped overnight so they were in a bit of trouble.
We started by finding out if they had any usernames and passwords for the forums they'd been spamming. Within 24 hours, they'd managed to find around 20,000 login details for the site. We purchased a copy of XRumer, and setup a spreadsheet then configured it to login to each of the websites and remove the links that had been originally added using Xrumer.
We managed in the space of about 2 months to remove about 27,000 of the 40k+ links, but unfortunately Google still weren't happy. We then manually started going through the list and trying to contact webmasters. Many of the websites didn't even have contact forms which made this hard and eventually, the client told us to stop work as they couldn't afford to continue the costs incurred with clearing up their profile. It was literally weeks of solid work to try and clear it for them.
They did see a slight rise in traffic when we were removing links, but penalties can be very hard to shift. I think you're probably right with guest blogging, it won't be long before sites that are overusing it get hit. The way forward is creating links from all different sources that build your brand up. Rather than manipulating the search engines, it's trying to create great content that people naturally share. It's a slow game these days!
Wait, you can use Xrumer to remove Xrumer spam? Ahhhh! I haven't ever looked into this software as I thought its use was to *create* not to *manage.* I have a client who used Fiverr spam and another who was definitely XRumer/SENuked ... but I have the login details. I may need to look into this more. Thanks!
Yeah, one day I thought 'I wonder if you can use a piece of software that spams to remove links if you've got access to the usernames and passwords', so I set off on a track and started looking for it.
Basically, create a new campaign and use the URLs of the links that you want to remove as your 'links list' containing the username and password. You then need to update your options/advanced options settings and check the box that says 'Posting on behalf of'.
It's worth looking at another 'registered accounts.txt' file as the format used for the links list as you need to do something along the lines of:
URL U:username P:password
I had problems getting it to update VBulletin Signatures, but apparently you can change some files (xas files?) to get it to overwrite the signature and write new scripts to do it.
Hope this helps!!
PERFECT! That will save me heaps of time! Thanks for detailing how to do this and saving me hours. Appreciate the tip and reply very much!
No problem, If you have any problems, let me know and I'll try to help out. I had no experience with XRumer so I had to play around with it a bit before I could get it working properly.
Kind regards,Lewis
In respect of guest blogging, my feeling is that it is always likely to be a safe route provided you're creating high quality content for high quality blogs. I can't see that it matters if you major on that approach provided you're adding value and not publishing fodder.
Our site had its pr reduced and then immediately after our organic traffic started to slowly but surely reduce, could this have been a penalty that didn't warrant a notice being sent to our webmasters tools. We've never used black hat to build links. My current thought is that google devalued some of the links in our profile. I've seen some for article directories and directory listings. They were a few years before I started they aren't super spammy or black hat but they are article listing sites. So I'm guessing devaluing some of our links had an affect on more then just our pr...
Really it's a great post, A problem with detailed solution ( I understand that don,t keep links on sites for example "website design & developed by " etc). but a question to Pinpoint Designs? Is it good now a day to have a large footer on whole website.
Hi Deepak,
Good question - Generally, I would recommend links only on the footer of the homepage, as this is most likely to get the highest pagerank out of any pages on your site (obviously that's not always the case, but the root domain will generally perform best).
When we were clearing up our links list, we were advised to stay away from site wide links, something that I would suggest others do too!
I hope this helps.
Lewis
Thanks a lot, Lewis. I will implement it.
Deepak
It is fairly obvious we have been hit by algorithmic penguin... all our big pages have dropped from the top of page one to often page 5 or worse... coincidentally those pages happen to have one or two sites linking in their navigation 1000's of times. The site owners ignore my request to remove them.
Over the last couple of years I have gone from 9 staff to just two as a result of lost revenue and spent tens of thousands on a new and supposedly improved web site.
I am now having to spend £1000's in consultancy to do a detailed backlink audit and hope the disavow tool works. Thanks google for allowing my competitors to aggressively target my site or allow well meaning but ignorant webmasters to ruin my business. I have done nothing wrong other than be successful in the past and google has penalized me for things that are out of my control.
Mike
Hello Levis, my website has manually penalized by google so what's i can do ? this my web - manufacturersinindia.com, my website had a pligg script in the past ! currently i am using free classified software and i have not any data my webmasterstools ! i got massage this Google Webmaster Tools: Quality Issues on https://www.manufacturersinindia.com/July 21, 2012Dear site owner or webmaster of https://www.manufacturersinindia.com/,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see ourWebmaster Help Forum for support. by google