Restoring link trust with Google is now vital. Here's how :

[Whitey]

Google has stepped up it's communication to assist webmaster's in what Matt Cutt's previously described as a "transition" back in approximately May when a higher level of transparency started. 8 new videos were produced recently to underpin the manual spam notifications now sent out through WMT and discussed here : [webmasterworld.com...]

This particular video describes, specifically, the philosophy and procedure Google requires webmasters to go through in order to restore trust. [youtube.com...]

My key takeaways are:

- make multiple "take down" requests to sites referring "bad links" to your website.
- keep documentation of those efforts
- clearly articulate, and if possible evidence efforts, that you are serious about removing those links to Google, in any future reconsideration request
- when you have made 2 or 3 attempts to take down those links, then use the disavow tool
- send your reconsideration request in.

From feedback I've been hearing, approximately 95% of sites will not take down links, for a likely variety of reasons. So the effort is in-practical.

Why then?

Google could easily just accept the disavow tool and release the manual action. But they re emphasise and acknowledge that the exercise is "going to be painful". Before they restore "trust" they are saying that they want some evidence that the site involved will not engage in SPAM linking again.

Perhaps folks should reflect on Matt Cutt's previous communication of going in with a "machete" to previously built links.

Thoughts? Does this fill you with an incentive to get cracking on link clean ups?

[jimbeetle]

There's not anything particularly new in the points you posted, basically the same that Google and Cutts have been saying all along.

Does this fill you with an incentive to get cracking on link clean ups?

If I run afoul of a manual action, yes; otherwise, no.

[Mentat]

A lot of sites and blogs (some blogspot) are using directly my RSS feeds => TONS of dofollow links!
For big sites is wind hunting... :(

[1script]

If I run afoul of a manual action, yes; otherwise, no.

I did run afoul of a manual action and completed all the steps Whitey describes (one difference I admit to: I only sent takedown requests once before disavowing) - the manual action was removed, or so I've been notified. So what? 4,6 and 9 months on (three different sites) and not a shred of difference in rankings/G traffic/Gbot activity - any of the indications I can think of that G had improved their "link trust". Bottom line: they make you jump through hoops but they have no intention of helping you in return. Basically, you're just another drone helping them clean their index for free.

Does this fill you with an incentive to get cracking on link clean ups? Not a single bit. It's a lot of extra work that makes no difference in the end.

[JS_Harris]

Does this fill you with an incentive to get cracking on link clean ups?

Sure I want spam to die a horrible death too but I'm not a spammer and so I resent being told to go look at these spam sites and contact their owners, it's not cool with me and I don't want to 'have' to do it, it's not right. Google should accept my disavow file without making me contact spammers, backlinks are only a problem because of how much value GOOGLE places on them.

Think about it for a second, Matt Cutts is extremely trusted by Google is he not? What if they told Matt they no longer trusted him because a high number of people started disliking him online and saying negative things about him on their sites, would they force him to track down all the haters individually to ask that we stop hating him? The idea is ridiculous but that's exactly what Google is asking us all to do with spam! (don't hate ya' Matt, just an example)

[aakk9999]

This video has sumarised what to do if a webmaster has engaged in link building themselves, however the video assumes that unnatural links were obtained by webmaster or on webmaster behalf.

Alex @Google (from the video):

As a webmaster, your goal is to reach out to sites that you explicitly purchased links from or maybe any services that you used to automatically generate backlinks to your site.

Unfortunately, the video does not address what should be done if "unnatural" (or better say, "dodgy") links were not placed or ordered by webmaster, and instead the site has "obtained" such links via scrappers or as a result of a negative SEO.

I am wondering whether if a webmaster has not purchased/ordered purchase of links nor built links automatically, would the following of the procedure described in video be some kind of "admission of guilt" to Google when in fact there was no guilt on webmaster's part.

[turbocharged]

This whole disavow tool is designed to turn us into unpaid manual reviewers for Google, and the data they collect from this will likely be used for another purpose in the future. How many of you have all this free time that you don't mind doing Google's job for free? I surely don't.

In the past spammers have spammed to rank, yet now they spam to sink competitors. Spam continues to work, but just in a different capacity then it was used before.

