Will a Google manual action affect all new links, too?
-
I have had a Google manual action (Unnatural links to your site; affects: all) that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links. I have been spending the past few weeks cleaning things up and have submitted a second pass at a reconsideration request. In the meantime, I have been creating new content, boosting social activity, guest blogging and working with other publishers to generate more natural inbound links.
My question is this: knowing that this manual action affects "all," are the new links that I am building being negatively tainted as well? When the penalty is lifted, will they regain their strength? Is there any hope of my rankings improving while the penalty is in effect?
-
Hi Maria
What do you mean by "Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link" -- Is there an issue with linking back from directories to your site?
Does this apply to submitting my website to social bookmark websites using a specific anchor text that am optimizing for?
Thanks
James
-
Hi Michael,
"You are correct that it wasn't a single press release but 3-4 that all had the same circumstances."
It's quite unlikely that a few press releases are the sole cause of your penalty, although it is possible. But I think you may have more links to clean up. Here are two examples:
http://healthmad.com/health/when-las-vegas-gets-the-best-of-you-6-ways-to-get-back-on-your-feet-in-sin-city/ - self made article
http://www.cannylink.com/healthhospitaldirectories.htm - Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link
-
Interesting. I hadn't seen these links before and have never purchased links. I'll download the list from open site explorer and review and disavow these and similar. Thanks for pointing these out!
-
Agreed. Ordinarily it wouldn't matter, but once subject to manual review they would be.
-
Looking in Open Site Explorer, I'm seeing several suspicious links in the report. These are links from sites that have nothing to do with medicine whatsoever, all with targeted keywords in the anchor text. When I click to view the page and look for the actual links, I'm not seeing anything. So, it seems the links are no longer there.
If the report from Open Site Explorer is correct, it looks to me like someone was purchasing links and has now removed them. Did you purchase links?
Some of the suspicious links are:
- afghan-network.net/Bookshop/persian-books.html
- learnscratch.org/resources/why-learn-scratch
- www.tiltshift.com/
If these links are also in Google's link profile, I could see why the site is penalized.
-
I suspect you missed some and Google are being well... Google.
Ahrefs do a 7 day money back guarantee. You can even find a 50% off coupon around for the first month. Some people will even need to check majestic as well.
No one site will get all the links unfortunately.
-
Agreed. But given that I had those removed in quick order and it has been several weeks since they have considerably dropped, any reason why they wouldn't have removed the manual action. I am essentially back to a pre-PRWeb profile.
-
Just looking a bit more, but you could have been flagged for manual checking because from around the beginning of August you had a huge spike of links. Based on Matt Cutts previous statements about Prweb, they would have seen it as possibly spammy.
From August you went up to nearly 125 referring domains, before dropping back down to 36 now. Prior to PRweb, you were at around 30 referring domains. I suspect this spike is what caused a manual review.
-
I don't know if that makes me feel better or not, but you basically confirmed my thoughts. I may do what you indicate and disavow everything, but I am going try one more time and cut a lot more deeply in actual link removal first.
Meanwhile, of course, I am top 5 for all my major terms in Bing and Yahoo. Joy!
Thanks
-
I have to say on my first quick look I cannot determine why you would have got a manual penalty. Your link profile does not look spammy, and I wonder if google are specifically targeting sites that use PRweb.
With Ahref's I only see 77 dofollow backlinks, and to be honest you could probably be very brutal when it comes to dissavowing these links and starting again.
It is strange that the two methods of link building (prweb, and infographics) are two methods that Matt Cutts has recently (in the last few months) said that should be nofollow links.
But I cannot give anything definitive based on what I am seeing.
-
I disavowed in the same day I submitted a reconsideration request, but I did also include it in my documentation. I also included multiple emails to publishers and contact form submissions, as recommended to me.
-
Sure. http://www.urgentcarelocations.com
I just added the footer links to each state profile this week and see how those could be considered "spammy." They weren't supposed to be implemented with "urgent care" after every one of them. I doubt that is an issue here, however, given that they keep referring to unnatural links.
-
Sometimes it takes a little while for the disavow tool to remove links. So, you may need to give it some time if you just did that. You can always include the disavow request in the documents for your reconsideration request. Beyond that, I'd take a closer look at your other links to see if there are other links causing an issue.
-
Thinking about it Kurt, I have to agree that it is odd that a manual penalty has arisen from this. Michael, if you would like to share a link to your site, perhaps we can have a look and see if there is something obvious happening.
-
I have disavowed the URLs now. The major offender was streetinsider.com. I was able to remove URLs on two other offending publisher sites. Even with the disavow, however, Google didn't remove the manual action. Going to try out removeem.com to see if their tools/service can assist.
-
Bummer about the rejection. You said that you were having trouble getting the press releases removed (and I assume the links), have you disavowed those links?
