Google Minus 50 Penalty: A Case Study

A Case Study: I will keep this thread updated on future progress/discovery

as much as i can gather from my research, minus 50 or 60 penalties are backlink related where google detected un-natural link building with a sole intention of passing PR.

i have a client site that ranks on 51 and 53 for 2 of the targeted keywords and no mater what i do, they dont seem to climb any higher. since it doesnt make any sense that the site wont climb any higher, in fact i myself think it should rank between 1-3 for the targeted terms, i started doing a little research and evidence suggests that the site got hit by -50 penalty.

now comes the digging part to see why! backlinks look natural and coming from varied anchor text as far as i can see. so i plugged the site into my webmaster tool account to see if there is any indication and there wasn't any. one thing i however i found out that boat load of the backlinks on webmaster tool are coming from blogger blogs. when i dug into it more, i see that they were all coming from footer section of a specific template. client at this point agrees that he sponsored a blogger template to gain backlinks (and he did, webmaster tool shows 68k links in total). i myself built about a good 900 - 1000 links which should have been good enough for top 5 ranking. template sponsorship was done before i took over the project and neither google not yahoo showed any such links on link search when i took over the project.

btw, this is a CPA offer site and has 9 affiliate links on the front page and 4-5 affiliate links on each inner page. Since google is not too friendly on affiliate sites with excessive affiliate links on them, I’ve taken the steps to fix the affiliate link issue as it might cause the problem as well. even though I seriously doubt that a site will be penalized for having such low amount of affiliate links, but it doesn’t hurt to rule this out and narrow down the field.

i have already taken care of them by doing an internal redirection (setup a separate page for each offer and redirect to affiliate site via the inner page. put noindex/nofollow in the inner pages that are redirecting as well)

content of the site is 100% unique so there is no issue

I setup a sitemap and submitted to the webmaster tool after fixing the affiliate links last night.

I’m launching a diverse link building campaign with varied anchor texts which I will continue over the course of next couple of months. At this point, only thing needs to be taken care of are the links that are coming from blogger template footer. Since I cannot do anything to get them removed, client don’t even remember whom he bought the template link form, I will just have to see if I can get around it by building lot more links with varied anchor text.

I don’t think a reinclusion request will help in this case as I cannot fix that template link issue so I will just see what else I can do to get the site out of penalty. Since this will take time, I will post occasional update every now and then if anything changes.

Moral for the story:
do not buy link wheels
do not do template sponsorships
do not build links with one or 2 keywords only and use wide range of anchor texts to build your links
do not get paid links

cause if you do any of the above, you are doomed as google now knows how to detect them and penalize your site.

 

Well stated sir. Great post. I have been yelling about linkwheels for as long as I can remember but folks think I am nuts. The problem is largely people being lazy or thinking there is a quick fix for ranking a site. You can't simply hurl links at the problem.

I was doing some work for someone in the business sector a few months ago. He had done a template sponsorship deal on his own and soon found his links on everything from gay porn blogs to recipe sites. Not exactly helpful to his cause lol... folks don't realize that templates get edited.

nicely done,
Nigel

 

thanks for your comment Nigel. i've been telling people against link wheels as well but lot of people seem to think they can fool google with that. if they dont listen now, they will pay the high cost later.

i will continue my research but please feel free to share any input you might have on this -50 penalty.

 

Great post.

I think a lot of people still believe that simply throwing thousands of links at a site will help. Once upon a time this was true. The more links a site got the better, regardless. But it's been a number of years since this stopped being true and the SE's instead began penalising just that.

 

Really interesting read and thanks for the the "don't" list! Will help me as I started out building backlinks. But I'v got a question: I assume, that you don't have a clue how long it will take to get rid of the ban to improve your SERP, so isn't it maybe better to suggest your client to buy another domain (change the old one/or link as a parked one) and try to build links from scratch again? Would be interesting as well to see how it develops. Any way, wish you good luck and I will follow up to this thread!
Subscribed!
Cheers,
Ray

 

Great read, thanks

 

Thanks, as I was thinking about buying into link wheel

 

thanks for the tip.. what do you think about forum signatures ? usually it is also repetition of same keywords / same domain etc in most cases

 

right. so many people still think that the sheer volume of links will get them ranked high where it is the quality of links that matters most. lot of people are new to SEO world and read an ebook or two which totally mislead them. its amazing to see what kind of misleading info out there and so many old articles that are still around but outdated by now

so much work has been done on the site that it would be a whole new venture all over again. even though its an affiliate site, the site itself is content rich. it has a blog attached to the main site with lots of blogposts. i will see how things go over the next couple of months before heading that way

forum signatures will not get you penalized, if thats what you are asking. however, they wont help you much in terms of ranking either as links form forum signatures have been devalued over time.

