Addressing Google Manual Penalty for Unnatural Links

[tdavid88]

Hi Everyone,

I have got a message from google webspam team like 6 months ago about Unatural links that has been discovered in our link profile.

Since then i have massivley tried to remove links and with each reconsideration request I send I have got declined.
They wrote that they still are able to see links that are not following google guidlines...

we really took masive actions like:

- Downloading the entire link profile from sevral sources <snip>
- Going manually over the links and contacting low quality websites and asking them to remove links. those that didn't replied back were included in the list of links to disavow via google tool.

* This job (for each reconsideration request) requried hiring a special team to go a link by link (approximately 3000 unique domains) to determine if they are good or not. (meterics were: overall website design (its looking like a real site?) , content quality, link position, link is looking natural?)

We did this over and over (4 times with a month difference between each request).

The last one was 2 weeks ago, I used a tool/service <snip> to determine if links are good or not and kept only those
that were showing as safe. and still got this message that they are able to see some links that are not following the rules.

The situation now is that i'm removing and removing links and i'm afraid I will stay without any links to support my rankings?

what strategy do I need to take? to stop sending the reconsideration requests and start getting links backs (safe way)? or to keep trying to remove this manual penalty?

I really need my rankings back and don't want to waste time and money by also removing good links and keep sending reconsideration requests until i'm staying without any links...


I will really appreciate your share of thoughts with my situation here, thanks!

[edited by: goodroi at 12:36 pm (utc) on Sep 9, 2013]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, now please go read & follow the community guidelines [/edit]

[goodroi]

I would suggest multiple approaches at the same time.

#1 - You want to avoid having a business that is 100% dependent on Google traffic, so it is very smart to develop backlinks that will drive real traffic. Reach out to relevant forums and blogs that have your target market and can directly drive sales to you. If the Google penalty gets worse or never improves, you won't care because you will be getting so much traffic from non-Google sources. Google tends to notice websites that are getting real traffic and reward them.

#2 - Keep trying with the reinclusion. It can be frustrating and I do have doubts about how carefully Google reviews them but if it was my site I would be relentless. I would make sure to be very obvious about the large amount of effort to clear any potential sign of manipulation. I would want Google to be impressed and feel that I am not trying to trick them.

#3 - I would also audit my website. Find the low quality pages and fix or delete them. If you had some black hat pages just kill them. Create entire new content sections. A great website will attract backlinks and high usage which will help to replace the missing link juice that you lost when you removed or disavowed those poisonous links.

good luck

[MarieHaynes]

The process is definitely frustrating.

I am not impressed with any of the tools that are out there to find bad backlinks. I have reviewed a good number of failed reconsideration requests from site owners who have used tools and quite often the links that are marked as "healthy" are not. I think that you could use the tool as a start as most of the links that are marked as toxic or suspicious really are bad ones but then you've really got to go through the remaining links by hand to determine whether there are still unnatural ones in there.

This job (for each reconsideration request) requried hiring a special team to go a link by link (approximately 3000 unique domains) to determine if they are good or not. (meterics were: overall website design (its looking like a real site?) , content quality, link position, link is looking natural?)

I am guessing that unnatural links were probably missed in this process. Did this team have experience in auditing link profiles? I find that when people first start trying to audit backlinks the lines of what "looks natural" get blurred. There are many links where a site owner believes looks natural but Google knows that the link was created with the intention of manipulating a site's position in the search engine results. For example, I've seen site owners try to hold on to article syndication links, widespread guest post links and directory links that were obviously made for SEO purposes.

An unnatural link does not necessarily have to come from a spammy looking page. I've had clients that had been dealt their unnatural links penalties for too many blogroll links (i.e. mostly reciprocal) from sites that were high quality, or from what most people would call high quality guest posting.

[tdavid88]

so what is the rule or how do i know for sure how natural link looks?

(thanks for taking time writing this comments!)

[MasterOfPuppets]

well you just wasted your time
this is the fact

google algos clearly marking non spam links as spam
probably they also mark spam links as clear

the remaining links are more than enough to get you algo penalized

i never saw a case who recovered rankings after manual link penalty