Any successes getting SEO/link vendors clean up Penguin-related problems they helped create?
-
Hi all,
I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create?
I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify.
There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed.
Cheers all,
Matt
-
Some good responses there, thanks everyone.
-
And now we know that EGOL does not live in NYC, because the major there wouldn't allow you to get serving sizes that big.
Might be time to invest in a slurpee machine!
-
just don't get confused and bring the popcorn bucket in there. I feel like slurpee mixed with popcorn would not taste as good as it sounds.
-
I just want the popcorn. I will donate the slurpee to whoever wants it.
-
You take a bucket into 7-eleven.
I am going to need a $10 slurpee before this discussion is over.
-
Where do you get a $10 slurpee?! That thing must be gigantic.
-
I have experience attempting to do exactly what you are talking about here with very little result. My company used to buy links from "SubmitEdge" and their link building practices are shady at best. Thousands of terribly written articles, directory submissions, message board comments, and other ridiculous penguin-tastic links built through them.
I spent a good month or two working at getting them to help me in the removal of these links. They pretty much did nothing but inform me that their practices are well-established and in-line with Google's policies.. (untrue. incredibly untrue.) So what I started doing was asking for logins and passwords of the accounts created to go onto ridiculous message boards and post terrible links. The beautiful thing is they were able to give me lists of everywhere they built a link. And for the articles, they supplied me with usernames and passwords. This meant several weeks worth of work for me to go through each one and remove the articles and links.
However I was left with all the social links and directory links. Some of the article links also did not allow me to login and upon further review the blog sites owned by Submit Edge were the ones I couldn't log in to. I went back and forth with them and they eventually stopped responding to me and would not help me log in to those. They still exist to this day... I've yet to disavow because I haven't seen results of any penalties but I have this all documented of course.
Anyway I digress... The point is, you can battle all you want and it might get you a little further but ultimately they are going to do very little and claim they have done nothing wrong the entire time. (This is my experience with only one company of course.) It is frustrating to say the least. Especially when I know they could just ask their staff member what "djnaro23" password is so I could go through forumland and remove all the stupid links. But no..
One more note -- I ended up trying to guess a lot of these passwords for the aforementioned social links I was unsuccessful with. I will say that they are incredibly lazy people and several of the logins ended up being simple passwords. I literally copied the username and used it as the password and this worked about 33% of the time.
In summation, good friggin luck getting them to do any work for you; they will most likely refer you to their paid link-removal service which is a huge scam. However you should be able to garner a bit of information and hopefully some logins which will give you the ability to go back and remove them yourself. Or at least, as in my experience, remove SOME of them...
Fun, huh?
-
I made a request for assistance in getting links that I feel weren't procured in our best interest or within Google's current guidelines. Our vendor offered to use the disavow tool on my behalf saying that was the quickest way, but from everything I've read, this was premature and could due potentially do more harm than good. I turned down their offer. I didn't want to perpetuate their lack of good sense and expertise by continuing to depend on them.
-
Depends how "well known" the agency is, I have taken one 2 clients from a local agency which is quite large they have about 40 staff locally. We asked them to remove a large number of links from their link networks and directories they own. They actually removed most of the links in question over a few weeks periods.
The process we used was to have the client contact the agency direct with some wording such as "We realized you have been using link networks to do link building (see attached report of network links) this has resulted in a serious drop in revenue and traffic. We request that you remove the attached links in the report from your network."
This worked with two prior clients, they did clean up most of the damage, but that been said some other SEO companies would not do the same.
-
- goes for popcorn and a $10 slurpie *
This is a really interesting question.
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
-
Whats the best way to get credit links from sites i've built?
Hello! I've build 100's of sites. They mostly have site wide footer links pointing back to me. I know this is now frowned on. But does anyone have a good solution to get maximum value back from these? A few have a footer link to a credit page that then links back. I get quite a lot of work back from them. So I don't really fancy removing them. Many thanks in advance.
Link Building | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Can we use Free domains (like .cf / .tk / .gq / .ml / .ga) for backlinks?
many times I Noticed that most of the website use .cf / .tk / .gq / .ml / .ga this domain for backlinks but when I click on this it shows me the error I want to know that how they get a do follow backlink from the Different free domain can I get backlinks from my free domain? if this possible then How? This is my website Pakistan News kindly tell me how to rank.
Link Building | | Zaidazam0 -
I Know How To Get A Link From Huffington Post ..... Should I ?
Hi pals, like the title says I know an author of the huffington post that will write a related article to my website and give me a genuine permanent link. But... he wants me to pay him $1000 for the link and the article. Do you think it's work it? Would YOU pay that price for a link like this??
Link Building | | ptiworldmoz0 -
How to create good SEO content for an essentially thin ecommerce site?
I have a retail website that in the past has been hit by a manual action for crappy backlinks (these were all done by a previous agency and up until the penalty providing very good results). We have since removed all of the rubbish backlinks and have come out of manual penalty and are looking in to our long term strategy in terms of content and link building. We have a blog within our site that does well with traffic and with an OK conversion to the products that feature within the posts, we are also putting together a strategy in terms of long term content plans and while this is all very good for the blog, the ecommerce part of the domain continues to suffer. I know that part of this is because we did remove all of these links that were giving it juice, but where do you start with SEO when what you are dealing with is essentially thin content? With around 7000 products, every page has unique descriptions and titles that have been updated to remove keyword stuffing and over optimisation that has occured in the past. We don't want to go down the route of getting an agency that is going to put us back in Googles bad books, but how do you go about getting a retail page juice without firing backlinks at it? Not looking for the holy grail here but just looking for some advice, I want a clear idea of a direction to go in before recruiting an agency to do this.
Link Building | | timsilver0 -
When/ What Links to Disavow?
We have an older website started in 2000. We have thousands of backlinks which we believe are hurting us. Starting with Panda our site has been devastated, traffic wise, from a million + page views a month to 1/3 of that now. We've never solicited links, never paid for them, they just happened. It seems every "search engine" and spammy site on the web has links to us. Hundreds if not thousands from sites like , 29searchengines.com, 55 searchengines.net, and on and on.. 1. How does a site know when the links are harmful?
Link Building | | foodsleuth
2. How do you know which links should be disavowed? Thank you0 -
Are links with space considered to be the same as links with %20?
I wonder if Google would consider those three links to be the same? http://www.example.com/test page.html http://www.example.com/test page.html http://www.example.com/test+page.html
Link Building | | lucek0 -
Link Building Services Post Penguin
Hi Can anyone suggest a link building service that is of higher quality and still works nowadays? All the private networks were deindexed and it looks like we're left only with blasting software, which i don't really like. I am doing research on link building now and i can't seem to find any service that meets the quality of BMR or other deindexed Homepage Networks. Thanks!
Link Building | | comancsm0 -
How do I start trying to get links from blogs
Do I just find blogs websites that are in the same topical area and ask them can i link back?
Link Building | | Feily0