Here's an example of a problem one of our client's has. His site has good content and gets heavily scraped. The scrapers copy the whole page - including the company logo, sidebar navigation links and even the Google Plus image. They post these pages on Blogspot .com, .uk, .in and just about every country extension you can imagine along with places like Wordpress, Tubmlr and all these "high authority" spam magnet free blog hosts. Then the scrapers spam these copied pages and they do rank some of them, even if it's only for a short period of time. When the scraping and spam to scraped pages exceeds ones capacity to send out DMCA notices, what do you do? I mean even though we can send out DMCA notices for all of the scraped pages that are indexed today, dozens more have already been created and will appear tomorrow. If the DMCA notices are successful, at the very least these scraped pages will remain live for about two weeks, which is apparently enough time to make it profitable for them to keep doing it. This is a vicious and costly cycle. But it does not stop with scraping. The client has links to his site pop up on strange blogs that have no comments enabled and not even a contact form for the blog owner. Oddly enough, all of the blogs reside in a similar IP range. My guess is that whoever is scraping the client, is also posting these links on the blogs and then submitting paid link reports to Google so that the client's domain gets devalued even further then it already has been.

So here's how it all breaks down.... If your site is whitelisted by Google, the link penalties do not apply to you and you are free to focus on content creation. If you are a small business owner, you should stop running your business, halt the creation of content and instead become an unpaid member of Google's review team.

It's hard to believe so many webmasters accept this whole disavow tool/link garbage as being fair. At any given time a site could be hit with tens of thousands of links from someone that simply wants to rank higher than you. They will even buy you links so that they can report you for the links they paid for! I've seen it happen a number of times, and I'm sure it's only going to get worse and more widespread as time goes on.

If Google was truly focused on quality search results, and how scrapers are manipulating them with stolen content, then they would focus more effort on that problem instead. Possibly the reason why Google can't is because its algorithm is incapable of evaluating the quality of content and instead must rely mostly on signals that are heavily manipulated by not just spammers but those who also claim to wear white hats. This is probably why Google needed to monetize ordinary webmasters by creating an army of unpaid review team members.

[EditorialGuy]

If a site owner has lost Google's trust, it probably isn't because of "negative SEO." It could be, but realistically, it's probably because the site or its SEO went a little too far with "link building." (In my sector, sketchy link building is rampant, and there are thousands of bloggers who'll happily take your money for plain-vanilla text links or for links that are buried in "guest posts" or "sponsored posts.")

For me, the question isn't "Should site owners be responsible for tracking down, eliminating, and disavowing bad links," it's "What is a bad link?" If I haven't received a warning message in Webmaster Tools, can I safely assume that the thousands of unsolicited links in my WMT links report are okay?

[mrguy]

Google has lost my trust. They need to now earn it back.

I've got better things to do than be free paid spam finder for Google.

[dethfire]

- make multiple "take down" requests to sites referring "bad links" to your website.
- keep documentation of those efforts
- clearly articulate, and if possible evidence efforts, that you are serious about removing those links to Google, in any future reconsideration request
- when you have made 2 or 3 attempts to take down those links, then use the disavow tool
- send your reconsideration request in.

good grief, I don't have time for that. Does google want me bounty huntering to working on my site. geesh. amazing I can get penalized for what someone else is doing.

[ColourOfSpring]

If a site owner has lost Google's trust, it probably isn't because of "negative SEO." It could be, but realistically, it's probably because the site or its SEO went a little too far with "link building." (In my sector, sketchy link building is rampant, and there are thousands of bloggers who'll happily take your money for plain-vanilla text links or for links that are buried in "guest posts" or "sponsored posts.")

<snip>

I'm a developer like many of you here. We all know it's trivial to write a small script that can scrape and publish on remote domains. We don't even have to pay someone to do it - utterly trivial to write such a script. The "it's too much hassle to do negative SEO" argument doesn't reflect actual reality. Scrapers are everywhere because it's easy and FREE to do. It's also easy to auto-post blog comments, forum profiles etc. This happens all the time. Feed in 20 domains into a program, and all 20 domains had better have a strong link profile, because things are about to get a LOT more spammy when they next view latest links in GWT. Can we please refrain from taking the Matt Cutts line that neg. SEO is too much hassle to do. It is not. It just comes down to your own moral backbone as to whether you'd do it or not. It is NOT difficult to do. It's push-button easy.

[edited by: ColourOfSpring at 8:55 am (utc) on Aug 11, 2013]
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[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:57 pm (utc) on Aug 11, 2013]
[edit reason] ToS [/edit]

[ColourOfSpring]

I decided to go through the whole disavow thing with one of my sites. I went to GWT, got my latest links list in a spreadsheet and went through it as much as I could. After a few hours, I realised I just couldn't email every single domain that was linking to me (that I wasn't sure WHY they were linking to me, the spammy looking ones). No I had NOT built these links AT ALL - many were from arabic character set sites for heaven's sakes. Some were Chinese. Lots from blogspot domains. I made a shortlist of sites to email - I focused on the sites that had sitewide / multiple page links.

