When I joined the PSD2HTML team in November 2014, the site had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spammy backlinks for over a year. They'd tried everything to promote a recovery, but nothing worked.
They were ready to admit defeat.
The penalty resulted in the loss of over 80% of their organic traffic.
The story of how this happened is very interesting. PSD2HTML was one of the first companies to market PSD to HTML conversions in 2005. At the peak of their success, they transitioned to an SEO company. In 2013, our relationship with a well-known agency resulted in a manual spam penalty.
The following is a screenshot of what this looked like:
Recovering from the penalty was a very painful process. There were two in-house marketing departments that hired several agencies to analyze over 2,500 linking domains. They spent a year and a half trying to remove the penalty, which included submitting numerous reconsideration requests that failed.
Since we finally had the penalty revoked, we wanted to share our experience with other companies, website owners, and SEOs that might be suffering from the same problem, and include some useful tactics for removing penalties.
It is also important to give credit to our outstanding consultant who helped us overcome the disaster.
Step 1: Create a master penalty removal sheet
The first thing we did was to collect all incoming links pointing to PSD2HTML.com. We then created a master spreadsheet that we could work through to identify possible artificial links. This process involves the following steps:
- Download all links from Google Search Console, using the process described here
- Supplement with links from Majestic.com
- Sort them by root domain using a simple Excel process from Distilled that can be found here
This may sound simple, but it's not. It's important to start with the right data. While it is helpful to have multiple link sources, Google Search Console data is key.
Step 2: Identify links that Google sees as artificial
Typical unnatural links can include articles, link directories, bookmarks, blog comments, malware, guest posts, and scrapers. They include anything where the content exists primarily to influence rankings more than offering genuine content. PSD2HTML.com had very few of these types of links. This is possibly one reason why the penalty had been around for so long. There were some possible unreliable link directories in their link profile. However, there were very few keyword-stuffed submissions or guest posts with links for rankings. It was important to identify the artificial links.
The theory of primary intention
Penalty write-ups typically list types of links that need to be removed. However, as link building methods continue to evolve, the potential types of unnatural links are unlimited. It is very helpful to identify the common denominator for all artificial links, which is the primary intention. If the primary intention of a link is to influence rankings, then it is artificial.
We went through all linking domains in order to develop a list of some interesting link types that fit this description. Despite our previous attempts, we could not access previous responses to reconsideration requests. As a result, no sample links from Google were available. Therefore, we had to start from scratch.
Giveaways
PSD2HTML had a number of links from giveaway promotions, where users could leave comments in return for a chance to win paid services. Paid reviews of services have a long history of being seen as unnatural by the Google Webspam Team. However, it is not necessarily artificial if a company wants to run a giveaway. Since these giveaways didn't have the primary intention of gaining links to influence Google, we decided to keep them.
Again, it wasn’t that simple.
In the case of at least one giveaway, the page had a genuine intention and also contained specific links with artificial elements. For example, here are two links to PSD2HTML.com that appeared on the same page:
- “The world’s first and finest PSD to HTML conversion company, PSD2HTML®, is giving away $400, $300 and $200 worth of services!”
- The leading PSD to HTML slicing service has made outstanding changes to the way they do business and provide services.
These two links are bolded here, but not linked, as one of them was artificial. I'm sure that you can guess which one. The first one was a genuine reference to the company name. The second one was a keyword phrase. Therefore, the giveaway was not artificial, but the keyword link was.
In order to deal with this situation, we kept all of the giveaway links and the domains they were featured on. We drilled down to any pages that also had artificial keyword links and disavowed them individually. When Google denied our first request, none of the sample links were giveaways. We therefore inferred that we’d gotten this one right.
Keyword footer links
PSD2HTML had some sites where they’d done conversion work and gained a keyword link at the footer of the site. This brought up the question as to what degree design firms can legitimately place footer links on client sites. John Mueller talks about this here. The intention idea proved useful here.
In one instance we noticed, the actual brand wasn’t linked, but the keywords were linked, so they were assumed to be artificial.
Sponsor and advertisement links
Sponsor links were absolutely fine. We thought sponsor links (not quite sponsored links) could be artificial and wondered if they’d be identified as artificial. However, these were genuine sponsors, so we left them and it worked out fine.
We also found that image ads were fine. However, they usually only showed up in Majestic data and not in Search Console. Therefore, there wasn't a problem.
Keyword articles, link directories, bookmarks, malware, and scrapers
There were some submission sites with keyword links and the sludge of scrapers that were added to the disavow file. However, the rest of their profile looked clean, so it was submitted.
Step 3: Submission to and response from Google
Our penalty removal consultant had a proven record of eight penalties getting revoked on the first try.
Unfortunately for us, after our submission the Webspam Team returned the following three sample links:
- https://www.tuicool.com/articles/UV3QZf
- https://www.campaignmonitor.com/forums/topic/5542/html-dev-required/
- https://ibartolome.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html
Interpreting Google sample links
The sample links that Google provides in response to reconsideration requests aren’t just samples. The Webspam Team shows you specific link types that still need to be removed. If you can identify the underlying link types provided by Google, it is possible to look through the link data again and find those link types.
Step 4: Identify links that Google sees as artificial from sample links
We thought the three sample links from Google were unusual. This penalty was interesting because the Webspam Team seemed to be highlighting possible new variations of artificial links. These link types appeared regularly and it looked like they were here to stay.
Sample link type #1: Chinese duplicate translation links
The first such link was a Chinese news site. In the past, it had been possible to clear penalties without similar foreign sites causing problems. These sites were posting verbatim articles from SmashingHub. While the URL included the source (https://smashinghub.com/10-best-online-resources-to-convert-psd-to-xhtmlcss.htm?utm_source=tuicool), Google had identified it as an artificial link. We again went through the links looking for duplicate Chinese pages. This was easy to do with the English ones. However, most of them were not duplicate translations.
This article was a duplicate of https://creativeoverflow.net/top-15-psd-to-html-services-to-use/ that was translated into Chinese. This made it more difficult to identify. Although it is tempting to judge a link only based on a language, countries with non-Western scripts form a massive part of the web, and can also offer genuine links to a site. We wanted to keep any genuine links using the primary intention idea, regardless of country or language. This is an example of a genuine link with no duplicate issues: https://www.rysos.com/bbs/redirect.php?fid=49&tid=7586&goto=nextoldset.
