How to fix an an unatural links penalty

12 years ago

If you don't have much time invested in the website, it may be better to start over. I used BMR for about 3 weeks on 2 of my websites. BMR will remove the links, but I can't help but wonder if this website will always be "marked" in Google's eyes.

It's a tough call. And now there is so much talk about negative SEO. It worries me that I could rebuild my websites on new domains and then get tanked by a competitor with Scrapebox.

On my websites, I see some odd links from some adult websites. I even have a link from dominos pizza! I would have never visited any adult sites to place a backlink. I'm too scared of viruses. I don't know where I ever got these links from. The only thing I've used to backlink is a few Yahoo answers (not spammy), a few Squidoo lenses and BMR. So I'm not sure why all of these odd links show up in my AWStats. These urls show up in the "Links from an external page" section of the AWstats. I wouldn't even know how to remove these links. I'm not sure if someone spammed them or they're actually natural. However, my website is in the depression niche so I can't imagine why I'd get natural backlinks from Dominos and an adult site.

I've also heard conflicting things in regards to fixing this problem. You may just want to leave it alone for a week and see what happens.

Thanks
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Pronin 12 years ago

I have the same problem with "unnatural links" penalty. Some of the blogs I got links from got deindexed and 2 weeks after receiving a "love letter" the site went down.
I have managed to remove some of the "bad" links, but some stayed. It's more than a month since the "fall" but nothing helps so far, neither frequent updates, nor new links. Every time I get some keyword in top-10 google buries the page. :confused:
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Thinking_man_too 12 years ago

i have a website that was penalized over a year ago. Never found out why but all the pages got a 200 position penality.

I did everything possible, deleted all ads. Eliminated any poor articles. eventually rewrote all articles.

I NEVER DID ANY BACKLINKING ON IT EVER. NEVER. all natural.

But it is still penalized. So I have purchased an aged domain on the same subject and will transfer the articles over to there this week and kill the other site.

It was not de-indexed but penalized.

So no they do not necessarily come back.
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- fancydressqueen 12 years ago
  
  "i have a website that was penalized over a year ago. Never found out why but all the pages got a 200 position penality.
  
  I did everything possible, deleted all ads. Eliminated any poor articles. eventually rewrote all articles.
  
  I NEVER DID ANY BACKLINKING ON IT EVER. NEVER. all natural.
  
  But it is still penalized. So I have purchased an aged domain on the same subject and will transfer the articles over to there this week and kill the other site.
  
  It was not de-indexed but penalized.
  
  So no they do not necessarily come back."
  
  Did you consider filing a reconsideration request once you'd re-written all of the articles? This might help push through the penalty removal.
  
  You can do it here: Reconsideration requests - Webmaster Tools Help
  
  Thanks
  
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JimSEO

12 years ago

Whilst there are maybe half a dozen ways to deal with these messages, two of the most common ways are as follows:

Step 1: Search for the links using Open Site Explorer or Webmaster Tools

Step 2: Find the admin contact details using Central Ops, and request for links to be removed

Step 3: Keep a list of contact details, who responds and which ones have been removed

Step 4: Beg for forgiveness from the Big G, provide the list for their info

- OR -

Step: Ignore them and keep slowly building links...

The thing is mate, Google sent out thousands of these unnatural links messages as a scare tactic, this might be a similar case.

But if you've built links on any of the article distribution networks such as UAW, BMR, Link Monster then you want to get these removed ASAP. I know you said they havent been deindexed but you better check just in case.

People are always complaining it takes forever to get links removed, I spent about 8 hours removing hundreds of links for one site recently, and its penalty was removed. Good luck!

Thanks

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devendragangwar

12 years ago

Hey

This is the batter to fix the unatural links penalty

Thanks

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winsoar

12 years ago

I wrote a blog post on it here:
Google Detected Unnatural Links - The Crazy Ivan Maneuver

Let me know what you think.

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Watch Store

12 years ago

So James do you believe that you can remove the penalty by re-buildiing high quality links to it with good content ?

Thanks
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winsoar 12 years ago

Originally Posted by Watch Store

So James do you believe that you can remove the penalty by re-buildiing high quality links to it with good content ?

I think if you have built high quality links already then Google cannot be 100% sure that any low quality links have anything to do with you - they could be a competitor trying to ruin your rankings.

In websites where ranking has dropped after getting this notice their entire backlinking profile are dubious links that are obviously from crappy paid for link building services.