Really important point now: I had to check these sites to see if they were still linking to me. After all, we know how out of date GWT can be. I couldn't access half the sites because my MalwareBytes I run refused the IP addresses of these sites!. In other words, these sites were likely carrying malware/trojans/viruses. Google expects us to trawl through the sewers of the web to clean up our backlink profiles! How many webmasters are getting viruses/malware just by visiting their backlink profile? I became extremely angry at this. I was devoting hours of my time to potentially catch viruses and malware just to ask people who I never wanted to link to me to stop linking to me. I have no idea if MalwareBytes has protected me completely of course...so perhaps I now have malware on my computer.... :(


ANYWAY, I emailed the ones I could. Many I couldn't email because they had no contact details / form. I decided I'd wait 3 weeks before doing the disavow. NO RESPONSE WHATSOEVER. Not one.

I submitted the disavow and am waiting to hear back.

The whole process took over a full day (more than 8 hours). For a single domain. And I probably now have virus/malware on my computer for my efforts :(

[EditorialGuy]

The "it's too much hassle to do negative SEO" argument doesn't reflect actual reality.

I didn't say anything about whether negative SEO is easy or difficult to do. I said that negative SEO could be the reason why a site owner lost Google's trust, but, "realistically, it's probably because the site or its SEO went a little too far with 'link building.'"

I get e-mails every day from SEOs who want to buy links, buy "sponsored posts," or place "guest posts" on our information site. Even hobbyist bloggers get such solicitations. Fact is, there's a whole lot of sketchy "link-building" going on, and if Google means what it says, there are a whole lot of SEO clients who'd be cruisin' for a bruisin' even if "negative SEO" didn't exist.

[ColourOfSpring]

I didn't say anything about whether negative SEO is easy or difficult to do. I said that negative SEO could be the reason why a site owner lost Google's trust, but, "realistically, it's probably because the site or its SEO went a little too far with 'link building.'"

I made a point about how easy it was to do because there's a lot of it going on. Negative SEO doesn't necessarily mean there's an intent to hurt a site. I just mean that the likes of scrapers, aggregators, and cheap directories (that pre-populate their listings by scraping other lists) are all churning out links 24/7, and it's evident this happens when I look at any link profile of any given domain name. As I say, this doesn't even include malicious intent. Basically, these are links you didn't build, nor are they "positive" links.

I do get what you're saying about deliberate and cynical link building, but honestly I think that's truly a practice that's been withering on the vine for some time now. A "normal" business site that decides to use old SEO techniques of blog commenting, article directories and other previously popular "mainstream" methods - well, it would be as if they've been asleep in the last 18 months or so. Not many people bother with these techniques now. Most are mired in a situation of trying to remove years-old links that did employ such techniques years ago.

However, scrapers and aggregators haven't gone away....

[edited by: ColourOfSpring at 4:15 pm (utc) on Aug 11, 2013]

[notsosmart]

Are you all saying that unless a manual action notice was received, there is no sense in putting in the work going on a wild goose chase looking for bad links?

Because that sounds good to me.

[jimbeetle]

Unfortunately, the video does not address what should be done if "unnatural" (or better say, "dodgy") links were not placed or ordered by webmaster, and instead the site has "obtained" such links via scrappers or as a result of a negative SEO.

Well, there's a tool for that. It didn't exist until a few days ago and it took Matt Cutts to (again) move the goal posts to repurpose its original intent.

It's called the disavow tool.

If there's any site you don't want to be associated with that's linking to you and you want to say, "Hey, I got nothing to do with this site," you can just do a disavow.

Should I be worried if a couple of sites I don't want to be associated with are linking to me? [youtube.com]

Quite frankly, I'm getting tired of Matt's continuing reinterpretation of the original intentions standards and tools. The only consequence of him doing so is confusion.

[indyank]

It looks like they are keen on handing out some of pain to the webmaster in the whole disavow process. This, according to their thinking, might be to ensure the concerned webmaster doesn't do it again. But the web is full of several unsolicited links and Google doesn't consider all of them to be good. some are viewed as spam and it is there where the innocent webmaster has to go thro. an unfair pain.

[JS_Harris]

This whole disavow tool is designed to turn us into unpaid manual reviewers for Google, and the data they collect from this will likely be used for another purpose in the future.

