No manual spam actions found

After my keywords rankings were falling drastically for my site steelwedge.com i had checked Google webmaster was showing tons of irrelevant links from many unrelated sites which i have never build. Then i have disavowed them and applied for reconsideration and got a reply that there is no manual spam actions found. so what do i do now? How to know if there is any penalty on my website?

 

One of the biggest confusions I see out there in the SEO world is the difference between a penalty from Google and simply being hit by an algorithm change. Google only considers that penalty if they manually apply that penalty to your site. If they haven't manually done something to your rankings, then you have not been penalized that in your eyes, and that's why you received a message that you got.

On the other hand, if Penguin changed the value of your links, then you may be seeing a decrease in your rankings simply because your website lost authority. So, the links that are coming to your site may have been devalued if they were considered to not have much value or to be spammy, or the pages that those links are on. If they had spammy links pointing to them, that page may have lost value, thus your link loses value because of that. So, it's not a penalty, per se. It's just that Google is counting links differently now, and you have less authority for your site.

The solution for this is to try to rebuild the authority for your site. You can do that by creating great content and distributing that content out so people can find it, and allowing them to this link get back to you naturally. Also, do a good job whatever your business is, so that people will link back to you or talk about you because you’re doing such a great job with your company.

There's really no easy fix to it, you just have to slowly rebuild your authority. And the thing to keep in mind is that, you aren't going to get that authority back. You've just lost it, it's gone. You have to start from where you are and build your authority up, so there's no rebounding back to where you were. Those links just don't count anymore. You have to build yourself back up.

 

Thanks, lesterj. That explains a lot why I lost lots of traffic from Google after the algorithm changes. Like OP, there was no manual penalty being applied to my site so I guess it's just that there are not much good authority links coming to my site

 

As there is no manual penalty, you can now focus on creating quality content and practicing white-hat SEO techniques. I think this will gradually increase your traffic.

 

Thanks for the help guys, do you think removing any bank links from directories would help?

 

I would start by creating good, original content and distributing that out to people via a blog and social networks. Perhaps try to connect with people in your niche and see if you can help each other out to both your benefits (to reach more people with you content and get more links). Try that for 6 months or so and see what happens to your rankings. It's always better to start by building up your site, then removing links which could potentially weaken your site. You'll need to be building up your site anyway. Also, since you don't know if removing the links will help, it's better to start by spending your time/effort on something you know will help.

Also, review the SEO of your site and see if you can improve how you are targeting your keywords.

If you find after several months that you have been able to build good, natural links, but your site still won't rank well for your target keywords, you can remove the old links. Just make sure you are tracking keywords that are lower competition as well as any higher competition keywords you want to rank well for. The lower competition keywords should start to move up in the rankings first and give you an indication of whether your link building efforts are moving you up in the rankings.