Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
-
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
-
It is something we have considered, but it is a very good source of income.
Obviously this only when it is ranking. It has a whole lot of history (granted this is why it is not ranking) and the domain is our brand as well. Basically we would rather keep it if we can.
Kindly thanking you for your advice Matt.
-
Hmmm, I understand. It can be frustrating.
The problem is that even if you are trying (and trying hard) to sort the issue out, if they still see bad links they wont lift any manual penalty.
I'm not saying that it is worthwhile in your case but sometimes it can make sense to throw away a domain and start again. Does it take many sales?
Just remember that if you start again with a new domain, do it properly and don't outsource to people who can't be trusted
-
Yes the penalty is referring to rankings, and while we are being indexed we are still under a manual penalty.
We know we have a good site, and have seen natural links since we dropped last year, but it is the old spammed backlinks which obviously spurned Google on to hitting us with this penalty.
-
Yes, you are right!
About a year ago we outsourced our SEO work to a company in india and they were extremely aggressive with these industry specific keywords.
Needless to say when penguin rolled out we pretty much disappeared.
I cannot say we have disavowed all of them but we have been working on removing these unnatural links for the past 9-10 months or so. So everything we found which we couldn't get taken down or no-followed we disavowed. As you can imagine the disavow.txt was longer than my arm!
The point is we have done everything we can and shown evidence of this but Google fails to recognize this.
-
Looks like your site is getting indexed. Is the penalty referring to rankings?
If so, some sites pre-penguin experienced high rankings because of their backlinks. If some of those backlinks' "value" were pulled (spammy links) your rankings fell.
Even if some of those spammy links were successfully taken down, doesn't necessary mean you get the organic position you lost after penguin.
This may or may not apply to your case--but generally speaking.
-
I see a problem already, although it could be that these links have been disavowed (there is no way something like Open Site Explorer can tell this).
Check out the image attached. You have used some very aggressive link building tactics which target exact match anchor text links - and lots of them! Very unnatural indeed.
Can you confirm that these have been disavowed?
Matt
-
No problem, thanks for your time. www.accidentsdirect.com
-
Do you have a link to your site please? In order to help, I think we would need to have a good look around your link profile.
Matt
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it?
Hi Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it? In an SPA website (angularJS), Why it happens?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Google + and Schema
I've noticed with a few of the restaurant clients I work with that Schema isn't contributing at all to their SERP -- their Google + page is. Is there any way to have more control over what Google is pulling to help make UX better? I.e. showing photos of the restaurant without a logo, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anti-Alex0 -
How to leverage Google Images?
My Google search rankings are improving rapidly at the moment, but a lot of my rankings are for images (presume that means the images are appearing near the top in Google Images). How do I capitalise on that? It's not really much help to me that my images are popular unless it results in traffic to the pages where those images are used. I am running Wordpress so I have the option to have images embed as "no link", "link to attachment page", "link to original image", etc. Is there any advantage of using one of these over the other? I'd really like to set it up so that when a Google Images user clicks "View Image" it loads the attachment page or the host content page rather than the image. Bad SEO? I'm not sure if the fact that I'm using Jetpack Photon CDN image hosting will make this more complicated or not. Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Remove Google penalty or make a new website, Which is better??
My local website was hit by google and I have done all steps to remove the penalty, But it's still not ranked. So it is better to make a new website with new content and start working on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Google Penguin 2.1 Penalty - Recoverable?
Hello, I have a client that was hit very bad by the Google Penguin 2.1 update. He mentioned he did an intensive link analysis and removed all the bad links; however there were a lot of them (around 6000). His domain has a decent sized domain authority of 30/100. I'm wondering if it's worth it to try and save his domain, or start fresh from a new one. Due to the high number of links I'm not 100% confident that all the bad links were taken care of, and I've heard that even if you remove the links Google won't lift the penalties. What would you do...get a new domain, or risk the next couple months trying to save the existing one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven751 -
Google Reviews
I have a couple of reviews from clients on Google that seem to have just disappeared. What gives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Does Google punish sites for Backlinks?
Here is Matt Cutts video, for those of you who have not seen it already. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4dAWb5jUws (Very Short) In this Video Matt explains that Google does not look at backlinks. Many link spamming sites have detected, there have been many website receiving warning messages in their Google web tools to deindex these links, etc.. My theory is that Google will not punish sites for backlinks. However, they manually check for "link farming sites" and warn anyone affiliated with them, just in case these links were built from a competitor. This way they can eliminate all the "Bad Link Farm" sites and not hurt anyone who does not deserve to be hurt. Google is not going to give us all their information to rank, they dont want us to rank. They want us to PPC. However, they do want to have the best SERPs available. I call it Google juggling! Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0