I don't think it's designed to do this but it is another data set that will undoubtedly be tested against and if the search results end up better then of course they'll test employing it to a limited degree.

The only problem I see with this is sites that abuse the system, or don't know what they are doing, marking trusted sites as spam via disavow. Still, I don't think many webmasters will disavow good links from their own sites, so maybe...

People said the same things about DMCA requests.

[jakebohall]

I imagine that the data being turned in to disavow will later be used in an effort to apply penalties to the sites that are repeatedly reported.... once they collect enough of this data, they can start showing that many people don't want links from you... so you can then get flagged for having to many unnatural links pointing FROM your website.

I did want to note that in most every case that I have been involved, getting links removed from 50% of the domains targeted has been pretty standard. I'm not sure where the 5% is coming from.

[rish3]

getting links removed from 50% of the domains targeted has been pretty standard. I'm not sure where the 5% is coming from

Depends on the type of link. I see both being equally plausible. There are some link types where 1% is more likely.

[ColourOfSpring]

I did want to note that in most every case that I have been involved, getting links removed from 50% of the domains targeted has been pretty standard. I'm not sure where the 5% is coming from.

A quick blog comment blast would knock that 50% stat down to somewhere between 0.1% and 0.2%.

[1script]

I did want to note that in most every case that I have been involved, getting links removed from 50% of the domains targeted has been pretty standard. I'm not sure where the 5% is coming from.

This could only be the case where you have absolute control over the link, i.e. you stop paying for it, and it goes away - exactly the type of bad link Google is trying to identify. It's either that or you've got extremely lucky.

I think I actually have anecdotal evidence of hight removal success percentage being perceived as a bad sign, not the other way around. My "inorganic" links problems all revolve around WP footer links I foolishly sponsored 4 years ago. For one of the target sites I got "lucky" in that a large percentage of blogs using that theme have had domain names expired by 2012. About 80% of bad links were no longer there, and I proudly wrote about it to Google in my RR. That site got its traffic *drop* even further after the manual action was removed, and it never returned. The actual removal rate really was about 5% if you only count webmasters that actually responded to my request (and my offer of free help since it had to do with WP theme change) , the rest came by attrition.

[Whitey]

Google wants me to remove links from sponsored WordPress themes
[webmasterworld.com...] [webmasterworld.com]

@1script With the benefit of hindsight, and the disavow tool did you follow through on the recommendations from @Netmeg @Cain1V and others. e.g.

What Google wants to see is hard work and acknowledgement that you tried to remove those links.

You may be able to find the owners of those websites via whois, contacting the website, etc.

Its not going to be fun, but chalk it up to a good learning experience. I would go that route rather than throwing away a decent domain with some age.

They were wise words looking back.

[simonlondon]

This whole disavow tool is designed to turn us into unpaid manual reviewers for Google, and the data they collect from this will likely be used for another purpose in the future. How many of you have all this free time that you don't mind doing Google's job for free? I surely don't.

one has to admit that our having to do this has our own hope for gain - increase in traffic. We are not doing this for free apparently, although you may argue that Google gets our content and should give us traffic, well it's all about leverage: if there is an equally strong traffic source I am sure we all would have jumped ship (or at least keep one foot on each).
Nobody is doing this for Google for free, that's for sure.

[1script]

@Whitey: ditto to that! I had a spreadsheet that I've collected all the info about the site contact, the way I got it (WHOIS, contact form, listed on site), the date contacted etc. I've inserted all that data into the disavow.txt as a comment above the domain. I've also added a comment in cases the domain has already expired, I still added it into the disavow.txt if WMT has still listed it at the time.

I have also included a PDF copy of that spreadsheet with my RR that followed 48 hours after the disavow.

So, yeah, I'd say if anyone cared to look, it would be apparent that I did my homework and put significant time and effort into it.

But regardless, I still take offense to the notion that Google should be doling out punishments as they [MC team, interns, reviewers - whatever] see fit. I want to know who concocted the very notion that getting out of the manual action should be "painful". Why? Do they not realize that the most prolific offenders are companies, not individuals, and they cannot "feel" anything? It is only painful to people that try to restore the standing of sites they've been working on for years. Spammers "rinse and repeat" - I thought everybody knew that. And, in any case, was it not enough to be the judge and the jury, they wanted to be the executioner, too?

Google may have been able to fool FTC and the Congress so far but they are in the very real sense holding the keys to Internet, at least in the niche I'm in. They certainly have the power to make or break online-based companies and they are affecting real offline lives of people. This is a huge responsibility, I don't see them acting as if they realize that.

