Let's face it. Getting slapped by a manual link penalty, or by the Penguin algorithm, really stinks. Once this has happened to you, your business is in a world of hurt. Worse still is the fact that you can't get clear information from Google on which of your links are the bad ones. In today's post, I am going to focus on the number one reason why people fail to get out from under these types of problems, and how to improve your chances of success.
The mindset
Success begins, continues, and ends with the right mindset. A large percentage of people I see who go through a link cleanup process are not aggressive enough about cleaning up their links. They worry about preserving some of that hard-won link juice they obtained over the years.
You have to start by understanding what a link cleanup process looks like, and just how long it can take. Some of the people I have spoken with have gone through a process like this one:
In this fictitious timeline example, we see someone who spends four months working on trying to recover, and at the end of it all, they have not been successful. A lot of time and money have been spent, and they have nothing to show for it. Then, the people at Google get frustrated and send them a message that basically tells them they are not getting it. At this point, they have no idea when they will be able to recover. The result is that the complete process might end up taking six months or more.
In contrast, imagine someone who is far more aggressive in removing and disavowing links. They are so aggressive that 20 percent of the links they cut out are actually ones that Google has not currently judged as being bad. They also start on March 9, and by April 30, the penalty has been lifted on their site.
Now they can begin rebuilding their business, five or months sooner than the person who does not take as aggressive an approach. Yes, they cut out some links that Google was not currently penalizing, but this is a small price to pay for getting your penalty cleared five months sooner. In addition, using our mindset-based approach, the 20 percent of links we cut out were probably not links that were helping much anyway, and that Google might also take action on them in the future.
Now that you understand the approach, it's time to make the commitment. You have to make the decision that you are going to do whatever it takes to get this done, and that getting it done means cutting hard and deep, because that's what will get you through it the fastest. Once you've got your head on straight about what it will take and have summoned the courage to go through with it, then and only then, you're ready to do the work. Now let's look at what that work entails.
Obtaining link data
We use four sources of data for links:
You will want to pull in data from all four of these sources, get them into one list, and then dedupe them to create a master list. Focus only on followed links as well, as nofollowed links are not an issue. The overall process is shown here:
One other simplification is also possible at this stage. Once you have obtained a list of the followed links, there is another thing you can do to dramatically simplify your life. You don't need to look at every single link.
You do need to look at a small sampling of links from every domain that links to you. Chances are that this is a significantly smaller quantity of links to look at than all links. If a domain has 12 links to you, and you look at three of them, and any of those are bad, you will need to disavow the entire domain anyway.
I take the time to emphasize this because I've seen people with more than 1 million inbound links from 10,000 linking domains. Evaluating 1 million individual links could take a lifetime. Looking at 10,000 domains is not small, but it's 100 times smaller than 1 million. But here is where the mindset comes in. Do examine every domain.
This may be a grinding and brutal process, but there is no shortcut available here. What you don't look at will hurt you. The sooner you start on the entire list, the sooner you will get the job done.
How to evaluate links
Now that you have a list, you can get to work. This is a key part where having the right mindset is critical. The first part of the process is really quite simple. You need to eliminate each and every one of these types of links:
- Article directory links
- Links in forum comments, or their related profiles
- Links in blog comments, or their related profiles
- Links from countries where you don't operate/sell your products
- Links from link sharing schemes such as Link Wheels
- Any links you know were paid for
Here is an example of a foreign language link that looks somewhat out of place:
For the most part, you should also remove any links you have from web directories. Sure, if you have a link from DMOZ, Business.com, or BestofTheWeb.com, and the most important one or two directories dedicated to your market space, you can probably keep those.
For a decade I have offered people a rule for these types of directories, which is "no more than seven links from directories." Even the good ones carry little to no value, and the bad ones can definitely hurt you. So there is absolutely no win to be had running around getting links from a bunch of directories, and there is no win in trying to keep them during a link cleanup process.
Note that I am NOT talking about local business directories such as Yelp, CityPages, YellowPages, SuperPages, etc. Those are a different class of directory that you don't need to worry about. But general purpose web directories are, generally speaking, a poison.