I identified duplicate Chinese links by searching for English keyword phrases. For example, most of the duplicates featured English website names. Therefore, by Googling “PSD2HTML" "CSS Chopper" "Direct Basing," it was possible to identify the original English post.
Sample link type #2: Brand name used as keywords with genuine intention
Seeing https://www.campaignmonitor.com/forums/topic/5542/html-dev-required/ marked as artificial was frustrating. This is a forum post link that was given completely genuinely.
However, the link text was “PSD to HTML.” It was used legitimately as a brand name that was rewritten with the number 2 in PSD2HTML converted to the word “to.” There were some giveaway links above with some artificial links using “PSD to HTML” as a keyword phrase to influence Google. Those links were artificial. However, the use of “PSD to HTML” was not artificial since the underlying primary intention was completely genuine.
How do you deal with a genuine link that is marked as artificial due to brands listed as keywords? In order to solve this problem, we called Google out on artificial links. In our second reconsideration request message, we argued that while the link text consisted of keywords, they were used as a completely genuine reference to a brand. Therefore, the act of identifying the link as artificial was in itself artificial, since the link itself was entirely genuine.
The frustration of having a genuine link marked as artificial became a tool to add weight to our argument and conversation with the Webspam Team. They regularly respond with sample links that can be argued to be genuine, or are already in the disavow file. These sample links are very important. They can be used in your next presentation to the Webspam Team.
Sample link type #3: Financial offer to influence links
This link was very obscure. However, it could be seen as artificial. It was impressive how the Webspam Team isolated this one link type.
This link was in Spanish: https://ibartolome.blogspot.kr/2012_01_01_archive.html
The writer reported receiving an email offering a Christmas promotion. They would receive $50 off of their next order from "our friends P2H" (P2H.com redirects to PSD2HTM.com).
There was a subtle, but important, difference between this link and the giveaways. Although the giveaways were promotional, they did not appear to be directly created with the intention of gaining a link. In the email, PSD2HTML offered $50 on their next order to bloggers with whom they had no previous relationship, which raised questions about their motivation. The "influenced-recommendation-tone" became clearer as the post continued. This indicated that the emails were sent in order to gain links.
We searched for similar links and found one more. This type of task can be difficult when there are many easy-to-spot, low-quality links. The standard artificial link types were largely irrelevant. The process of searching for the links that matched the exact link types implied by the Webspam Team’s three sample links took real precision.
Step 5: Second submission and response from Google
We submitted this work with our explanation to Google and received a very quick response.
Image credit: Comics Alliance
Euphoria. Penalty revoked.
A note on emails and outreach
We didn’t send any emails to get the penalties removed.
There are a number of differences between only using the disavow tool and also using manual outreach. We had the following findings about the use of email outreach: Email outreach is not required to revoke a penalty. Clients and providers often feel they must use outreach to revoke a penalty. This can significantly add to the costs and timeframe.
It is possible to commit resources to email outreach. However, it is not true that both outreach and manual action removal are needed. Once you realize this, you can have more control and save time and money. Google penalties are a psychological phenomenon. Therefore, getting the “No manual webspam actions found” message showing quickly is very important.
Hey Anna
It is tricky with regards to keyword rich domains - how do you decide what is good or bad? I think the big takeaway here is that you can push back a little and if you have a keyword rich brand name use a simple URL link or remove spaces so there is no murky middle ground:
psd2html
psd2html.com
www.psd2html.com
https://psd2html.com
In many respects it is good to know that this is not some Google AI answering the reconsideration requests and there is a chance to actually reason with a real human being given the work has been done. Push back if you feel something is legit.
On a side note - we once worked with a client that had really gone to town and done absolutely everything possible yet still got a knock back on what I think was the third request. We advised them to do no more clean up but simply wait 3 months and try again. They did that, reiterated what they had said before and that time the request went through so whether there is a time / effort / human element here who knows. You just have to persevere and certainly, appealing to the human nature of the reviewer and not trying to bullshit them is pretty important.
Good to hear you got this sorted. I used PSD2HTML many times over the years for design to html work and quality was always solid.
Cheers
Marcus
Hi Marcus,
With keyword domains if the domain matches your brand and you like it then go with it, psd2html.com for example was created well before EMD updates and such like and it's a name that matches their service perfectly. While we often seeing ourselves as constantly trying to catch up with Google's constant changes, it may also be the other way round, Google is playing constant catchup to find the nuggets of authoritative high-value content amongst seas of more derivative wordiness.
Also there are still niches I see every day where a keyword domain ranks well, and also even if a domain doesn't have a keyword, inner pages and sections often do well to include a keyword as part of the whole URL. So I don't think keywords in the domain itself cause trouble for artificial links, to be honest in this case I think the Google Webspam Team reviewer saw a forum post with the words "PSD to HTML" with spaces, according to whatever criteria they use to assess artificial links it came up as a forum post using a keyword link, and so they flagged it feasibly without differentiating between a forum keyword link for links and a forum keyword link as an actual genuine reference. Pure speculation of course but when Google came back with those sample links saw it as just a formality to meet their criteria.
Also as you say getting a response from Google is really nice, some actually prefer manual actions to algorithmic ones because you can deduce more precisely the links that are causing the trouble. As the number of manual actions you clear grows, the sample links you see build up into this composite picture of what links Google really sees as artificial. And when you do get a lemon of a sample artificial link come back, it's just ammo to use the next round you can show the inconsistency to them.
Interesting you said just waiting helps, had penalties here too where possibly just with time they see you've done the work and the recon request goes through with minimal change from a previous request. So time passing can possibly help, at the same time the speculation on how long to wait is exactly that it's speculation, every rejection message I get I usually submit within a few days of getting the message, go through the links again and then submit straight away.
"done absolutely everything possible yet still got a knock back on what I think was the third request" - see this regularly, not always but so often it's the "Google Wait", where the link data you submit on is correct, but while you're waiting for a response Webmaster Tools data updates and they come back with sample links that weren't in GWT link data when you submitted. Webmasters come back saying:
- "we sent three rounds of emails"
- "we went through every link from GWt, Majestic, Ahrefs, OSE"
and so on, but check those latest links from GWT, and there's new ones in there, so many times people compile all these data sources but they aren't being systematic with the GWT links. So here's a tip: checking GWT links while you wait for them to respond really increases your first-time hit rate :). Anyway waiting got it cleared and Google revoked it, nice one.
