Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal: What did we get hit for? Cutting a long story short, the main reason we were hit with a manual penalty was for adding followed anchor text into the bottom of clients websites that said Web Design Yorkshire by Pinpoint Designs (both web design yorkshire and Pinpoint Designs linked to our website). At the time, we were just doing this out of habit, but we never varied anchor text, always had followed links and we were basically violating Googles quality guidelines. After a lot of work and research, we managed to remove the penalty from our website and since then have worked on lots of other clients websites to help them lift penalties. Weve worked with clients whove had both unnatural link penalties along with on-site penalties for low quality content, cloaking issues and malware issues. We have a great success rate and are consistently trying to improve our processes to become even better! What are we doing to improve? Over the past few months, weve been trying out different tools to aid link recovery, speeding up our process of getting in touch with webmasters, finding new ways to contact webmasters and ultimately just trying to streamline the process of getting spammy links removed. In this guide, Im going to review a few of the different link removal tools weve tried out and also give you some ideas of how you can carry out link removal work manually to get your website penalty removed. This guide is mainly for people whove specifically received a penalty for unnatural links warnings. To find out if youve received a penalty for unnatural links, simply log in to Google Webmaster Tools and use Googles new Manual actions tab to see what type of penalty you have. If its for Unnatural links with a yellow warning symbol next to it, then youre on the right guide! Step 1: collecting backlink data First of all, we need to pull a list of all the links pointing to your website from a few different sources. A Google employee on the Webmaster Central Forums has recently stated that they recommend you focus on the Webmaster Tool Links. Webmaster Central Forums Response Whether you choose to believe that though is another question, theres an interesting discussion on this available at the Webmaster Central Forums: productforums.google/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/ga3vI8Y2RtA Matt Cutts has also responded recently saying the following: Its certainly the case that we endeavour to show examples from the set of links returned by Webmaster Tools, and likewise we prefer to assess reconsideration requests on that basis of those links. However, if theres a really good example link that illustrates a problem, we do leave enough room to share that link, especially because it can help point the webmaster in a better direction to diagnose and fix issues. Whilst it may be that Google just want you to remove the majority of bad links and not necessarily every single one of them, I would personally recommend doing the job properly and start by collecting as much data as possible from various different link sources: Google Webmaster Tools - Login to Google Webmaster Tools and click into the website with the issues, go to Search Traffic > Links To Your Site, then click the more link under the Who links the most tab. Once in here, click the Download more sample links from the top. Google Webmaster Tools Export Open Site Explorer - Visit opensiteexplorer.org and type in your domain name (make sure you get this absolutely correct as having a slight variation of your domain such as missing out the can cause a different set of results). Once loaded, click the Advanced Reports tab, select Links that come from: External linking page and leave all the other settings as they are, then click export. Ahrefs - Visit ahrefs and enter in your domain. Click the CSV tab and export the list of Backlinks/Ref pages. Ahrefs is an absolutely brilliant tool thats helped us so many times with link removal campaigns. It allows you to narrow down quickly sitewide links, followed / nofollowed links and more. Majestic SEO - Visit majesticseo, enter your domain name and select Historic Index. This will show all your previous links instead of just the most recent. Click on the backlinks tab, scroll to the bottom of the page and click download data. Most of the above sites will require you to have subscriptions in order to gather the data. Sites such as Majestic SEO will allow you to use the tool free of charge (or a limited amount) if you have the domain verified in your Webmaster Tools account. That being said, for the sake of one or two months membership, its worth paying for the wealth of data youll get. Note: Google have previously recommended you add both the and the non- version of the domain to Webmaster tool and gather links from both sources. Its worth search different variations of your domain to get as much data as possible. Step 2: documenting your work Start by creating yourself a Google Docs Spreadsheet where you can track all of your work to see exactly where you are at with the link removal process. This will be extremely useful when you come to submitting a reconsideration request with Google, as theyll be able to see exactly what youve done to sort out the issues with your site. I should also point out at this point that Google say they dont tend to trust external links from sources they dont trust. For that reason, I recommend only using a Google Spreadsheet when documenting your work as its a Google product and trusted by them. You can also include a link to this document in your reconsideration request very easily and its free! We would usually start by creating tabs at the bottom of spreadsheet for each of our data sources. For example, Google Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO & Open Site Explorer. You dont have to separate your data into different sheets, but I personally think it shows more work being carried out and allows more in-depth analysis. The only disadvantage to doing this is that