Rich anchor text
Rich anchor text has been the downfall of many a publisher. Here is one of my favorite examples ever of rich anchor text:
The author wanted the link to say "buy cars," but was too lazy to fit the two words into the same sentence! Of course, you may have many guest posts that you have written that are not nearly as obvious as this one. One great way to deal with that is to take your list of links that you built and sort them by URL and look at the overall mix of anchor text. You know it's a problem if it looks anything like this:
The problem with the distribution in the above image is that the percentage of links that are non "rich" in nature is way too small. In the real world, most people don't conveniently link to you using one of your key money phrases. Some do, but it's normally a small percentage.
Other types of bad links
There is no way for me to cover every type of bad link in this post, but here are other types of links, or link scenarios, to be concerned about:
- If a large percentage of your links are coming from over on the right rail of sites, or in the footers of sites
- If there are sites that give you a site-wide link, or a very large number of links from one domain
- Links that come from sites whose IP address is identical in the A block, B block, and C block (read more about what these are here)
- Links from crappy sites
The definition of a crappy site may seem subjective, but if a site has not been updated in a while, or its information is of poor quality, or it just seems to have no one who cares about it, you can probably consider it a crappy site. Remember our discussion on mindset. Your objective is to be harsh in cleaning up your links.
In fact, the most important principle in evaluating links is this: If you can argue that it's a good link, it's NOT. You don't have to argue for good quality links. To put it another way, if they are not obviously good, then out they go!
Quick case study anecdote: I know of someone who really took a major knife to their backlinks. They removed and/or disavowed every link they had that was below a Moz Domain Authority of 70. They did not even try to justify or keep any links with lower DA than that. It worked like a champ. The penalty was lifted. If you are willing to try a hyper-aggressive approach like this one, you can avoid all the work evaluating links I just outlined above. Just get the Domain Authority data for all the links pointing to your site and bring out the hatchet.
No doubt that they ended up cutting out a large number of links that were perfectly fine, but their approach was way faster than doing the complete domain by domain analysis.
Requesting link removals
Why is it that we request link removals? Can't we just build a disavow file and submit that to Google? In my experience, for manual link penalties, the answer to this question is no, you can't. (Note: if you have been hit by Penguin, and not a manual link penalty, you may not need to request link removals.)
Yes, disavowing a link is supposed to tell Google that you don't want to receive any PageRank, or benefit, from it. However, there is a human element at play here. Google likes to see that you put some effort into cleaning up the bad links that you have gotten that led to your penalty. The more bad links you have, the more important this becomes.
This does make the process a lot more expensive to get through, but if you approach this with the "whatever it takes" mindset, you dive into the requesting link removal process and go ahead and get it done.
I usually have people go through three rounds of requests asking people to remove links. This can be a very annoying process for those receiving your request, so you need to be aware of that. Don't start your email with a line like "Your site is causing mine to be penalized ...", as that's just plain offensive.
I'd be honest, and tell them "Hey, we've been hit by a penalty, and as part of our effort to recover we are trying to get many of the links we have gotten to our site removed. We don't know which sites are causing the problem, but we'd appreciate your help ..."
Note that some people will come back to you and ask for money to remove the link. Just ignore them, and put their domains in your disavow file.
Once you are done with the overall removal requests, and had whatever success you have had, take the rest of the domains and disavow them. There is a complete guide to creating a disavow file here. The one incremental tip I would add is that you should nearly always disavow entire domains, not just the individual links you see.
This is important because even with the four tools we used to get information on as many links as we could, we still only have a subset of the total links. For example, the tools may have only seen one link from a domain, but in fact you have five. If you disavow only the one link, you still have four problem links, and that will torpedo your reconsideration request.
Disavowing the domain is a better-safe-than-sorry step you should take almost every time. As I illustrated at the beginning of this post, adding extra cleanup/reconsideration request loops is very expensive for your business.
The overall process
When all is said and done, the process looks something like this:
If you run this process efficiently, and you don't try to cut corners, you might be able to get out from your penalty in a single pass through the process. If so, congratulations!
What about tools?
There are some fairly well-known tools that are designed to help you with the link cleanup process. These include Link Detox and Remove'em. In addition, at STC we have developed our own internal tool that we use with our clients.
These tools can be useful in flagging some of your links, but they are not comprehensive—they will help identify some really obvious offenders, but the great majority of links you need to deal with and remove/disavow are not identified. Plan on investing substantial manual time and effort to do the heavy lifting of a comprehensive review of all your links. Remember the "mindset."
Summary
As I write this post, I have this sense of being heartless because I outline an approach that is often grueling to execute. But consider it tough love. Recovering from link penalties is indeed brutal. In my experience, the winners are the ones who come with meat cleaver in hand, don't try to cut corners, and take on the full task from the very start, no matter how extensive an effort it may be.