The bad thing with WMT links is that links sometimes appear with old dates. For example comparing 2 WMT link lists I saw in "newer" file links with date older (3 months) than date of download "older" link list.
Hi Marcus,
Thank you! It is so great to hear that you know and use us, kind of proves Google's penalty wrong once again, doesn't it? :)
As for a keyword-rich domain name, I think Jeremy is right with his explanation. Besides, I think psd2html is seen by Google as a brand name rather than a keyword and not to sound too cocky, but I am pretty sure "psd2html" as a keyword seems to have become popular after PSD2HTML.com as a brand became popular too.
Greg makes a great comment above, regarding the need for having the right mindset when dealing with these sorts of issues. One of the elements that continued to shine through in the piece was your team apparently maintained a "this-too-will-pass" mindset.
To that, I say bravo :)
Thanks for sharing your story with us, Anna.
RS
Thank you so much, Ronell :)
Hello, Anna
This is one of the finest manual penalties revoked example I have seen. Prevention is better than cure , I always use Ahrefs and OSE to check the link profile and monitor them on the regular basis. I really appreciate that you shared those unwanted links here with the article. This can give everyone a clear idea for how they should follow the guidelines.
OSE? It's useless tool if You're looking for links. Better choose majestic so combined with ahrefs and Your WMT You could say You have 99.999% of links. Also there's no tool which will do link analysis job for You. Of course some of them will tell You link is bad or good but trust me, experience is a must here. I saw links marked as "good/healthy/no risk" shown as examples of bad links in google message about unnatural links and vice versa. No tool will read Your website and check what is brand for You and what is money keyword. For example for apple.com "apple" keyword is brand but for everybody else it's a money keyword (if they have large number of links with that anchor).
Yeah I still see that the site traffic is down from where it was before the penalty. Total bummer that the BIG G has so much power that they can tank your biz with one single mouse click. I wish instead of giving a penalty they would just not give value to the links they think/consider are spammy. Then the problem would be solved and you would not have to worry about NEG seo as it does happen.
Google lifted penalty but recovery is different thing. If top10 was mad with bad links (in google eyes) and there're no good links, don't expect top10 for nothing. Consider penalty lift as allowing doing effective link building again (without "old techniques"). Penalty lifted - focus on seo again.
This is one of more interested case study i've ever seen in Moz.
I have similar issue (w/o manual penalty) caused from scrappers. As dev company we're building apps for AppStore and Google Play. And scrappers constantly crawl that sites to build their own sites. I follow similar steps but also included Ahrefs and WebMeUp as sources of backlinks in mega sheet with all known links.
In result i was disavowing 220 domains where only from one (1) domain i have link created from us. One domain was where we submit app as software directory where domain expired and new one is selling links for "insurance". All other 218 domains was crawler generated sites.
It's sad story because such sites was harming our sites in result making us nervous about linking.
Hi Peter, feel your pain with having to constantly update disavow files, Google are pretty smart with spotting which sites are scrapers and beyond a user's control, but still while the fear surrounding penalties has subsided since the original frenzy when Google first started issuing manual actions, the actual number of scrapers has increased dramatically.
Also Google link data is much more comprehensive now than before I find, it used to regularly be that adding external link sources like Ahrefs and Majestic for example easily added 30-50% more links in that didn't show in Webmaster Tools data, now though while those secondary data sources are still extremely helpful, Google picks up many more scrapers.
There's an interesting graph here https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/ showing the massive increase in DMCA take down requests in the past few years, tangentially related to disavows but again an indicator that while the initial fearful reaction has subsided, the general increase in scraper content is booming.
So what can we do:
- well, check your link profile regularly. Every site can benefit from a disavow file, there's nonsense links in every profile and link profiles are a ratios game, so if you disavow them you increase the ratio of links Google sees as genuine and decrease the artificial ones. I think that's worth doing.
- don't be fearful. Fear just paralyzes everything. We don't link because we're fearful. Then we don't grow because we don't have new links so we get more fearful, it goes round and round. The theory of primary intention above, if a link comes from primarily from a genuine intention to provide value and build a relationship, it's worth pursuing. The big secret of penalties is that actually, they are the biggest opportunity to build links, because now more than ever spam isn't rewarded and quality is. You no longer need to spam to rank, and before for many sites they often felt they did. Sure it isn't perfect, there are plenty of niches where artificial links rule as well as they ever did, but anyway, my two cents is you don't need to be nervous about linking. Could talk about this all day, hope all this helps :)
Jeremy
"Google penalties are a psychological phenomenon."
^ Truer words have never been said...
Interesting to read your process of getting the penalty revoked. Unfortunately for smaller business without the knowledge or resources of things like this, it isn't this "easy" (not that it's easy at all - even for the experienced), and can completely destroy businesses.
Thanks for you comment.
It is true that smaller businesses sometimes simply get killed by a penalty like this. But I actually originally included one more paragraph full of pain and tears with details on how it affected our business (it got cut out by MOZ editors, probably they just could not endure all that pain:). Still it was very harsh - the loss of such a huge bulk of organic traffic lead to a conspicuous decline of direct traffic too; and as organic and direct were the highest converting ones - it meant the loss of 20-25% of the overall revenue. People had to be fired, ad budgets had to be seriously increased - it was a very rough period.
And it is very good that being big, we survived to share this story :) I do hope it will help smaller companies get rid of their penalties by themselves. Or at least they now know who to turn to for help. (I mentioned the guy that consulted us at the beginning of the post).
Hey Anna, wish I'd seen the pain paragraph missed that one, sitting at home going through link sheets day after day, reminds me how awfully real they can be, also didn't realize it was 20-25% revenue with jobs lost, this is really unfortunate. Can speculate on the underlying motives of Google giving penalties all day, in the end while their crackdown on spam is laudable, well they sure did take their time responding to artificial links. Articles, blog comment spam and link directories, of which your site had virtually zero by the way making it a particularly bizarre, possibly even unnecessary penalty, ruled since what 2003-2013. Yes the links were awful, but when they worked that well for so long, is it so completely the webmaster's fault. Anyway, PSD2HTML is awesome, you can attract as many great links as you want, all the best :)
Thank you so much, Jeremy! :)
Anna - I may have missed it, but you say you didn't do outreach to remove links so how were you in fact removing the artificial links?
