Need referrals on expert to clean up "unnatural links" and submit reconsideration request
-
I just received a manual unnatural links penalty. I was shocked because other than maybe five links many years ago, I've not done anything to get links. The site is very powerful in it's own right and buying links is unnecessary. My first thought was a competitor has done the link spamming on my behalf, any my site is very profitable and the competitors are plentiful and ruthless (i.e. steal my content and use it) since we are #1 for our search term.
I took a quick look at my links (via webmaster tools) just now and yes, in the last few months there are tons of links from very bad looking sites that are I've never heard of. It's obvious I've been purposefully hit by a competitor. (What's it called when they do this?)
Does Google understand at all that this stuff goes on? Do they even care? On the eventual reconsideration request, if I say that I honestly didn't do those links, would they even believe me or even care?
I have read several articles on what to do now. But this is so important to my income stream that I don't want to screw anything up trying to fix it, and I want to get it right the first time. Every day is very expensive to me. So, I'd like to get some recommendations on any experts that can handle this professionally and swiftly. Please let me know of anyone trustworthy that won't rip me off, and if you are such a professional yourself, please let me know.
Thank you
-
Either way is good. Just as an FYI I likely won't be able to respond until tomorrow morning as my little one will be waking up from her nap soon and the rest of today (being a Sunday) is family time for us. Thanks!
Marie
-
Awesome! I just was looking at your work now. I will put together some info an private message you here. Or should I just contact you through your website listed in your Moz profile?.
-
Thank you very much EGOL. I'm very honored to have you recommend me.
Bizzer, your case intrigues me as right now I am working on my next Moz article which is about negative SEO. Google does admit that negative SEO is possible. However, they say that they work extremely hard to not penalize sites that have had someone else point links at them. I would be very interested in having a look at your backlink profile, even if you don't hire us to do the job for you.
I have seen hundreds of penalized sites and I have yet to see a case where I felt a site was penalized unfairly. In cases where a site has been a victim of a spam attack of unnatural links and then gets a penalty, there is usually still a bunch of unnatural links that truly were made by the site owner. One thing that I do commonly see is site owners that don't realize that they have been making unnatural links. For example, many site owners have done extensive guest posting in order to gain links and because the guest posts were not on ultra spammy sites they feel that this is within the guidelines. But you did mention that you haven't done anything specifically to get links, so this may not be the case for you.
Anyhow, I'm happy to take a look if you'd like.
-
Marie Haynes is a moz member who has written extensively on unnatural link penalties - much of it published here on moz.
You can see her profile page here. Scroll down to the listing of her posts and note that she writes about unnatural links penalty removal.
She has published multiple times on this topic at Search Engine Watch.
She published a guide to unnatural links recovery here.
Interview here that touches on how she got into diagnosing website problems.
-
Thanks. But there is no category to find link audit services.
-
We do have a list of recommended companies at http://moz.com/article/recommended that is one place to start looking.
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
-
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
Internal Link Building and Link Juice Quality
Hi There! I manage the website for a law office that covers many geographical locations. For very specific niche content, we would prefer to create one piece of content and link to the various geographic locations where we would handle that topic instead of posting multiple variations of the same content for each specific geographical area. If we put a button on these pages that has links to each location, will that have the same "link juice" effect to the pages we're linking that linking directly in the text would? (example: the Where can we help you? button on this page : http://www.zdfirm.com/volkswagen-recall/) Thank you!
Link Building | | ZDAdmin0 -
Why am I getting links in my link report from sites that no longer exist?
So, I have a link report from Link Detox. And I'm going through all of them and considering what sites need to be removed. and trying to find emails and contact webmasters. There is just one odd thing i'm starting to see more of. A lot of links are on websites or webpages that no longer exist. The link no longer exists. Some of the domains are even available for purchase. Why are these links showing on the backlink report and are they really harming my website? Also, do I need to add these links into the disavow document that I will submit to Google?
Link Building | | lightwurx0 -
Please help me find unnatural links
My URL is: http://bit.ly/hBJAG4 Just been hit with an unnatural imbound links penalty and don't know what to do. I haven't done any link building work for the last 3 years other then creating an infographic at Christmas that was incredibly popular: http://bit.ly/14lao4G I have 0 paid links and I have never spammed a blog or forum. The only thing I can think of is back in 2006/2007 I was directory crazy - I got listed in all of the (what I thought at the time) were good quality paid directories - could this have come back to haunt me? Why do you think I have just been penalized now when these directory links have been there for years? Should I start getting rid of the directory links? - they did cost me a lot of cash. Can any of you spot any other links that could be seen as unnatural? Thanks to anyone who can help in advance
Link Building | | Eavesy0 -
Does the twitter link shortening service reduce link value (strength).
We have many SEO team members that use Twitters link shortening service, will this reduce the strength or value of the page to be indexed? I ask this cause the displayed URL isn't the actual page it is going to and would like to make appropriate changes to improve our company's SEO For example: http://t.co/zHu8vIcjPx is going to page http://4wheelonline.com/atv/QuadBoss.107503 Thank you for your assistance.
Link Building | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
Is it worth me considering a reciprocal linking request to my authority site ?
My web site is www.swimmer.co.uk it sells waterproof mp3 players & is the authority site in its niche I have no out going reciprocal links I don't have advertising or encourage reciprocal linking as I thought it may devalue the sites quality & link juice I have had a reciprocal link request from a swim wear based website called www.onlyswim.com that has a reciprocal linking sub-page with many varied links on it that are not just on the subject of swimming I don't think I will get any direct traffic from this website so I was wondering if ts worth me agreeing to a reciprocal link page I think we both have a PR of 2 **Any comments would be much appreciated ** In research to try & answer my own question I have just read this on wikipedia "Reciprocal linking between websites is no longer an important part of the search engine optimization process.Google and other search engines now do not give credit to reciprocal linking as it does not indicate genuine link popularity."
Link Building | | ChrisBIlly0 -
How can I check a website to see if it is "nofollow"?
I'm a little new to SEO, so maybe this is obvious to some . . . I'm attempting to build backlinks by submitting articles, posting on forums etc. I just wrote my forst article for ezine and submitted it. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I mentioned it to someone trying to sell me their SEO services and he said that ezine articles are considered "nofollow" on all their links. Well, that was pretty frustrating to hear! It got me wondering, how many of these other sites have all their posts and blogs listed as "nofollow"? Is there a way for me to figure it out ahead of time? Obviously, there are only so many hours in the day and I would rather focus on posting on sites that will actually help me build backlinks! Thanks for your help in advance!
Link Building | | damon12120