Does this type of process succeed? You bet. Here is an example of a traffic chart from a successful recovery:
Hey Eric, thanks for the post.. It serves as a good intro point on link cleanup basics, for sure.
There's one bit that I found to be somewhat surprising, and potentially dangerous advice.
"They removed and/or disavowed every link they had that was below a Moz Domain Authority of 70. They did not even try to justify or keep any links with lower DA than that."
Woah! Let's add an important asterisk here: DA scales with spammy links! Domain Authority is not a metric which takes relevancy into account; it's quantitative. You could very well cut out a majority of your relevant links and end up with a majority of your profile as spammy, high DA links. That could work out to put you into a worse place than you were in the first place.
In my opinion, relevancy is the primary attribute of a link that should be taken into account when judging which links get the axe and which do not. I'll take a profile of highly relevant links that have low DA over a bunch of spammy links with high DA, any day.
Very good point!
I don't remember off the top of my head, but shouldn't most natural backlink profiles look like a bell curve -- most links are 40-60 DA and then it slopes down left towards 0 and right towards 100? If the distribution curve looks extremely different from that, then isn't that a sign of artificial manipulation that will be at risk for a penalty?
Yes, I completely agree with that. There are a couple of resources that I have saved about that very subject, in fact..
John Doherty's Bell Curve Breakdown - JohnFDoherty.com
The Middle Path of Marketing - A Philosophy - Moz blog UGC, by Mark Meyerson
Nicholas - agree that relevance is a critical component. In the case of this company, relevance was very high on all those DA > 70 links.
Oh I believe it, if it worked for them to revoke their penalty status.
However, it's just worth nothing that you can increase the DA of a site to 70+ with pure spam, easy as pie. So this method isn't necessarily fool proof, and should be met with caution.
Yes, I think it is difficult to find 70+ DA backlinks
:) Inspiring. Great article Eric
Eric - love the rich anchor text example, I cannot believe I haven't seen that before. Really made me chuckle! You make some very good points, disavowing links should not be something that is half arsed and trying to conserve links by convincing yourself that they are 'borderline' will just create more work in the future (and mean you fail to recover)! It is a question of opportunity cost and in this case there really is no argument in that the better option is to get your site up and running again in the SERPs long before someone who tries to retain their link juice.
Contacting webmasters to ask for link removals is a necessary evil in the process and possibly the most irritating step, especially when the majority of them do not respond or will ask for payment. Also, nice time saving point about the domain and something that I myself do when working on disavows for clients. It is unlikely that a spammy article directory is going to turn into some renowned content publisher in the future so no need to retain it as a linking domain.
Cheers Eric
Agreed, the whole part about contacting webmasters for removals is a sad but necessary evil that you just have to deal with in these situations.
Hey Eric,
Thanks for making the point that mindset really is the difference between success and failure when taking on penalty work.
Here's the one place where I have to disagree slightly with you and Simon:
Mindset is also key to successful link cleanup and will very much determine whether your cleanup rates are high or low. The key is to be creative. Approach your link cleanup as though it is a link acquisition campaign. Find smart and delightful ways to approach webmasters with your requests. Use your skills and experience or maybe even your in-house resources to help them solve obvious problems with their site...Give them a reason to love you, to feel that you have some empathy for where they sit in the link removal process too.
When you start to spread some love and laughter with your link removal requests, you'll be amazed at the amount of love, brand amplification and totally natural links that can flow from your efforts.
Don't let the time you invest in link removal efforts be just a "sad but necessary evil". Turn it into a big box of totally TAGFEE genius moments that earn you the double win and suddenly you'll be resolving a penalty and building your business at the very same time ;-)
Sha
Great post. One question with regards to being hit by penguin but not having a manual penalty. Should you still be as aggressive? If you are to aggressive will this have and adverse effect?
Having been recommended to disavow little and often on an ongoing basis I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
With Penguin, I find you may not need to be quite as aggressive, but dealing with anchor text is a major must. I would also still take out the comment links and the links from countries where you don't sell too.
One of the big problems that most of webmasters find here is money. Money for paying ahrefs, money for paying majestic, money for paying all the other tools... and we are not talking about Link Detox or other solutions even more expensive.
I think your post is quite good, but for a simple webmaster or amateur a penalty can signify the end of his blog or the end of most of its links.