-
Thanks Kurt. You are correct that it wasn't a single press release but 3-4 that all had the same circumstances. In fact, it was the same 2-3 publishers that removed the nofollow tags. The real crummy thing is that those publishers refuse to remove the links so I am having to resort to disavowing them.
While I have been working through a couple of reconsideration requests, I have built some pretty strong links, but Google seems to have capped me at page 5.
I actually got a negative response back from Google this morning following my latest reconsideration request. It provided no specifics as it did in the past only that my "Site violates Google's quality guidelines" and references the manual action of "Unnatural links to your site." I'm on round three now. I only have about 300 total inbound links nearly all of which are purely natural or nofollow. What a mess...
-
That stinks that those publishers did that. I'm a little suspicious that this would happen from a single press release. Usually, it takes Google a bit more than that to trip a manual action. Are you sure there aren't other links, maybe other press releases, that are suspicious? I only ask because Google usually responds to a pattern of manipulation, not a single action.
In regards to your actual question, natural links typically aren't "tainted" by a previous penalty. In fact it would probably work in the exact opposite way. With manual actions Google thinks that you are trying to manipulate them. In order to get the manual action removed, Google is looking for you to clean up the old links, apologize, and demonstrate that you have changed your ways. So, getting new links that are completely natural demonstrates that you have changed your ways.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Yes. The publisher (streetinsider.com, amongst others) are technically violating PRWeb's copyright terms as they are altering the content prior to publishing. PRWeb isn't very happy, but has been unsuccessful at getting the articles removed (which isn't helping my reconsideration request).
-
Ditto. I saw a competitor use PRweb, and was tempted. However, I felt the potential for spammy links not the direction I wanted my SEO to go in.
This just reinforces the issue.
-
manual action ... that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links.
Seriously? I've been thinking about trying PRWeb for product announcements but this makes me rethink that strategy.
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
-
How will google respond to allowing multilingual search terms for a single language website?
We would like to set up a website in English language only and promote this in various European countries. As said the website will only be available in English language, but we will keep translations (google translate) in backend. When a user in France then enters search query in French language in browser, a search can be done in French content, but we will present relevant content in English. Does anyone have any experience with that? Will it be allowed given the fact that the result (in English language) will probably not include any of the terms that was searched on (in French language).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hansdef0 -
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
Will using CDN Affect SEO?
I'm got a website with a slider and each of the 6 slides has a 5-second video background. The website is B2B and the user profile for the website is employees at Fortune 1000 companies in the United States using desktop computers to browse. The videos are highly optimized and we did testing using various browsers and bandwidth connections to determine the videos loaded fast enough on down to a 15mbit/s connection (which is pretty low by today's average U.S. business bandwidths.) We tried hosting the videos on Vimeo and YouTube but it caused issues in the timing of the slide show display. (I've not seen any other website do what we do the way we do it. Most sites have a single video background with a single text overlay on top.) The downside to this is that loading all those videos produces a lot of bandwidth usage for our server. The website is serving a niche service industry though so we're not exceeding our current limits. I'm wondering though might there be some benefit to hosting just the video files on a CDN? Obviously that would mean lest bandwidth usage for our server, and possibly quicker load times where the CDN server is closer to the user than our server. But are there benefits or downsides from an SEO perspective noting that I'm proposing only putting the videos on the CDN, not the entire web page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Consult19010 -
Manual Removal Request Versus Automated Request to Remove Bad Links
Our site has several hundred toxic links. We would prefer that the webmaster remove them rather than submitting a disavow file to Google. Are we better off writing web masters over and over again to get the links removed? If someone is monitoring the removal and keeps writing the web masters will this ultimately get better results than using some automated program like LinkDetox to process the requests? Or is this the type of request that will be ignored no matter what we do and how we ask? I am willing to invest in the manual labor, but only if there is some chance of a favorable outcome. Does anyone have experience with this? Basically how to get the highest compliance rate for link removal requests? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
Hello, I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links. I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000! Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000. This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Are there new updates in Google Panda? Please help review my website...
My site have significantly went down in google ranking today. Is there a recent update with regards to google panda? Also, please help me review my website for possible errors so I may apply the necessary changes for my site to recover. Here is my url: http://www.homeescapade.com Thanks and God Bless
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trigun0 -
Reciprocal link finder tool - not looking to do reciprocal links.
The company I work for had an old SEO company that did a lot of reciprocal links with websites that are not what we want to be associated with. Does anyone know of a tool that might be able to tell us if there are still reciprical links to our site? I want to try and find them, but the old pages we had with links going out have been deleted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b2bcfo0 -
Aside from creative link bait, what's a solid link building strategy involve?
All things considered, directories, blogs, articles, press releases, forums, social profiles, student discount pages, etc, what do you consider to be a strong, phased, link building strategy? I'm talking beyond natural/organic link bait, since many larger accounts will not allow you to add content to their website or take 6 months to approve a content strategy. I've got my own list, but would love to hear what the community considers to be a strong, structured, timeline-based strategy for link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman1