My site got around 1000 visitors per day, but got hit by a backlinks manual penalty and plunged to about 100 per day. I see so many guys on here complaining about trouble recovering from Google manual penalties. Well I recovered from mine in a month (last month) so just wanted to share what I did in case it helps. Unfortunately I think lots of links I purchased here at DP over recent years was the cause, so perhaps many people are in the same situation. 1. Downloaded my backlinks from WMT, ahrefs and Moz (purchased a gig on fiverr for the last 2 sources because I don't have an account). I had over 12000 backlinks! 2. I manually skimmed through them and found plenty of dodgy looking links (sidewide, homepage, low quality directories, bookmark spam, forum spam, etc). Some I recognised as purchasing over the years but I'm sure some might be an attack from a competitor. I emailed as many as I could and created a disavow file for those I couldn't. 3. I'd only managed to make a tiny dent in the list doing things manually. 12000 was totally overwhelming if you don't want to spend a year on it. Reluctantly I coughed up some money and purchased SEO Spyglass. It's a backlink analysis tool that collects metrics on the links and calculates a penalty risk score (0-100%). I sorted it by high score and removed/disavowed all links with a score of 50% or higher, plus some below 50% that looked plain dodgy to me. 4. Submitted the disavow file. 5. Wrote a reconsideration request to Google. I got a reply in about 10 days saying they had removed the penalty. I couldn't believe it! So many reports of multiple failed attempts, but I think my systematic approach paid off. The traffic recovered the same day. I actually saw it spike to 150% of the original traffic the first day which surprised me, but it's back to right where it was before the penalty now. I hope with some quality link building going forward I can actually boost my traffic as I'm sure the site probably had an algorithmic penalty for the poor links before I got the manual penalty too. Any questions? Not a real step by step guide sorry but just wanted to give you guys some hope that you can recover with some work and time.
Just to clarify, it was the 'Unnatural links' manual penalty I got, to the whole site!! I got the notification in WMT.
But he already dealt with the problem Thanks for sharing, good to know that with good approach it's possible to recover from such penalty, many users doubt it.
Submit your disavow file here: https://www. google. com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main (you need a WMT account!) I did remove all my 'bad' links that I could, by emailing the webmasters. I was surprised how effective it was, most were very helpful. Some didn't reply. Some tried to charge me money
Thanks man, this is very helpful. I think I might have the same problem. How do you know if you are suffering from manual penalty? Do you get a message somewhere? Thanks, Alex
You will have a notification within Webmaster tools, you need to have your site verified for the message to show up in your account though. The key to recovering from a manual penalty is removing the bad links and providing evidence to Google that you are doing such. That's how I recovered from my penalties. Granted I didn't actually do the work but I hired a service to do it for me. Penalties are easy to recover from just as long as you show Google some proof of work and thankfully there are good services out there to get the links removed.
Ohh okay, In that case I only have algorithmic problem. It happened probably because I was buying SEO services (backlinks and articles) and then Panda hit and everything went downhill. What would you recommend? Should I do the same things to fix an algorithmic problem? -Alex
Thanks for the link you have shared. The process you have followed is of a great help for lots of digital point members and other people.
Fir of all check that your is hit by Penguin or panda. If Penguin :- Remove all bad backlinks, make it a text file and upload it in a disavow tool and start building quality backlinks, after some time put a reconsideration message to google spam team regarding the same. If Panda :- Check duplicate content in your website or all kind of Black hat applied to your website like Keyword stuffing, Doorway Pages, Hidden text etc remove all of them and file for reconsideration to web spam team through WMT
You need you have to remove all Bad backlinks by prepare a text file of links and upload it in adisavow tool.
When you submitted links for disavow, did you waited for your links to be gone from webmaster tools first, or you just submitted reconsideration quickly after disavowing?
Well, it looks you have easily take dow your penalty, we have around 32K backlinks when we started the link removal process and after 5 months or hard touch down effort we managed to take 24K backlinks down yes 24K backlinks removed and now webmaster tool start showing 7k backlinks. We are pretty much confident that this time we have take down all the backlinks and our penalty is going to be revoked but to our surprise we get a mail telling that no you still have unnatural links pointing to your site. We were like and the great thing the links from forum signature are considered as spam some of them really are reputed sites I don't know why but have started the link removal process all from the scratch again. So, for me getting out of the penalty is more like hell but I still haven given up I am going to try again. Why I am writing this is to let others know that getting yourself out from the penalty is not as easy as the OP has posted.
Analyse all the links. Make a list of bad links based on Relevancy, PR, PA, DA etc. Disavow all the links. If possible change the design structure (optional). Update the content and remove if you have any duplicate content. Gain some authority relevant back link. These are the basic task and i hope it will works for you.
Sadness and regret are pervasive. People worry about the loss of revenues. They worry about providing for others that depend on them. People need assurance that a penalty revocation is possible.