There is a simple solution: that Google tells the webmaster what links are the bad ones. But I'm afraid we're far away from it.
Hi Abel,
The irony is you can actually remove a penalty no problem without Majestic, Ahrefs, Link Detox or anything else. These tools are only recommended so much because they're already recommended so much, all the penalty write-ups recommend them so people follow. But has this actually been tested? Webmaster Tools links are the only links you need to shift a penalty, think about it if Google required access to external databases to revoke a penalty that would be illogical, which Google generally isn't. Majestic can help there are various reasons for this, but if you know what you're doing Webmaster Tools can work almost every time.
Hi Jeremy - here at STC we have seen too many situations where Webmaster Tools data was not enough. That's why we recommend the larger data set you can get with the other tools.
My reason for making this recommendation has nothing to do with other people recommending them at all. It has to do with the 200+ situations we have worked on over here.
If you can't afford $100 a month for something like Moz or Ahrefs, should you even be in business in the first place? It takes spending money to make money (or, in this case, not lose it).
I partially agree Samuel. Of course large agencies and professionals can and must afford that prices and even more, these are they work tools. I'm talking about amateur people that were affected, that is affected every day like bloggers, students or little businesses that begin in this world.
Just a simple mail from Google to them talking about the reason they were penalized and how to revoke it would be enough. If you're not a professional or you don't have money enough to avoid a penalty a penalty is, certainly, a nightmare.
If you're condemned by a judge, a right all over the world is, at least, to know what was your fault. Google just say: "We suspect you have been bad" and you have to investigate why do they they think you were bad. Some people think that's not fair.
Here's a link to an Online Google Disavow File Generator
https://www.disavowfilegenerator.com/
Nice little tool - thanks for sharing!
I had a very long discussion with a friend of mine about changing the mindset when it comes to link building. A penguin penalty is a slap in the face, further differentiating between those who "get it" and those that never will. A similar psychology is in place when people lose rankings too. Some rebuild their strategy from ground up, while others only further scale their black hat techniques.
The former is the type of person that breaks clean with everything shady after penalized, the latter tries to find a way around for months ahead, often times failing to adapt.
Quite the inspiration- in some weird kind of way- when you look at how people improved their businesses after taking such a hit. It makes sense though; I remember improving my site dramatically for a couple of times, in each instance only after a competitor takes over rankings for a certain valuable set of keywords. As if all of the sudden you are prepared to work harder, and be more creative. I guess the same thinking applies to penalties as well.
Such an important part of it! Getting on to doing it the right way, using content marketing and attracting links to your site.
Excellent post! I completely agree with your position. Way too often people are so afraid to throw the proverbial baby out of with the bathwater that they end up just drowning the baby because they take too much time trying to determine what is water and what is baby. A penalty means your business is stuck. I would rather be behind and alive than even and dead.
Hey Russ - glad you liked it! Missing you out here at SMX West.
great metapher, but I can understand the webmasters. They allways read about links and how important they are for ranking. They worked and payed a lot for all these links and wont lose one. There are not so many (shown) examples of people wich get back on top in disavow 50% (or more) of there links.
But they exist...
Superb post...your style correlates with your huge experience and knowledge; being your huge fan i love all your researches. Thanks for the post
Thanks!
Agree with you, your mindset is the most important link penalty removal tool. I may add, your mindset is the most important tool, in the first place, to keep you out of trouble.
I like your post and tools you mentioned.
What i don't like, is the ability left for competitors and everyone else to hurt your site. That should not be possible.
Agreed that negative SEO is an issue. It's not as prevalent as many fear, but it does happen.
Great post, Eric! Two quick comments:
#1 a case where you'd disavow only a link, and not the domain: where you're looking at spammy links in a big UGC site, like a forum or Yahoo groups, for example--you'd want any good links from outsiders to be kept.
#2 I recommend you check out LinkRisk for backlink toxicity analysis--I've been using it for a month or so now, and am quite impressed--especially with its risk assessment. Seems way more accurate than Link Detox. With LD, I typically had to hand-inspect 90% of the domains, whether they were marked as very risky or not. And no, I have no commercial relationship with LinkRisk (except I'm going to subscribe as soon as my free trial runs out!).
#1 Agreed that there are exceptions to the rule.
#2 will have someone check that out!
A great and informative article.I am completely agree. Thanks for The Most Important Link Penalty Removal Tool.