I've seen websites maintain a top 3 ranking long after getting the notice where they have a lot of high quality authority links.
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opensky

12 years ago

JeanneLynnyou run a site on 'Depression'? Maybe google are trying to make you depressed. Certainly they are causing so much anxiety for innocent webmasters. And, it's hard to even know if all this unnatural links business is a penalty or not. I mean, I've seen heaps of junky looking websites appear on page one in the last week it's scary. Do they want people to use yahoo or something by getting rid of quality websites with these insane unnatural links notices. And our site too has had about 500 spammy links from adult sites, many foreign language sites. How the heck are we meant to get those removed. No idea who would have posted them either. So unfair if there actually is some kind of unnatural links penalty.

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seenathkumar

12 years ago

This will be a really TDS task for you now you have to remove each spam links and bad neighborhood links which has lead to this unnatural link warning, Your website is not totally penalized it has just been de ranked for some paid links or spam type of link now if you are not able to find such link and remove it then you are penalized for next 60 days and if you wan to get that ranking back start working on building quality natural back links then you can find your site back on top position.

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shailender

12 years ago

Ok, so that means there is no concrete way to remove your unnatural links?? We can only try to build more and more quality links so that our unnatural links could be hide behind them.

This is what I understand with so far discussion.

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IronGloves

12 years ago

Of course to me it sounds more like a scare tactic.

I don't have Webmaster tools on my websites and I don't think I will add it (no need for it for me as I have very small websites).

The reason I think this is a scare tactics is because there's no way to determine if the backlinks are made by you or somebody else.

What about if I hire somebody to destroy my competitors website by building crap backlinks to their website??? (It would take me probably $25 and fiverr to do that in 1 day).

Think about it...

Thanks
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BarryOnline

12 years ago

Originally Posted by IronGloves

Of course to me it sounds more like a scare tactic.

I don't have Webmaster tools on my websites and I don't think I will add it (no need for it for me as I have very small websites).

The reason I think this is a scare tactics is because there's no way to determine if the backlinks are made by you or somebody else.

What about if I hire somebody to destroy my competitors website by building crap backlinks to their website??? (It would take me probably $25 and fiverr to do that in 1 day).

Think about it...

It used to be that site A could not hurt site B, but a lot has changed with Google over the years.

A negative SEO case study has been conducted by some members over at Traffic Planet with some interesting results:

CASE STUDY: Negative SEO - Results - Main Backlinks/SEO Discussion - Traffic Planet

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BarryOnline

12 years ago

I got the "unnatural links" message from Google on the 8th of March for 2 of my sites. ( almost 7 weeks ago )

Site 1 is still ranking well with several number #1 positions.

Site 2 has dropped from position #1 to #5 for its main keyword but still ranks #1 for several other target keywords.

I beleive that my sites are still ranking well because I have a high quality, diverse back link profile and some age to the sites.

If a large portion of your back links are high quality and have authority I don't think I few spammy links that trigger the "unnatural links" message will result in a penalty. If most of your back links are of low quality and spammy then it's more likely that you will be hit harder after receiving the "unnatural links" message.

If you think about it, your not going to be able to take Amazon or CNN down with some "unnatural links". But a smaller site will little authority and a weak back link profile would be more vulnerable to an "unnatural links" penalty.

This is just my view on the subject and not fact. It has been almost 2 months since I got my "unnatural links" message from Google but I could still be hit.

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winsoar

12 years ago

Don't believe negative SEO claims. SEO companies cannot negatively effect the ranking of competitors websites.

Thanks
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BarryOnline 12 years ago

Originally Posted by winsoar

Don't believe negative SEO claims. SEO companies cannot negatively effect the ranking of competitors websites.

I would have completely agreed with this 1 year ago, but I am open to the suggestion that it is now possible after listening to the many people hit with a penalty after recieving the Google love letter.

There has also been a few negative SEO case studies done that suggests that it is now possible.

As mentioned, I have 2 sites that received the "unatural links" message. Time will tell whether I get a penalty or not, but I hope my sites have enough authority that they do not.

Negative SEO Case Study:

Pixelgrinder and I conducted a little experiment on whether negative seo was possible in the current climate - we felt it was important to know whether it was possible for a site to be negatively affected completely by outside influences. This experiment was not done with the knowledge or consent of TrafficPlanet.com owners/admin/moderators.

We carried out a massive scrapebox blast on two sites to ensure an accurate result. The two sites we chose and the reasons we chose them are as follows:

seofaststart.com (Dan Thies)

1. He has received a direct response from Matt Cutts on Twitter, so if we were able to affect his site he is more likely than most to get the ear of the right person and show google what can be done (https://twitter.com/#!/danthies/statuses/180389475497676801)

2. A self proclaimed "seo guru" (Hi, I'm Dan Thies. Although I'm best known as the "keyword guru," I've been practicing, studying and teaching advanced search engine marketing strategy and tactics for several years http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/) - it should be harder than most to affect the site of an "seo guru".

