Hello everyone! I am looking for an advice. In summer we have received a letter to Webmaster tools that Google has detected unnatural links to our site. We have deleted the links and sent the site for reconsideration. We then received same answer. After that we have performed some changes to the site, closed links to nofollow from banner advertising that we are doing and sent 50% of the links to disawov tool. Every time we described what we have done and sent a request for reconsideration. Today we again received the notification that they still can see the links. The site is under the filter already half a year and we don't know what else we can do. Is this Panda or Penguin? What can we do more to recover from the filter? Any comments are much appreciated.
You can delete the affected pages and create the new one and do the natural back links. If you want more explanation, let me know.
The affected page is the home page, should we rewrite the homepage completely? And yes more explanation would help. Thank you for your reply.
Check Google Webmaster central guidelines closely to see if you are adhering completely to them. Use disavow tool properly again. Still if its not over, contact Google to address your problem
If Google is saying that there is still some unnatural links, then ask for this, try to understand the problem, I would say.
It's neither Panda nor Penguin. If you have received a notification through WMT then your site has been handed a manual penalty by the webspam team, not an algorithmic penalty. In regards to how you can get out of it though, I'd be very careful about using the disavow tool. All that tool does is effectively turn the links into nofollow. The links are still there, and if they are "unnatural" then it's not gna make much difference whether it's follow or nofollow. Plus, if the links you're putting into the tool are not actually the ones which G consider unnatural, then you're only serving to notify them of other links that you've built which they might not have known about before. You're essentially giving them even more ammunition to target your site. Don't do their job for them My advice would be to first of all make sure that you are working off of an up to date list of ALL live links to your site. Don't just rely on one backlink tool. Use multiple tools, export all of the backlink data that you can get your hands on, and merge it all into one master spreadsheet. Only once you've done that can you then crack on with getting the problem links removed. It sounds like there must still be some links live that you don't know about. So jump into all of the backlink tools you can think off, and make sure you get a full understanding of your websites backlink profile.
Might be to do with the anchor text and the fact that the majority of the links are directed to a specific page on your site as well and not just a few debatable links. I know its to late now, as you have already been in contact but my initial response would have been they are not my links. Surely if you can get penalized for certain links then you could just build these links to a competitors site? I'd keep going with trying to find and get rid of as many bad links as you can, as mentioned above. But also look at your anchor text and what pages of the site the links are pointing at. If your anchor text isn't varied enough ie its mainly your main keywords dilute it with variations and generic terms. I think getting social signals would help aswell. Id also state in your communication with google that you hired an SEO company to do this for you and are now trying your best to fix their mess.
Welcome to the world of negative SEO! G completely changed the game when they released Penguin and began punishing sites based on their inbound link profile. Up until that point, your inbound links couldn't hurt you. Now however, that is not the case. It doesn't matter to G who built the links or where they have come from. If they are there and they are dodgy, you're gna be getting a SERP spanking. There are certain industries where negative SEO is rife, and it's causing a huge debate in the industry at the moment. But that's a whole other issue.
Yeh, well aware of negative SEO hence the reason I'd plead innocent to google. What an absolute mess, that you can effectively get penalized by a competitor building crappy links to your site.
Totally! What makes it even worse is that G still seem to be in denial about it. And meanwhile entire industries are launching full scale negative seo attacks on each other. Bad times indeed!
Thank you to all who answered, will start working over the list of the backlinks. There are 16,175 backlinks that are shown in WMT ... the site is very old. Think it will take a great deal of time but if there is no other way out, will have to do this. Thank you again for your help.
One more question. WMT reports 11000 links from 1 portal to our homepage. This is true as we are doing banner advertising on that portal. The link from the banner is closed into nofollow + I sent it to disawov tool. Don't understand why on earth Google is indexing these nofollow links I have written about this in one of the requests but got a standard reply that they still see the links. Should we refuse from banner advertising on that portal? IS there any other place where I can address with this issue to Google? maybe their support forum? or this is a hopeless thing?
You can also contact the sites that are linking unnaturally and ask them to remove your link. I operate a couple sites and have been contacted by a few folks requesting me to remove their links. They even threatened that if I didn't they'd report me as a spam site to google, lol. Either way, that got me to remove their link!