Nope, we didn't. Just added them to the disavow tool. Most of the links were ligit, so there actually was no other reason to delete them, except Google. So we disavowed them for Google and left them as is for the rest of the world. :)
Disavow is better imo and here's why:
- when You disavow bad links, traffic from them (if any) will still be the same - google is happy, You're happy
- when You delete bad links, traffic from them (if any again) will drop to 0 - google is happy, You're not so happy
Interesting article but one thing I am not completely clear on (or maybe I'm a dope and missed it) - did Google give you a Manual Webspam penalty, or did you just see a divebomb on the traffic graph prompting the cleanup?
I have a client that has a huge divebomb in organic traffic from a few years ago. There is no webspam action noted in webmaster tools.
I am adept at using tools for link cleanup, but thus far haven't seen much of a recovery. I did notice they have a TON of links from what appears to be a scraper called pinbud.com. Wondering how much of an effect these sites can cause if webmaster tools shows 10,000+ links from a site like this. Any insight on that?
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your comment, here goes with your questions:
- " did Google give you a Manual Webspam penalty, or did you just see a divebomb on the traffic graph prompting the cleanup?"
Yes, confirm this is for a manual action with an actual message in Google Webmaster Tools.
- "I am adept at using tools for link cleanup, but thus far haven't seen much of a recovery."
Sure you know this but link cleanup itself doesn't always means a recovery in rankings, when a site is algorithically "penalized" what often happens is links that used to cause rankings are devalued, so that to rank again you need to both disavow links that Google sees as artificial and generate more genuine links that Google sees as indicating authority to the site. The more a site's rankings were dependent on links Google sees as artificial, the more likely new links are needed to grow rankings again.
"Recovery" is really a very personal term, it's based on a sense of past glory as rankings that were lost have been taken away and need to be regained. The reality is Google's algorithms have precious little interest in any past rankings or personally how well our site used to do. Previously Google's algo ranked a site higher, now it ranks a site lower, so logically from the algorithmic point of view in both cases the site is ranked exactly where it should be according to that algo. If the client site lost rankings a few years ago it's likely they then had built links from a few years before that, so it seems plausible that the site's backlink profile simply has accumulated a significant number of links that used to cause rankings and now they don't.
- pinbud.com is a local listings site, so yes it is a scraper however the links are all brand name or urls rather than for example keyword spam, so this would count as a business listing more than an actual artificial link with intention to influence rankings. If you disavowed it there would be little to lose, similarly by keeping it I think those links from that one site alone are less likely to be a major influence on your client site's rankings. As above there are likely older links that used to cause rankings that Google isn't giving so much value to anymore. It's a ratios game, cleanup the artificial ones, generate new better links, and wait for Google to catch up.
Also if you ever want to let me know the URL just shoot me a PM here or hit me up on my website mentioned above, not going to sell you anything just a fresh pair of eyes to look at the backlink profile see if we can figure it out together, totally up to you, hope this all helps thanks,
Jeremy
Hey Anna,
Congratulations, got promoted from YouMoz, and it was required..Also, thanks to the moz team for promoting this blog here..Let me come to the point quickly, I had faced such issues for my client (Baby-Direct, Australia)and revoked manual action penalty on the very first time..It's not difficult if you do everything in a right direction but it becomes too much hard if you lost your authority and trust in google eye..
Let me share what I did for revoked the penalty - Downloaded all the backlinks from Webmasters and Ahrefs -> Filter the spam backlinks and removed the duplicates in the sheet -> Started removing the forum comments, spamy articles, listing, etc (Had login details for some sites), -> started email outreach and requested for removing our links from their sites..Till this process, 65% of the links were removed..Now, took rest of the links and disavow all of them..
We took screenshots of our email outreach and also removed backlinks, so we can show our efforts to google for removing unnatural links from the website...Then did the reconsideration request and within 4 days, got response by Google that - "Manual Action Revoked" and seriously that feeling was awesome as it was truly a positive result :)
I hope, people would love this post and it will definitely get boost ...Thanks and keep sharing :)
I think it is an important lesson to remember, getting free traffic from Google is not a sound business plan. I see so many companies make this mistake. Thanks for sharing
Hey Anna, I really like the way you explain. To remove the manual Google penalty is not everyones cup of tea.
But if you really want remove it, then you must focus on your backlink analysis process. And trust me it's the most painful process I ever felt.
Last time we did the same for the our one of client( eCommerece service provider) and after 3 attempts we got the success. And here I explain the entire process of removing manual penalty.
Step 1. Finding about the Penalty in Webmaster tool (Search traffic -> Manual Action Menu Option)
Step 2. Discover the Backlink Profile with the help of Google Webmaster Tool(Search Traffic -> Links To Your Site), Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, MOZ Open Site Explorer
Step 3. Identified the Low Quality, Low Authority, No Relevance Links
Step 4. Removed that all the Low Quality backlinks (one of the most hurdle stage)with the help of that website/blog owners.(E-Mail Outreach)
Step 5. We use Disavow tool to complement our efforts. (You just need to submit Top Level Domain in your disavow file)
Step 6. Pest Controlling web Site. (Before submission of your website for reconsideration, go to your website and makesure that you're not using any spammy tactics as per the Google Guidelines mentioned.)
Step 7. Sent Reconsideration Request
And...Finally Manual Spam Revoked
Thanks
Thank you ClickMatix for your Informative comment post
Very interesting case study. Getting rid of a penalty can be super-easy (1-shot recoveries do happen - in the last year I think I got rid of maybe 8-10 for clients with first-recon approved) but yeah, it's usually a process that involves cutting "good" links because you just don't know where the line really is. You can't get rid of everything. You can't get rid of just the "obvious spam" or they say no.
Having the right mindset for penalty recovery is extremely important. We had a client who had lost 98% of their traffic due to the first 2 Panda updates - they didn't have the right mindset and gave up before we recovered it all. Others have seen huge recoveries by sticking with it.
I know that. "We I have to change if others got even worse content than mine and they weren't penalized?!"
This is a complete article.
There are many websites which is effected badly by the Google Penalties and never recovered. I know many online marketing experts including me, who tried a lot to get back the previous ranking, visibility and traffic but most of the time we failed. I must confess, sometime when we tried and recovered from the penalties were completely unaware how it happened. But after reading this post, i am confident and very much sure to recover the penalties,
Very very effectively written post, practically it will going to help many of us.. thanks @Anna
The problem is what You expect. Think again about not recovered websites. For example there were 1000 links, 600 bad, 400 good. Those 400 aren't (probably) too strong to get them back to top10 but penalty is lifted. For me lifting penalty is allowing to do effective linkbuilding (but without previous "techniques") if we talk about link based penalty. If You saw positive message from google, don't wait, focus on seo again.