Great post, I like to share one more tool called - Open Link Profiler for link profiling
Thanks
Google webmaster tool is eminent to link research both internal and external of any site which is still powerful over third party softwares like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO anyway. I use OSE when come to build up authority backlink also Ahrefs and Majestic to build competitor's backlink.
This indepth guide is appreciated enough since I have learned how to deal with old spammy backlinks. Great and useful article.
Thanks for writing up
Great Article Eric, As a Small business owner there are allot of good tips in this article.I went through your article, I used Google Webmaster tools( I will use the other tools listed)and I have identified some questionable links. I will email them and see what kind of response I get. I have been following allot of SEO blogs and Groups in Google plus. This has been area of interest to me. Phil Rozek and Max Minzer have commented that some of my links are questionable. I believe I understand what they are referring to know. When looking at links for your site is putting this links:www.celebrateitballoons.com in the browser a good way to compare links? I see this as being different list than using Google Webmaster tool etc.. Can you possible explain the difference.
Thank you, This truly was a good article
Hi Timothy - I don't use the link: command because it returns so few links. The other data sources I mentioned in the article (Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs) return far more information, so I'd focus on those.
Hi Eric,
It is the best post I have ever read on this topic. I once worked on manual penalty removal, removed every single link that could be removed (except legit ones like from wikipedia, top media sites etc), had to go through multiple follow-ups, then disavowed those that could not be remopved.
However, what do you think about post-penalty? i.e. once penalty is removed, we instantly started content marketing and other link acquisition (white hat) techniques. Would our website gain visibilty as normal or would take take more time now?
Shariq - that's exactly what you want to do. Start building high quality links going forward. In the traffic chart I shared you can see that the site now has higher traffic than before the penalty. That's because we have also been doing high quality content marketing for them.
But a question here Eric, does it take more time for your site to perform well after the penalty is revoked. I have worked for more than 3 websites' manual action but have noticed one thing, these sites do not perform as good as they were supposed to.
Hi, thanks for heartwarming post. I'm currently fighting to reconsiderate my site for four months with no results, requests are sent only after consecutive step in cleaning link and disavowing. No results though, and now I don't know what to do.. site's really nice and well visited from direct, but in google is dead. Maybe I'll need to disavow almost all links..
We often do what you've suggested and "come with meat cleaver in hand" as long as clients are on board with that strategy.
For those who aren't, we save time by doing it slightly differently: We classify links into three groups.
1) Links that should stay
2) Meat cleaver, cut it off links.
3) Links the client will let us cut.
Once the first removal attempt is unsuccessful we have more substance to go back to the client and say "hey, see what we meant before? Can we do it fully now?" And when they say yes, the work is already done properly. Saves a bit of time and you're even more of a hero when it doesn't take long to get it fully removed.
Matt - sound strategy. Not all clients are ready to go full tilt, but getting them to work towards a two step path can be the next best thing.
100% agree on the meat cleaver approach, as I had to perform on a site w/ millions of links. Link Detox is a good tool.
The way I see it you have two options when dealing with penalties--you can either offer much resistance, fighting against the very thing that's hindering your site or take a more optimistic approach and see what solutions are out their for resurgence. Eric, you've offered some great strategies and we often need to tread with caution on this topic. In all cases, it's best to stay away from cutting corners and the black-hat strategies in an attempt to build your link database up fast and for cheap. ~Vishal
Eric, great post!
In my experience, the winners are the ones who come with meat cleaver in hand, don't try to cut corners, and take on the full task from the very start, no matter how extensive an effort it may be.
Very, very true. I'd just add one additional mindset that people should adopt -- stop building links and start earning them! The more that people remember this principle, the more that link removals will not be needed in the first place. :)
Both of these mindsets will help both individuals and our industry as a whole over the longer: Earn natural links instead of building artificial ones; but if you are penalized, be sure to hack away at bad domains and links en masse rather than one-by-one.
However, I just had one question on your suggestion to delete all links of these two types (among others):
First, aren't almost all of these links no-followed by now? Plus, as long as spammy anchor-text is not used and the links are relevant to the topic at hand and not going overboard, shouldn't they be OK?
Just a quick example. Say Bob Smith comments a lot on a certain blog because he's a fan of the writer and the community that has developed around the blog. He comments a lot -- but not in a spam way at all. He rarely links directly to anything he's written. But the blog platform allows him to link his (user)name above each comment to a URL. So, Bob Smith (the anchor text) links to www(dot)bobsmith(dot)com.