[fathom]

From feedback I've been hearing, approximately 95% of sites will not take down links, for a likely variety of reasons. So the effort is in-practical.

Confirming such statistical evidence is problematic. One can say even the site owner 'getting such links' don't wish to labor undoing anything of no consequential value for themselves... which is equally why a 3rd party isn't all that interested in laboring for no value either.

But I can 100% guarantee all site owners will remove all links pointing to a 404 error... remove the page... no more problem in but 5 seconds.

Even if they still gladly link to your 404 page you can't be devalued anymore by PANDA, PENGUIN nor a manual review... and that beats disavowing simply because - only Google is an expert on what Google classifies as organic and that changes depending on the volume... e.g. if you have 5 reciprocal links Google will almost certainly not suggest those 5 reciprocal links are inorganic but the latter 9,995 will make the first 5 change their original Google endorsed status... thereby the target problem changes which means you can't aim at 100% organic links to disavow without simply disavowing 100% of your Google profile.

I prefer the sure bet as oppose to guessing that you know inorganic links better or at least as good as Google does.

[morpheus83]

It's hard to believe so many webmasters accept this whole disavow tool/link garbage as being fair. At any given time a site could be hit with tens of thousands of links from someone that simply wants to rank higher than you. They will even buy you links so that they can report you for the links they paid for! I've seen it happen a number of times, and I'm sure it's only going to get worse and more widespread as time goes on.

I completely agree here. For a small webmaster it is painful for me to take time out of my schedule and go in the painstaking process of identifying scrappers, then contacting them individually to take down the content, following up with them and finally when they dont respond I report them to Google with the disavow tool. How difficult is it for Google to develop a standard and then push it for popular publishing platforms which allows content creators to ping with the content they have created. So that if anyone scrapes them Google knows its a duplicate.

I understand fat pings have been around since some time but Google has not approved / denied them.

With the amount of tools that are available it does not take a smart person a couple of hours to rip apart and clone a 8 - 10 year website.

[fathom]

I completely agree here. For a small webmaster it is painful for me to take time out of my schedule and go in the painstaking process of identifying scrappers, then contacting them individually to take down the content, following up with them and finally when they dont respond I report them to Google with the disavow tool.

The disavow tool is about disavowing links to YOUR PAGES of content not disavowing pages of content established on other domains.

You'll be happy to know that "scrapper sites" don't have a lot of trust signals to devalue your pages and if they happen to have more than you you have bigger problems... e.g. your content isn't all that original and likely not the first version Google had in its archive.

How difficult is it for Google to develop a standard and then push it for popular publishing platforms which allows content creators to ping with the content they have created. So that if anyone scrapes them Google knows its a duplicate.

I understand fat pings have been around since some time but Google has not approved / denied them.

With the amount of tools that are available it does not take a smart person a couple of hours to rip apart and clone a 8 - 10 year website.

Just because Google doesn't acknowledge a term publicly that you are familiar with [like fat pings] doesn't mean their own term PANDA in its massive amount of developmental changes over 2 years via Updates #1 through #26 doesn't incorporate their ideals of the same thing.

They just wouldn't go into too much details so anti-PANDA countermeasures can exploit the newest vulnerabilities.

[JohnRoy]

You'll be happy to know that "scrapper sites" don't have a lot of trust signals to devalue your pages and if they happen to have more than you you have bigger problems... e.g. your content isn't all that original and likely not the first version Google had in its archive.

True to a certain degree. But not always.
If your content (original) went online five years ago, and the site is not getting any freshness, the low-valued fresh scraper might rank higher.

[Whitey]

Why then?

Google could easily just accept the disavow tool and release the manual action. But they re emphasise and acknowledge that the exercise is "going to be painful". Before they restore "trust" they are saying that they want some evidence that the site involved will not engage in SPAM linking again.

Google has lost my trust. They need to now earn it back.

I guess for "trust" to re establish itself, it has to be a "2 way thing"; an act of consideration based on the confidence something will happen by going through the various quality guidelines set out by Google.

Really, there's a lot at stake for both Google and site-owners in a NEED < > NEED . The need for more, diversified good quality user experiences, and the need to incentivize an energy with creative momentum to do it.

Without falling into the temptation to rant, do folks think that Google could make some communication improvements by demonstrating specific sites or real instances of success that have responded positively with the disavow tool and RR?

What do you think? Thoughts ?