Hi, only just saw this was published, could I possibly just add I'm the "outstanding consultant" mentioned above, very happy for Anna and the PSD2HTML team to have credit this is the result of a six month odyssey to try and get a penalty writeup published in Moz,
Also Anna was just amazing to deal with, the level of detail for example with the sample links being given, most writeups don't show these but PSD2HTML was happy to provide them, so it offers a new level of insight into the thinking behind the penalty removal process. Artificial links are still very much part of the SEO landscape and what really constitutes an artificial link is often based on speculation, so the hope is the exactness of the process outlined above can help people to more accurately identify truly artificial links while keeping the good ones.
If you do the right thing always ends Google forgiving your mistakes, for example, recently the website of a friend of mine was not penalized but almost. My friend made a mistake and put in the robots.txt file that search engines will not index any of the websites of your site. A few days your web dropped from 40% to 20% visibility in Google, luckily he realized his mistake, arranged robots.txt and in two or three weeks the web regained visibility.
That wasn't penalty but just mistake. Check also blocked resources in robots.txt file.
Hi Anna.
In Your case brand isn't "psd2html" because of money keyword in that. Instead of this better use "psd2html.com" to be safe. Brand is if You create/invent/develop a thing with completely new name. Coke, ipad, etc are brands but in Your case it's shortened money keyword imo. That's why google gave You negative first time.
You're right brands with keywords can be tricky, think with this one even the PSD2HTML was fine, what caused the trouble was sometimes it got spaced for example "PSD 2 HTML". There was one forum link in particular where the link was completely genuinely given, but because of the spaces it got picked up. They had a great link profile, and so many sites with artificial link profiles, really the artificial penalties themselves have an artificial element, it's great articles and keyword blog comments don't work anymore they were destructive and ruined sites, but as for artificial links, still working. Anyway, I guess on balance things are better than before, cheers Krzysztof
I'm very happy to see that part:
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There are a number of differences between only using the disavow tool and also using manual outreach. We had the following findings about the use of email outreach: Email outreach is not required to revoke a penalty. Clients and providers often feel they must use outreach to revoke a penalty. This can significantly add to the costs and timeframe.
It is possible to commit resources to email outreach. However, it is not true that both outreach and manual action removal are needed. Once you realize this, you can have more control and save time and money. Google penalties are a psychological phenomenon. Therefore, getting the “No manual webspam actions found” message showing quickly is very important.
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I'm working with disavow only and got results. Manual, algo - no matter. I'm telling this to clients all the time, but in most cases they're saying "but top specialists said it's a must!". Hah, Maybe "top specs" will try do penalty lift that way?;)
Hey Krzysztof,
It's great to see you here, agree completely with this "I'm working with disavow only and got results. Manual, algo - no matter", yup totally agree, disavow works just fine. What clients sometimes forget is the disavow tool was created precisely because manual outreach didn't work, before the disavow tool there was a time when the only way to get a penalty revoked was to do manual outreach - and if it didn't work, you couldn't get the penalty removed. So all those cheap submissions, the reams of keyword blog comments, had to try and get them all removed manually, it was crazy. So the disavow tool has to work, if it didn't work why would Google make it?
As for "top specialists say it's a must", only difference between top specialists and people like us is let's face it, they do way more promotion saying how they are a top specialist. And good on them - having a skill, and having the skill to sell that skill and build authority, are very different skills :). There was a whole lot of fear and hope when the penalty furore first hit, people were very eager to have those penalties removed and someone provided the service. Good on them, they filled a demand and likely did a good, if rather expensive job.
I think actually if you want to mail out to try and remove links it can be a good idea, the thing is clients believe they have to do manual outreach, and agencies happily perpetuate this belief possibly to increase sales. You can add a whole lot of hours onto a project for manual outreach. So clients should know that it's a choice, if they want it sure that's great, but for the purpose of just getting a penalty revoked in itself, agree absolutely not necessary.
You know I've been looking at Matthew Woodward's zero-linkbulding approach here, if you see the first few months you can see how he got his blog going from zero to $9k/mth in just like 4 months. He didn't link build. Well he did, but he didn't. He just setup Google alerts and got contributing and adding value everywhere. I mean it was places like WarriorForum and DigitalPoint, but still enough to get build authority. From his first few months just saw he contributed around 200-400 times/mth, and wrote around 3-8 posts a month. Backlinko I think writes even fewer posts. That's maybe one approach I actually possibly feel comfortable with, creating authority by being a giver and just keep pumping out the value, it's still selfish of course but at least it's responding to genuine, preexisting needs rather than just constantly persuading people to buy. Actually tried setting up a google penalty alert just now, it's all self-promotional stuff about google penalty services of course :). Might just set it up for SEO or link building, people don't know what to do, there's always folks needing help. Anyway I'm talking too much again, good luck man,
Jeremy
Hey Jeremy!
It's about money. Paying for useless service with 2-3% of success rate (or less) is waste of money (for the client only). Disavow works not only because of that cheap massive submissions not possible to delete. Google can't tell You any of link is Yours. They simply don't have proofs and that's the reason (for me) manual outreach isn't needed to get penalty lifted.
I got few clients who did manual link removal job but Google sent them negative answers. Wasted $ and zero effect. Again - the key is link analysis, not showing "effort". IF client wants waste money - ok... can do that. But most clients simply don't believe that manual link removal isn't needed;)
Hey Krzysztof :)
It's refreshing to hear you say it like it is. Yes, it's about the money. When the penalties first came out writeup processes got created, few dared to go against them they couldn't afford the risk, and so it was harder to test anything different. Manual outreach is for the most part an expensive process with minimal results. You've made my day :)
that's really interesting. thanks for sharing this informations with us :D
Hello Anna,
Its outstanding case study on Manual Google Penalty in 5 Steps.i followed all the above steps its working awesome.and really its again nice moz blog for me.I learned new things from here.