Is this still OK? Or, in context of your "hacking" theory, should all of those links / comments be deleted just to be safe?
Hi Samuel - I probably should have been a bit clearer when I talked about that, but if you notice I had a strep about not having to worry about NoFollow links before we get to the part about eliminating the forum/blog comment links. So, if they are followed AND they don't use rich anchor text, out they go in my opinion.
Great post, Eric! And I completely agree - It's all in the mindset.
What's more important?
Getting the penalty removed or trying to hold on to a few good links IF the penalty is eventually removed?
I know what I would choose.
We were strict with the manual penalty at Peachy and removed a lot of good links. However, it paid off, and the penalty was lifted within 3 weeks.
Full cast study here: https://moz.com/ugc/case-study-payday-loan-penalty...
Glad you liked it. And, yes, you and I would choose the same thing!
Superb post by nicely elaborating each stage.
I'd like to know, have you faced any scenario where the webmaster demanded you to pay in order to remove your link? And if yes, how did you cop that situation? And if someone mention this in the disavow file, will google take any action against them? I heard that, google does not bother to read anything related to comments.
By the way, you missed the CognitiveSEO in the tools section :)
Thanks,
Generally speaking if someone asks to pay to remove the link, I just disavow them. Having said that, I have encountered exceptions where it turned out to be such a small fee that we paid it (I took a stronger stance in the article, but am allowing for other circumstances in this comment).
Excellent article, I can also take it as making links.evaluating the competition.
Great post!! I have a client with a serious penalization. I try to removal it trought this guide. Very, very thanks.
Glad you liked it!
This is an awesome guide. I like your point about being aggressive. If you don't know for a fact that a link is good, it's better to get rid of it to clear the penalty. As you said, it may hurt you eventually anyway.
Great post Eric. It's about time someone came out and mentioned being aggressive with the link removals - after all you are in this situation because of links, why hang-on to some shady links when you think you might get away with it.
Awesome.. we followed the same..
Ok but if You have large % of bad links (in Google eyes) like 80, You can't get back to top10 for keyword You want to rank on just like that without doing anything (ok, except link penalty because of negative seo). You have to do better linkbuilding after and that's penalty lift: Google allows You to do seo after. If You didn't do anything after penalty lift, then congrats. Very rare to see that traffic back. OR there were some updates meanwhile?
after penguin update , i never using keyword anchor anymore .. i always using brand anchore
Well written content it is. Today, link removal is become necessary for every single doamin. Anyhow, 70% of the website penalized by Algo update or Manual penalty. To recover from such trap, you need to collect all the backlinks and then have to start sending link removal mail. Also, one more thing, Link detox is not for link removal. It is for link auditing and it is not perfect as well.
I wonder that google now ban a site domination the SERP except google ads alone. Some of my site traffic decline for a half amount along the last year. Just check my site obat kuat
I found out that the link detox tool from linkresearchtools works pretty well when you have a lot of links to check. And after that comes the hard part, getting them removed.
Great article. Those links with Chinese text are quite common if you use linkbuilding tools like GSA SER. To avoid creating links with chinese text / anchor you have to select the right engines and platforms in your campaigns. There's info about this in the GSA forums.
A lot of cheaper services for getting links run into these types of problems. As Samuel Scott says below, your efforts should go into link earning/link attraction activities, such as really solid content marketing.
Hi - sounds like a non easy problem to resolve without really digging into it in detail I am afraid. Wish I could help more, but I think this will require many hours of work to figure out. Let me know if you are interested in consulting help for that.
When you moved the site, did you implement 301 redirects from the pages on the .com domain to the corresponding pages on the new domain?
yes Mr Eric, we did 301 redirect,, but I don't know if this is good info, we have make a footer back-link on other non-related website, that generated about 20,000 page with the same anchor text, so since 2 months we have disavowed this website backlinks
Do you have any links from sites hosted in the UAE or other .ae websites that show up in the Google.ae search results? It feels to me like Google.ae may not be crawling the site yet. You can also check the log file to see if they are crawling the site.
Hi Eric, Thanks for your reply,,,
Yes we have links from UAE & outside UAE, I'll check the log file, but what should I see their?
let me briefly tell you an info, the site was ranking on Google.ae very well, but we have changed the site from .com to .ae and redesigned the whole site, but we may didn't implement the migration very well.