youll have lots of repeat links - we do however have this covered! If you visit the Pinpoint Designs Blog, weve created a Google docs spreadsheet that you can use which helps to combine multiple sheets together and remove duplicates. This is a brilliant asset to use on your link removal campaign. Google Docs only allows importing of 50,000 characters at a time. This may sound a lot, but its surprising how quickly you hit this limit. You can import data from a CSV by going to your Google Docs file, then clicking File > Import. You can do this for each document you export from OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic and Google Webmaster Tools and import them into separate sheets within the same document. Theres still a limit, but its higher than 50,000 and will speed up the process. IMPORTANT: Once youve got all your data into the spreadsheet, make sure you add the following columns to the end of each of the sheets (or alternatively your Master Sheet if youre combining all the data into one sheet): Contact Name Contact Email Address Website Contact Form Twitter URL Facebook URL Google+ URL LinkedIn URL Date of 1st Contact Date of 2nd Contact Date of 3rd Contact Link Status Notes This may seem like a lot of data, but its the best way you can document your work. That way, when youre carrying out research on your domains, youll be able to start populating the spreadsheet and making your life easier in the long term. Youll also be able to show Google all the work youve been doing to get the links removed and making it very easy for them to see everything youve done. If you dont want to go to the effort of populating all the data above, you could combine all of the different forms of contact method into one cell and just populate that. The chances are, youre not going to need Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Email and Website Contact Form for every single URL so its just down to preference. The above recommendation is the best way weve found of documenting data. Finally, add an additional sheet to your Google Docs file called Contact Examples. In here, you can upload images of a few examples of the emails youve sent out to the webmasters youve been working with. Be careful what you put in here, Google will be reading these messages so make sure youre not badmouthing them. Dont threaten Webmasters by saying Google will block their site and how theyre going to get harmed if they dont remove your links. Instead, say that youre trying to clear things up so that youre fully compliant with Googles webmaster guidelines. You can apologise for the inconvenience to the webmaster and thank them for their help (examples further down in this article). That way, when Google reads them, theyll understand youre genuinely trying to sort things and hopefully be a little more forgiving under the circumstances. Tip: If youre on a Mac, you can press Cmd + Shift + 4. This command allows you to take screenshots quickly and easily of a specific section of your monitor. Perfect for quickly snapping contact forms, emails youre sending, etc. and uploading them to the Contact Examples sheet in your Google docs file. Step 3: spotting low-quality links This is a hugely important section of link removal. It sounds simple, but you have to be extremely careful with what links you attempt to remove. Good links generally take a long time to build and if you ask for them to be removed thinking theyre potentially spammy, that hard work may all be for nothing. Over the past year, weve learnt that the best way to identify spammy links is to manually review each and every one of them. If a link is good, mark it in your spreadsheet so you know not to remove it. Dont delete any links from the sheet, as its all research to show Google what youve been doing. Either highlight the cell in a colour, or add a note in one of the columns so you know its safe / genuine. So, how do we spot spammy links? Some links are easy to identify. For example, if youve been featured on the BBC News, Guardian or a high quality, authoritative website, you can be fairly sure its a strong link that doesnt need removing. The definition of a natural link is fairly hard to summarise. I would class these as links that have appeared from other content youve written naturally. For example, lets say you were involved in the automotive industry and wrote an article all about the history or cars, different manufacturers and really went into great details about every aspect. This type of article is obviously going to end up very big, hopefully interesting and should be a brilliant read. If youve done a good job and shared the article in the right places, you should hopefully acquire links naturally. People will link to your guide / post naturally without you having to ask for it and those types of links are ok. Throughout this article, Ill link to other articles Ive read on the internet that I believe are helpful for link removal. All the people I link to have created good quality content that I believe will help you in removing your penalties with Google. They have written an article for the sake of it, theyve written it with an aim in mind so that its beneficial. On the same side, its easy to spot some spam links. For example, if youre listed on a website with 10,000 links on the same page in a list, or if youve commented on a blog with xx,xxx other comments just for the backlink. I realise thats a bit of an extreme situation, but hopefully my point is made. If you know the link has been placed on the site purely for SEO purposes, then its most likely unnatural. Some links however are harder to spot, so here are my top tips for identifying lower quality links: Whether the URL is indexed in Google or not: If not, remove the links as the site has most likely received a penalty. You can also see if a domain is indexed in Google by searching Google for site:yourdomain. to continue:moz/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 10:47:31 +0000
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