You followed the steps, well if you ever actually apply them to a real site let me know, would be really interesting thanks
Maybe I should share my story in a YouMoz post about a Google double penalty (Google DP) I cleaned up not long ago. It started as a partial manual penalty, then it turned into a sitewide penalty and the whole story started with a negative SEO bomb. :-)
Great post - I really enjoy reading case studies, since it brings a human element to the article instead of reading a "do this because I said so" post. A question I have about your analysis and communication with the webspam team is about scraper sites, bookmarks, and directories. When the webspam team sent a sample set of links back, were the scrapers in that list or was it ever acknowledged that those particular links were ignored? I know a lot of people say just add those because they're not beneficial anyway, but was it confirmed by the webspam team that you should add those types of links to a disavow file?
Bookmarking sites and directories serve little value unless they're niche relevant, so what was your process of identifying which ones to keep and which to toss? That's a very subjective process at times, so any insight would be great to hear.
Thanks again for sharing your story!
Thank you, Eric! As for the scrapers, in fact, we did receive an example of the bad link from Google that kind of implied that scrapers need to be disavowed.
It was this one - https://www.tuicool.com/articles/UV3QZf - which is scraped from the original https://smashinghub.com/10-best-online-resources-to...
So it was not just our judgement.
What about search engine scrapers like m.biz? That seems to come up a lot in audits. I've heard Google could be smart enough to ignore those types, but I add them to the file anyway. Any preference on how to treat those types of scrapers?
This is a great question, in the original penalty writeups that came out when manual actions were having such a fearful effect on the webmaster community, everything that was a scraper was bad and really the pressure to get penalties revoked was so great that few had the luxury of being able to test which links actually got through a review process and which didn't.
I've always wanted actually to do a penalty where I would have license to revoke it with the absolute bare minimum of disavowed links, it's very likely a significant number of scrapers would get through.
That said, a few notes:
- I've never tested not disavowing m.biz links, they're a scraper network so admit have always included them. If anyone has a penalty where I can have permission to try not disavowing them, do let me know. Personally I believe it would likely be possible to get a manual action revoked without disavowing them, just there is so little reason to keep them the possible risk of them causing another round of a reconsideration request means I keep them in. Would love to test this.
- I have had manual penalty sample links where scraper sites or sites of similar quality have come up, so the exact extent could still be tested but they do have an effect, and similarly older sites where just the general buildup of scraper links has led to a manual action.
- One thing that scrapers can do is turn internal keyword links into external ones. For example you've interlinked pages on your sites using keyword links, then when that page content get scraped and posted on scraper sites, you now have keyword links from your own site content pointing to your site. Those links are then artificial keyword links, so this is another reason why scrapers are bad news.
- The number of scrapers is increasing. Webmaster Tools link data is significantly more comprehensive than it used to be, and especially sites in high CPC niches like health or finance the number of scrapers can be significant, there can be thousands of domains lurking in the scraper sludge of a link profile. Link profiles are as I keep saying a ratios game, so as the number of scrapers mounts up compared to the number of genuine links, there comes a stage where personally I really wouldn't want them all in my link profile. Google is smart enough to largely discount them, then again in every niche there are still unnumbered sites that still rank due to artificial links, and also sites in the unfortunate position where a scraper is actually ranking above the original site and Google gets it wrong. So they are both extremely smart, and yet not that smart either, might as well make their job as easy as we can to discern the true value of a site.
- Finally one link type I have tested is "domain analysis sites", you know the little seo metric sites that give seo analysis of sites. Can confirm they get through the Webspam Team review process no problem, so yes you can to some degree at least get auto-generated sites through the review process.
Hope all this helps, thanks Eric,
Jeremy
Same is my question too. Its not always easy to identify which ones to disavow. Please throw some light on this in detail,
m.biz? Depends what links it has pointing to Your website. If domain names - leave it. If money keywords - to disavow. If they just copy Your content - fill DMCA notice and abuse to server admin/owner.
Something I rarely see discussed when it comes to Google algorithm penalties is mindset.
What was the mindset in that company that caused them to take the shortcut, break the rules, engage in bad tactics?
You can clean up as many penalties as Google can throw at you, but if you don't change the way you do business it'll happen again. That's the thing with SEO - it's bad. What we're doing today we'll probably be cleaning up tomorrow.
I know a lot of people reading this site don't want to hear that, but it's the truth, and it's what Google has been telling us for quite some time now. Mindsets need to move away from manipulation, er...optimization.
Hi Greg, thanks for your comment.
I agree that SEO has been abused by so many shady agencies with so many black-hat techniques that it is now considered a bad thing "to do SEO", whereas, there is nothing wrong in making your site more search engine friendly. But it's done, SEO has gained a negative connotation.
But another point we were trying to make in this article is that even when we totally discontinued any shady link building through an SEO agency a lot of purely natural and white-hat links got highlighted by Google as manipulative. Like for example - https://www.campaignmonitor.com/forums/topic/5542/html-dev-required/ or translations of the content containing links to our brand. We have not manipulated anyone to get those links, they were genuinely given for all the hard work the company has done. It is really upsetting to be penalized for them and to be made to get rid of them.
So, yes, I agree that some SEOs have become overly bold and abusive of Google, but Google in their turn are being unjust and inconsistent at times too.
Big fan of this mindset theme, penalties have a definite psychological element to them and the fear and hope of them continues to influence the webmaster community possibly even more than the actual penalties themselves. For me the people who have the biggest chance of not only revoking the penalty but re-patterning their behavior to sustainable growth are those that for example:
- forget the past and look to the future."We want our rankings back" is an incredibly personal point of view, but Google is an algo and more impersonal and processing more data than most of us can really ever imagine. You get a phenomenally detached view of the world going through millions and millions of links, the pyramid of links from the scraper/spam base to the minute pinnacle of great, non-derivative, truly original content, really is a mirror of the human condition. Penalty zen, I feel luck to be there really. If you want your rankings really back, you'll also want your current lost rankings, why? Because logically, they both came from Google. Any attempt to try to get back rankings as quickly as possible and retrace previous success, is likely to be repetitive behavior which will mimic the very patterns that caused the penalty in the first place.
Written so much about this point can't write any others, just one though does come to mind. Brian Dean at Backlinko.com wrote 32 blog posts. Very wellknown blog, linkbuilding guru. 32 posts. In his words, from the newsletter he sends out I think: "Backlinko didn’t grow despite having 32 posts. It grew BECAUSE of it."
You get into that mindset, of creating truly 10x content (also known as the Skyscraper Method but it's Rand's site, and well happy to call it 10x), getting past the infinite churn of derivative blog posts that sure, they aren't artificial links or anything, but they're still offering really limited value, and coupled with creative distribution and outreach really, penalties just fade in nothing. There are so many content opportunities, so many ways to better what's already out there, growth becomes inevitable.