Hi thanks @dynamicdreamz
for sharing that tool its really helpful.
very nice blog. i see the same type of chart in ahref tool and its shows the all anchor text link popularity data. i think using such tools we can simply remove the bad links and can submit it for reconsideration
Hello,
I've a CCTLD website or domain, that ends up with .ae for Google.ae or Google UAE search engine, since a year my most of keywords are not showing up in the first 30 page of Google.ae!! although they are showing up in the first or second page for other google search engines like google.com or .fr or any local google search engine, how could I troubleshoot this problem in ranking for Google.ae? it seems that my site is penalized on Google.ae only? is it ablack hat attack??
any answer could help
thanks
Thats a great article Eric, I would love to see another guide from your side regarding Algorithm Penalties, especially Penguin. Manual Penalties as far as my knowledge is concerned can be tackled and revoked with some hard work but as far as algorithmic penalties are concerned it takes a bit more than hard work.
Great post. One question with regards to being hit by penguin but not having a manual penalty. Should you still be as aggressive? If you are to aggressive will this have and adverse effect?
Having been recommended to disavow little and often on an ongoing basis I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Great post Eric, one problem I always run into is trying to explain to a client why its best to cut so deep (it's always painful). I still wish Google would be a little more helpful I've noticed the notes from Google have been reducing since it was started no so long ago which is frustrating especially if you've got people who are not used to dealing with penalties.
Big thanks again thought its a great post.
Agreed. As I noted in the post, Google can literally get to the point where they tell you to stop submitting for a while. Along with your observation of Google sending out fewer notes, these are signs that Google is having to manage the volume of requests they are getting.
This definitely resonates with me. Explaining that some decent links will be sacrificed for the 'greater good' always divides the room. It's tough, but as Eric says, hit it hard, cut deep and the nightmare situation will be over much quicker. Then again, for any doubters you can always direct them to read resources like this! :)
Very good post!
It is true that Google penalizes you when you get scared. It's horrible. First you should know that animal has hit you and once you've figured out comes the task of fixing it. As you say in your post, a person wearing an aggressive tactics, he can rebound before a person that goes with caution and go slowly. Ira safer (or not), but may take much longer. Besides the need to send more requests for reconsideration to Google.
Follow the recommendations you mention in your post and have a more winning more aggressive mentality.
Thanks for your interesting article!
Glad you liked it!
"We paid good money for those links." <---- I have actually heard this. It was said to my face, after I plowed through a few hundred thousand links. Suffice to say, that recovery attempt wasn't successful. From that point on, I no longer sought consensus.
Fortunately, I don't hear that very often any more, but there are still people that think that.
After revoking well over 200 manual actions by myself, in coffee shops and my apartment, all paid on results including several Inc 500 sites, I've found the only thing you really need to do to identify artificial links is ask yourself - is the primary intention of a link to offer a genuine, impartial reference to a site, or is the primary intention of a link...well, to score a link? Answer that honestly and you've got it.
The tricky thing is the psychology, it takes a certain courage to admit square on exactly how many artificial links you've built to intentionally try and rank higher, and it's also then scary to lose them again. The Mindset idea though is bang on, just like you mention by far the best idea is to face the fear head on, get rid of the artificial links completely and thoroughly, and often you don't even have to lose 20% of good links, just whichever ones are artificial remove the lot - after all if rankings have tanked those links are likely devalued already anyway. Delete artificial links, dilute with better ones, and grow stronger than ever before.
Agreed! So important to dilute the bad links with better links too. Will not only help you recover faster, but will also help you grow stronger than ever before.
Great article Eric. I really like the meat cleaver analogy, it's a perfect representation of what's required to clean up a junky backlink profile. Right or wrong I also believe in taking a choppy, choppy approach to link cleanup! I prefer to be on the aggressive side rather than risk further delays in a project. Thanks again for sharing.
Hi Calin - glad you found it useful. Sounds like you are have the right approach!
Great Post Eric, I am currently living a link removal quest.
I have an outsource team that spends the whole day doing outreach. Unfortunately, the removal rate is low, but expected. I agree with your filtering system 100% as I am doing exactly the same here, the only difference is that we are dealing with 30 million links and it is very challenging to work with this amount of data. We are removing everything that we can and whatever we cant, it will go to the disavow file.
However, what I am not 100% sure is how to approach the inner network links. I manage a really large umbrella brand site and we have dedicated domains for sub-products and subdomains for different geo locations. The umbrella site currently has a partial manual penalty but the sub-product sites are penalty free.