 

What are you using to come up with this score?

 

Hey SultonOfSEO...

If you want to get rid of the links from the blogger site, simply 301 redirect all page requests where the referrer is that blogger site to some other site like a parked domain (whitehouse.com should work). The webmaster will quickly take the footer links down when they notice they are linking to a parked domain.

Once you think ALL of the problems are fixed (affiliate links, blogger links, etc.), I would definitely submit a reconsideration request. Google will rarely re-review the penalized site to see if you've fixed the offending problems without you prompting them to do so with a Reconsideration Request. Typically, you cannot link your way out of such a penalty even if you have fixed everything... I don't care how many great links you build. You have to get the penalty lifted via a manual review by a Googler first.

Then things should return to normal. Their rankings may return automatically after the review and penalty is lifted. If not then building links should be an effective way to climb the rest of the way back to the top.

And "Hello Nigel!"

 

By "score" are you talking about "-50 penalty"? The name simply means the degree of the penalty prevents the site from ranking better than 50 no matter what they do from an SEO perspective. Basically, it is believed that based on the degree of the offense, Google buries your listing XXX positions back in the SERPs. So people over the years started naming the penalties how far back their listing is dropped... There are lots of such penalty names... -30, -50, -60, -90, -350, -950.

 

aah! a good piece of advice. thanks canonical. initially i was thinking of 301 redirect and reinclusion (yeh, i guess Matt would like to call it a reconsideration request which makes sense) request but reinclusion request would not work until the bad links are fixed. since i dindt want all the work to go to waste, i didnt wanna do a 301 redirect but never thought of doing a 301 with blogger as a referral. will work on that.

webmaster tool started to show a bit more data now and i fixed couple of other minor issues like couple of html error but i see page load time is 5 seconds which is kinda high. i'm taking care of those issues but will work on blogger 301 and see if i can find any other bad links that i havnt see yet. then submit a reinclusion request

from what i can see that a ban is manual but a minus penalty is somewhat automated. it appears that google is using this minus penalty in the same manner as sandbox and they release those pages under such penalty in batches or till a reinclusion request is filed. it will be an interesting drill, will see how it turns out. i will keep this thread updated

 

Good luck to You anyway mate and keep this thread updated!
Cheers

 

Ahhh, gotcha. Thanks for the explanation.

 

I agree with your statement about bans being manual, and most filters being automated.

Most people yell 'BAN!!!' when in fact they mean filter!

I agree with your chosen route, I assume you are linking to the pages that have been hit (homepage, or subpage?) with some varied anchor text?

If it is the homepagem, and it truely is an automated filter, it may be possible to lessen the effect, and remove the filter by adding decent links ot water down the anchor % (I assume the template linsk all used the target anchor?), HOWEVER lots of folk think (myself included) that different filters may well have a time delay on them, meaning even when the anchor % goes below a 'safe' level, the recovery may take a little longer.

Once you have a nice, healthy spread of backlinks/anchors to the damaged page, I would consider doing the reconsireration request, and open up and tell them that before you took over the site, the owner had been talked into buying a template sponsor deal, and you have done your best to fix the issue.

Is his link still in the template I wonder? - as at a guess, it is still available for download? If so, every time someone installs it... Just a thought!

Good luck!!!

 

Great post sultan, many new things for me in it.

and I would like to know when you say link wheel, are you also referring to mininet because I believe they are also a kind of it.

 

Hello sultanofseo,

any news about your site?

I'm asking because two days ago I had 12 sites penalized by -50 filter, and I am looking a way to resolve the situation


Thanks

 

I'm curious myself.

What did you do to invoke the -50 penalty, Perelman?

 

filter detects this via site wide/partner/blog roll etc. anchors. make sure you got none of those nor any content unrelated high pr anchors.. as to anchor diversification - it won't hurt (especially for exact match domains with high CPC/high traffic keywords). this particular penalty usually takes a long time to fade - monthS (unless you file reconsideration request). Here is two great reads on this topic:

google spam boss sheds some light here:
http://www.pagetrafficblog.com/matt-cutts-on-google-60-penalties-and-bad-linking-practices/4261/
real experinece here:
http://www.davidairey.com/how-i-reversed-my-google-ranking-penalty/


can also add that if you are an affiliate site, make sure all affiliate links have no follow rel. and java script redirects are better be replaces with 301 htaccess redirects. well and of course, unrelated sponsored links on your site to bad neighborhoods (think.. hoodia) will haev to go (if you have any).