Thank you! Very helpful for identifying unnatural keyword phrases and other unnatural links.
Thank you Anna! Very helpful for identifying keyword.
You are right Albert
How to know you are hit by any penalty. I do not found any message in webmasters tool.
There are two types of Google penalties - manual and algorithmic. In this article we were dealing with a manual penalty - in the case with manual penalties you receive a message in your Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console).
But if you have just spotted a dramatic drop of organic traffic without any manual penalty messages in your GWT, the chances are high that your site got under an algorithmic update. To understand your next steps you should define the date when it happened, check this Google algorithm updates' history https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and try to match the date of your traffic loss with one of the updates. Study what that update was targeting, try to relate it to your site and fix the issues. Then wait for Google to re-index your website (1-4 weeks, no need to file reconsideration request in this case) and observe if your organic traffic is coming back.
Actually I put together an infographic on troubleshooting Google penalties at my previous job at a marketing agency, it might help you figure out your issue - https://www.promodo.com/blog/infographic-troubleshooting-google-penalties-how-to-get-your-organic-traffic-back/
Yep, forgot to mention, what I said above, is true if you have not made any major changes to your website and still experienced a dramatic drop of organic traffic. Of course, if it happened after a major redesign, chahge of content or switching to a different host - the reasons might be much more obvious and might not involve a penalty at all.
Hope it helps and makes sense :)
Excellent article you shared very useful information often Google punishes spam links and I think many people would like to know how to get rid of it, thank you for information
You are most welcome Mihail :)
Useful advice. But can I express my ideas? To remove a massive Manual Google Penalty, I think that we should list all your incoming links on a master spreadsheet, filter out incoming links that are unfavorable in google’s eyes, interpreting google’s answer to you, and submitting your reconsideration request again.
Anna,
Thanks for sharing this with the world. Glad to see you managed to get penalty lifted. The case study shows that there is hope of recovering a site from a penalty.
One of my sites was recently slapped with a pure spam penalty and I'm working towards getting it lifted.
You can read about my progress here https://www.georgenjogu.com/google-penalty-recovery...
Very interesting article
I'll save to favorites
Thanks Anna
Thanks Rafa, good luck to you
Very useful case study. Great bounce back for psd2html.
Great post!!!
Great comment!!!
At last some new tricks to identify Google Penalty.
Sometimes people trying to do things well and white SEO don't recognise their own mistakes (I am one of them :)
Thanks
Hi Makkao,
It's encouraging you can acknowledge this, agree completely a lot of "white hat SEO" really those hats are a murky gray at best, so many webmasters simply have no idea where to start with getting good links so they hire a self-professed white hat provider and longterm the chances of those links working out well isn't so great. White hat also takes a long time, however it really is worth it, takes a while to get going but you end up with a link profile that can power sustainable rankings for years to come.
There's no whitehat:) All we do is to boost traffic/seo visibility so unnatural in google eyes. Even writing content is unnatural because we write it for seo purposes to get more clients/sell more products;)
Your steps are fast I you want to recuperate your website for a Google penalty. But don't forget that the best way to repair a penalty is not to have a penalty doing things in the best way:)
Agree doing things the best way is best, still so many sites in Google rankings with spam, and so many sites not ranking that have great content but just not the clout to score authority links. And then there's the hordes of scrapers encroaching on rankings as well. Most content ultimately has a self-interest which could be termed artificial, just do what you can to keep standards high and hopefully contribute somehting
Thank you for your article, Anna. I will keep it in case I need it in the future
Thank for share, Anna Korolekh !
Hi Anna,
Thanks for sharing your case study. It was very revealing.
As you mentioned ion your post that Google is considering a link from a forum with brand keyword as artificial link. So don’t you think! anyone can do these kind of artificial activities against their competitor to put them in front of Google to get penalized?
Hi Asim,
Yes, of course, anyone can do that, that's why it's called "negative SEO". And, unfortunately, there is no way you can prevent anyone from doing it or protect your brand from it.
This can also relate to that "mindset" theme we have discussed above. If you are in the niche where your competitors prefer to waste time, effort and money on undermining their competition rather than outperforming them, it really is a challenge. But I believe in justice and sooner or later everyone will get what they deserve, I am sure ;)
Thanks Anna!
But I believe there should be a rule in Google Algorithm to conquer such instances.
You're right anyone can do negative seo, what is also likely true is that the harm caused by negative seo, however real, is insignificant compared to the harm done by self-proclaimed "white-hat" seo workers who build links Google sees as artificial.
There's also the reality of course that in many niches, possibly with lower CPC and non-US results for example, web 2.0 miniblogs with thin keyword stuffed articles for example can still rank a site, see it regularly. You're right their should be a rule in Google's algo and I'm sure there are many rules already, just keeping an eye on your link profile now and again can catch a lot of potential problems in the bud, good luck Asim.
One of the most important points you made here is right at the end: you didn't have to send any emails and request links actually be removed! :-)
Hi Michael,
Exactly, there are several assumptions about what Google must see done to revoke a penalty, and especially with the initial furore surrounding penalties they were rarely questioned. The reality is though yes, you can get penalties revoked sending mails for sure, and indeed one of the reasons the disavow tool was created was because mails didn't work, however many you can get removed there are always going to be ones you can't, which pre-disavow was a real problem. So Google made the disavow tool, and it works.
Thing is also that outreach costs can really bump up costs, any many buyers go into penalty removal services under the impression they must pay for outreach as part for the removal process otherwise the penalty can't be removed. This is incorrect, if the client wants outreach they can have it, but to imply outreach is an essential condition for penalty removal can potentially be misleading. Over the past 260-odd penalties I've done so far, sitting at home in front of my notebook, I'd say there have been say 2-3 where I have had to send emails to actually get the penalty revoked, so it's a choice not a condition for penalty removal, and can possibly save client a significant amount as well.
Amazing study, Anna.
I simply can't even imagine how you guys managed to untangle those 2,500 links. I mean, this just seems so obscure, but I understand that thousands of hours had to pass until you've made it.
Anyhow, thanks for the article, it was very inspiring.
