Google Webmaster Manual Penalties?

Can you please share your sites which have received penalty. So, We can look in to it and provide you more accurate data.

That's your problem. You told Google the sites are connected to each other through ownership.

Everything you did do make them look different, have different themes, etc.was wasted. Moreover, since this is a "network" - a blog network, they are all a target.

Initially, you claim there are all pure white hat. Obviously, what you are doing is not "white hat" in Google's playbook. Then you admit, well, a thousand links just came pouring in, including spammy and "2.0" ones.

To be blunt: why in the world you submit any network site to Google webmaster tools? Let alone all the sites to the same account?

Given that Google was told all the sites are connected, and there are linking problems, I'm guessing the content isn't all that great. Either you, and / or the "expert" did this wrong and it was only a matter of time before Google trashed all the sites.

When you are trying to avoid Google's radar for what you are doing to manipulate backlinks, the last thing you should be doing is making it laughably easy for Google to penalize the entire network by putting all the sites in the same GWT account. Or any GWT account.

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Login to Majesticseo. With 1000 backlink,

- How many referring domains and referring IP? If is a dozen or less, that's pretty poor.
- Under anchor text graph, do you see evenly distributed chart? If so, that's bad. I prefer my money phrase should be around 2% and it comes from high PR. If the chart is so structured it screams for Google's attention.
- What is your domain look like? Is it mostlyl somesite.com, www.somesite.com, http://somesite.com or click here? Most people get slapped here. You need to dilute your anchor text.
- What did you use to protect your domains? Paid for privacy? Use plugin? Use fakename for each contact?
- For those 1000s backlink, what quality? SENuke? Fiverr gig?

Sovanna

I'm tending to agree with you that the link profile doesn't *seem* like the issue, especially given their very pointed message. And I've not known them to penalize all sites simply because they are owned by the same webmaster account...that would be a law suite in the making. Each site is its own property and should be evaluated as such...independently. Besides, many agencies have many client properties in one webmaster account...it just doesn't make sense that Google would kill the lot. Maybe if you did extensive cross linking and it really was a blog network, but assuming what you've told us, it points to something else.

Are they wordpress sites? Check your 3rd party plugins CAREFULLY. I've had more than one that has inserted a backlink for nefarious purposes. I have no doubt there could be others that are doing content cloaking or something else. So I'd evaluate your plug-ins first. Then run a scan on your site for malware. You can have malware which redirects certain users at certain times. There are many online services which will scan your site.

Finally, After verifying all that, you can craft a well reasoned response to the webmaster team. They are far more reasonable than the adsense team. Explain what you did, what you checked, what you corrected - be honest - and ask for a re-evaluation or explanation.

Good luck - I know how frustrating it is.

Hi cdutoit,

Thanks for your helpful suggestions. There is no cross linking. Each site is in a different niche entirely, so they don't link to each other and each they link out to different sites (there is nothing to connect them at all).

Yes, they are WP sites. Someone else mentioned the plugins earlier, but I didn't really follow what was meant. I understand what you are saying and have looked for information on how to check them, but I still don't know how to do that. ?

I have checked now for malware - this is clear. So I guess after I know how to check the plugins and do that, I will ask for a reconsideration and hope for the best, although I am reluctant to do that without having any clue what raised the flag in the first place.

My bet is they were all on the same IP address or some other footprint which made big G think they're a splog network

Regarding the plugins, go back to the wordpress directory and search for each plugin and read the reviews again. Also, do a View Source on your pages in the browser and look for suspicious code. There you might find text in your page which is not visible when viewed as a web page, which is what Google alluded to in their generic message. The malware scan should also help.

One famous trick used by malware is to check where the visitor is coming from. If you type in the url directly (which the site owner typically does), it does nothing malicious so you never see it. However, if the click to the site is coming from google search results (how most of your visitors find you), then it will redirect or inject 3rdparty content. So try google a phrase that will cause your site to return in the result (if it still does after the penalty) and then click the result.

Lastly, you did mention that one of the sites has a dubious link profile (my words...). If some of those links are really spammy, use the disavow tool in webmaster to clean up your link profile.

When you file for a reconsideration request, you need to show that you have done *something*. So, at least you can say that you detected bad links on 1 of your 5 sites and have disavowed them, you scanned for malware across all 5 sites, you analyzed each plug-in etc. Show action.

If you want to PM me one of the sites in private I can do a quick view source to see if I see anything obvious, though I can't spend any exhaustive time on it.

Good luck...I hate getting caught in these blanket policies.

Thanks, cdutoit, for your helpful suggestions.

The sites are already deindexed, so I couldn't look for the type of malaware that you mentioned, but I have now gone through carefully in relation to your other suggestions.

Thanks for your offer to look through the source code. I really appreciate it, but I won't bother you. I've now had someone else do this for me, who didn't find anything untoward.

I have identified a couple of possible issues - minor things, but things I have now changed and can point to in reconsideration requests.

If its a network and Google knows about it, that's a problem. Also, did you use guest blogging - either for increasing posts or getting backlinks? That can get you penalized too. Yes, guest posting is NOT good for SEO - thats what Matt Cutts says.