Since we are dealing with an enterprise level website, we have hundreds of thousands of pages in each dedicated sub-products domains (including the subdomains). Almost all the sub-product website’s pages are linked to the umbrella site or one of its subdomains because of the nature of our products. Customers are one click away to surf through all our products. We are not trying to manipulate PR through those links but it is nice to benefit from link juice of strong sites (our dedicate sub-product sites) pointing to our umbrella site. In summary, the umbrella site has a very large number of links coming from our own network.
In your opinion, do you think the links from the dedicated sub-product sites should be no follow or you believe it is still possible to lift the penalty having the network links do follow?
Thank you Eric and I look forward for your and everyone else opinions.
For large recognizable brands, it's common to have links from their various sub-brand sites back to their main site. Not knowing your brand, I think it comes down to what Google perceives as the intent (assuming we are talking a manual penalty here). If they believe the links are a result of an intent to manipulate, then they are going to need to go.
One way they might recognize that is if a lot of the sub-domains have little to no external incoming links of their own. If that's the case, I'd day that the links are going to been as manipulative.
The tough part is that you don't get to have that conversation with Google, so unless each of the subdomains has a lot of incoming link authority, you may have to consider taking the links out.
However, since I don't know the details of your situation I can't treat that as official advice!
Great post Eric. From the looks of this one you could write an entire series on how poor mindset impacts the various aspects of SEO and leads to duplicate content, misinformation, internal linking, keyword stuffing, and so on.
It's night and day too with how quickly sites improve that scrap bad practices while replacing them with positives, versus the ones that try to hold on to each aspect of their old work and methods because it represents some sort of point within their mindset of a scheme-based SEO system.
Hey Ryan - no doubt that the concept of mindset could related to nearly any part of SEO!
Eric what about the webmaster who demands money in order to remove your backlinks? as once I faced the situation when I found out that on one of my client website which was penalized getting un-natural Keyword based backlinks from around 250+ web directories(these web directories were also penalized by google) and the Webmaster of all that Web Directories was same
I disavowed all those links but what would you suggest in order to get more effective result should we Pay webmaster or disavowing links is the best option?
And one more thing have you tried CognitiveSEO? To remove penalty or to spy on your competitor backlinks I always find this tool very helpful
Anyhow some great points you have mentioned, will follow them in my next link removal campaign
Hi Junaid - For the most part, if someone asks for money, I just disavow them. In rare cases, if the fee they request really seems like reasonable payment for the few minutes they might spend removing the link I might pay them - but usually not.
Have not tried Cognitive SEO at this point. What is your experience with it?
Thanks for the reply Eric, Well if I have to run a Link removal campaign I always use CognitiveSEO & Google Webmaster tool, With the help of these tools I have successfully recovered numerous of my clients websites and will definitely suggest you to try this tool out.
* I am not CognitiveSEO spokesperson :p *
Once again Thanks for your wonderful Feedback :)
Eric thanks for the useful post.I agree with you that Google likes to see that you put some effort into cleaning up the bad links that you have gotten that led to your penalty and I see some good results after doing some good effort into removing bad links and Big G rewarded me for my that effort.
I would love to see some research on the correlation between Moz posts about Google penalties and the standards of grammatically-correct English in the comments section :)
can't we estimate, weather google ignore suspicious link or not after submitting disavow tool?
I've got one question. Let's suposse I have a blog with a commenting platform (say DISQUS). What can I do if I receive an email of someone requesting me to remove the links in his/her previous comments, taking into account Links in comments are auto-generated by the platform it self and are not under control of the admin/blogger of the site?
I ask this because if I do what you say in the post, I won't mail blogs where I commented once, knowing they are not going to be able to do anything.
By the way...great post :)
Daniel - My bet is that your links from the comments are NoFollowed anyway, so I would simply let the requester know that this is the case, and that NoFollowed links don't matter.
Of course, there will be many out there that will not be happy with that response, but really very little you can do if it's not within your control to remove the links.
One other question though - would you be able to delete the comment?
Eric this is a great post and really provides the information needed, but there is one question in my mind. In Link removal campaign, I faced some webmasters asked Money for removal of the links, should we pay and move on, Coz its hurts Client and approximately they got thousands of Spam links.
If the amount of money is small and a reasonable compensation for the effort of removing the links, it might make sense to pay it. But, disavowing them is an option too.