Google Penalty for External Links - How to Remove this Penality

[bushib]

Hi there,

Recently my webmaster got the below email from Google.

Dear site owner or webmaster of (site name),
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include selling links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

We removed all external links from the home page and made all links in the blogposts no-follow.

Site dropped its 70% traffic and revenue since this penalty.

All the contents on the site are 100% unique and the site was regularly updated.

After we made all these changes and sent reconsideration request to Google but the site in question got rejected 3 times by Google.

According to Google's last email site still has some issues which doesn't comply with their quality guidelines. We are trying to find the issues with this site but nothing more found yet.

Can any expert tell me please what are the exact issues with this site, how to find them and remove the Google penalty from this site.

I will be very thankful for any help.

Regards

[edited by: tedster at 1:14 am (utc) on May 31, 2011]

[tedster]

This sounds to me like you might have been hacked - and are hosting parasite links that are cloaked so that only googlebot can see them. To discover if that's the case, you can use the "Fetch as googlebot" tool in your Webmaster Tools account

[Planet13]

Did you also update your blogging software (and any other software that could be hacked)?

[bushib]

Hi,

I used "Fetch as googlebot" utility in Google webmaster accounts and checked various pages but it didn't show me any errors.

Also, the blogging software and plugins are fully updated.

Any help please?

Regards

[walkman]

bushib, how's your content? Looks to me like Google is looking at that too after penalties. Too many ads or MFA pages are being left out.

[bushib]

Hi,

All content is 100% unique and originally written. Domain is 2-3 years old. Site is regularly updated and having nice design.

After the penalty, site is not appearing on the first page of Google even with its own name. Site is now on the 5-6th page in Google with its own name.

We have removed all external links from the site and made the rest no-follow but according to Google site still does not comply with their quality guidelines.

I will be really thankful for any help in solving my issue.

Looking for more replies.

Regards

[tedster]

I used "Fetch as googlebot" utility in Google webmaster accounts and checked various pages but it didn't show me any errors.

You would not expect to see "errors" but rather changes in the content put there by a hacker - most likely links.

The message you got from Google apparently means that you do have a penalty - one that can be removed after a successful reconsideration request. However, you may also have Panda-related issues, and lower rankings because of Panda cannot be removed through a reconsideration request.

[bushib]

Hi,

In the first message by Google, they clearly mentioned that the issue is due to the following.

"Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include selling links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes".

I removed all links and made others no-follow but they told me that the site in question still does not comply with Google quality guidelines.

The issue is due the links and not Panda.

I am asked by Google to put a reconsideration request after removing those issues from my site but I am unable to find the issues on my site.

My purpose of this discuss in this forum is to find out those issues which still exists on my site and getting back my site in Google.

Any help will be really appreciated.

Looking for your replies.

Regards

[tedster]

I agree, the issue Google was communicating with you about was due to links and not Panda.

I was only expressing extra caution - that there may now be Panda-related issues as well. If that is the case, then even if the link penalty is removed, the site may no longer rank the way you are used to.

[bushib]

Hi,

Thanks all for the replies.

Is there any way that Google can tell the exact issue with the site in question?

Looking for your reply.

Regards

[Planet13]

Is there any way that Google can tell the exact issue with the site in question?

I don't believe I have ever heard of google telling a web site owner exactly what the violation is (meaning, which specific page or pages have the violation). They just don't give out a more detailed notification that the one you already received.

I would start checking all the .htaccess files (in every directory) on your site and make sure there is no unwanted code on there.

I would check with other blog owners who may be using the same theme as you to see if they have found any problems. It turns out some theme creators will sneak in certain links in the themes they create.

I would then check every page using Xenu and look at all the external URLs - you might see something that surprises you. However, a good hacker would probably NOT show the links to Xenu, so it might not have any value. On the other hand, it takes very little effort to run Xenu and, at the very least, it will alert you to broken links on your site.

Then you might use either the fetch as googlebot for ALL your pages or you might look at the CACHED results in the google SERPs for your pages. The cached results should show you want google bot saw when it last visited.

I hope this helps.

[CouponUs]

Try to site:"your site" to see what kind of pages that G cached. The "bad links" on that caches also count

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Link to higher quality sites, your ratio of good to bad will improve.