All the best,
VS
Hey v_popart,
Thanks for the support, it was tens of hours rather than thousands to be honest, anytime you want me to have a look at your own link profile, I'd always be interested, thanks again,
Jeremy
One of my client traffic and SERP was increasing slowly suddenly due to some problem it gets reduced and SERP are became lower. I have doubt that either is that because of google penalty.
Reason for my fear is client address changed recently but still many local listing have old address. im trying to change that in local listing but as that have numerous links cant do manually. I dont get any get penalty mess from console. Still im confused why there is sudden reduction in both traffic and SERP
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It's imperative for me also Sandeep :)
Interesting case.
Then we must be always aware about the links placed by others, and that may be harmful to our website.
Unfortunately anyone can put a negative direct link to our website.
Thanks for the info.
Hey Zid,
Yup you're right, anyone can place an unnatural link, and really keeping a eye on your link profile is a good idea, things do happen and you can catch so many problems in the bud just by looking in now and again.
There is actually a good side to this though. Put simply I know sites where they rank with artificial links, and instead of waiting for a penalty just embrace the fact they'll likely get one. disavow links, and get some new artificial links to replace them. A slightly cynical strategy perhaps, and it's Google Australia where really, every niche I see someone's using cheap link building just fine, but the fact is it's working and people do tend do go for what just works in Google. How they time this with the Penguin updates though I'm not sure as they happen so infrequently, but anyway, just something I came across. These days everything looks artificial :)
And then of course there's negative reviews, a story here of the effort it took one business to get hundreds of fake Facebook reviews removed, interesting read here
Thanks Anna,
Great infomation ! It's very helpful for identifying unnatural keyword phrases and other unnatural links.
Thanks Kane, you're welcome :)
Very enlightening! And helpful. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Anna,
Very Interesting and must read case study to rectify google penalty. Thanks for sharing.
You are most welcome classiblogger :)
Anna, first thanks to you for sharing meaningful post. I had faced the same case earlier and got succeed too but my question is slight differ than your real post. My Question is how you can provoke others to pulling down your website URL? Like is someone doing bas SEO for your website(may be your competitor) then how you will face this?
Thank you, Rahul.
With bad links that your competitor might be pointing to you, there is nothing that can be done. You just have to monitor your backlink profile and disavow suspicious links once in a while. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to trace and prove that someone else is actually putting up those links, but not you.
Let's hope that the day will come when Google will simply start ignoring all the crappy links and eventually black SEO will just become pointless.
My understanding is that once links have been disavowed, the penalty may have been removed, but so is the authority that these links provided prior to the penalty being implemented. In theory this would mean that traffic to the site would not be as high after the disavow as before the penalty was applied - did you find this to be the case?
You said that manual outreach was not carried out due to the additional time and cost that this would incur. Did you not feel that reaching out to some of the sites linking to you and changing the type or nature of the link would allow you to maintain an authoratative link rather than disavow it?
I'm thinking more of the giveaways - removing the secondary link and keeping only the company name link.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the great questions, links that are seen as artificial by the Webspam Team are essentially devalued, so yes any value those links may have had is lost and links that once contributed to rankings now become links that cause a penalty.
In answer to this question: "In theory this would mean that traffic to the site would not be as high after the disavow as before the penalty was applied - did you find this to be the case?"
Generally the more dependent a site's rankings were originally on artificial links, the more traffic they will lose and the longer recovery will take. So yes, with a certain number of links lost, it often takes additional link generation as well to gain full rankings again. That said a few things I've noticed:
- Firstly, revoking a penalty in itself doesn't guarantee rankings will increase, something Google has quietly started mentioned in their new response to successful reconsideration requests, which states:
"keep in mind that removal of a manual action doesn't guarantee that your site's ranking will increase"
- Link profiles and penalties are about ratios, so if a site has a strong base link profile with a few artificial ones on top, like PSD2HTML for example, with the artificial ones gone you end up with a lean link profile where the site can recover and even do better than it did before. Other end of the spectrum if a site is 98% spam links and they get their penalty revoked, that's great the artificial links have been dealt with, however they've got nothing left to rank with so it's not so much "recovery" which is a personal point of view as growing rankings again hopefully using better link building strategies.
- Did you not feel that reaching out to some of the sites linking to you and changing the type or nature of the link would allow you to maintain an authoratative link rather than disavow it?
If a link is artificial most of the time the link is artificial, the nature of the link itself is such that it has been placed with the intent to influence rankings and as such even with changing the anchor text for example, that underlying artificial intent remains. So changing the link can be done, changing the intention is harder.
Agree though there are definitely cases where you can re-avow links, penalty cleanup involves a strictness in identifying artificial links that likely many competitors wouldn't have a hope of comparing with, so if you do have links that can be manually changed, on a case by case basis this is possible. If you do this suggest it be less of an exercise in trying to squeeze back in as many old artificial links in the hope they'll help you rank again, just get rid of them, but links where there was genuine intention and Google has marked them as artificial for example, yes there can be room for prudent reavowing.
About the giveaways where you could remove the secondary link and keep the original one, giveaway links were originally divided into those with keyword links and those without, so yes if you wanted to remove the keyword links and then reavow them, that would essentially render them the same as the giveaway links without keyword links that got through the review process. Sobearing in mind each link is an individual case, and also Wordpress for example generates often dozens of urls for the same page, it can be trickier than expected to truly delete a keyword link on a site, that's a case where reavowing could possibly be done. Hope this helps thanks :)
Jeremy
If number of bad links with keyword You want to rank on is high and You disavowed for example 80%, don't expect top10 again. Also if You remove 80% of links (instead of disavowing) You won't be in top10 too. Lifting penalty isn't getting back to top10 all the time but after penalty lifted, linkbuilding will be effective again and better to focus on it than complaining about "not good recovery".
Thank you Anna Korolekh for your Great Article posting. I hope see next post very soon :D Go Ahead
How to deal with a genuine relationship that is marked as artificial is really interested.
Really useful case!
What are you trying to say, can you please elaborate?
I think he is saying they links were natural but Google considered them artificial so they had to be dealt with.
In an ideal world, preventing penalties from happening by using white-hat tactics is the best approach. This is especially true since getting them removed can be a time consuming and frustrating process. Once they do happen, though, it is incredibly important to use the right method. When it comes to clearing the penalty, there is unfortunately no quick solution - it takes patience and a lot of hard work. This is why it's so important to stay current with what Google considers "best practice" and stay white-hat!
@pixelcrayons: This is really a good post, it;s really helpful
Wow interesting blog.