3. If it works, he should be smart enough to profit from all of the publicity he would get out of it.

4. He already has several domains 301d to seofaststart.com without penalty (not a white hat tactic) - we were wondering if he had been 'protected' in some way.

5. He is a suck-up-brown-noser, smugly bad mouthing everyone and crowing that "many pants are being pooped and it's long overdue" - we don't like him.

negativeseo.me

1. They are selling services for negative seo under the tagline "destroy your competitors".

Rankings Before (22nd March):

seofaststart.com:

dan thies - number 1
seo - number 11
seo service - number 34
seo book - number 3

negativeseo.me:

negative seo - number 2
destroy your competitiors - number 1

Timeline:

15th March - Dan Thies posts smug tweets to Matt Cutts and pisses off the entire internet.

18th March - seofaststart.com - blog posts started - anchor text "seo" "seo service" and "seo book"

22th March - seofaststart.com - 1 million scrapebox blast started - 100% anchor text "Dan Thies"

24th March - negativeseo.com - 1 million scrapebox blast started - 100% anchor text "destroy your competitors"

26th March - Dan Thies posts in Twitter that he has received an unnatural links message.

Note: 18th March - seofaststart blog posts started. This was NOT US. We had previously decided that it would be risky to 'out' the blogs that links were getting placed on and agreed not to include blog posts in our experiment. We don't know who did this, how many links they built or what network/s they used. We discovered these links in ahrefs and have estimated that about 5000 links where built, probably with ALN between the 18th-23rd March.

Ranking After (18th April) note rankings are still jumping a little:

seofaststart.com:

dan thies - number 1 (still number 1)
seo - not in top 1000 (down from number 11)
seo service - not in top 1000 (down from number 34)
seo book - number 34 (down from number 3)

negativeseo.me:

negative seo - number 6 (down from number 2)
destroy your competitiors - number 13 (down from number 1)

Other stuff of interest right now:

ahrefs seofaststart.com (notice how few of our 1 million scapebox links have shown up!)
https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/subdomains/www.seofaststart.com

ahrefs negativeseo.me (notice how few of our 1 million scrapebox links have shown up!)
https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/subdomains/www.negativeseo.me

Dan Thies begging on google groups
https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/chit-chat/Azfly-iRtLs

Our personal message to Matt Cutts/Google:

Negative SEO is possible. Sort it out!

Our personal message to Dan Thies:

Next time you want to smugly throw your holier than thou 2 cents into the ring, think before you speak. Every backlink to your site was analyzed before starting this. Don't think those 301d domains hide what you are doing because they don't - you are the same as the rest of us - your methods for link bait are, in fact, worse than some of the 'spammers' you so often refer to. Now your pants are being pooped and it's long overdue

CASE STUDY: Negative SEO - Results - Main Backlinks/SEO Discussion - Traffic Planet
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JeanneLynn 12 years ago

Originally Posted by winsoar

Don't believe negative SEO claims. SEO companies cannot negatively effect the ranking of competitors websites.

Why not? If I blast a small competitor of mine with 100,000 scrapebox spam links today, would his website be penalized? I'm not talking about the big sites. I'm only talking about lesser known sites.

I keep seeing people say it can't happen, but I don't understand why. I'm new to IM and still learning. I'm not an SEO expert, but from what I've read, it looks like there is a good possibility that someone could take out small competitors with spam backlink blasts.

I've been following this discussion with great interest.
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Thinking_man_too 12 years ago

I disagree.
If Google can penalize your site for unatural linking then you can create unatural links to someone elses site.
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retsek

12 years ago

You need to determine whether the site was penalised or not. When you type in the domain name into the search, does it appear as the first result? That's just one way.

Another is to look for a pattern in all dropped keywords. Sometimes it looks as though all or most keywords have dropped 50 places respectively.

If you determine that the site wasn't penalised, then your rankings may have dropped because the your inbound links have been deindexed or devalued. If that's the case, I wouldn't do anything. Just take the notice as a warning and try to build better links.

If the site is clearly penalised, then you have two options:

- Remove the bad links, file a reconsideration request.
- Move the content over to another domain but do not do a 301 redirect. In effect, you'd be starting over.

Thanks

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Pronin

12 years ago

All due respect, but so far this discussion is almost useless from the practical viewpoint.
Can anyone diagnose the penalty properly. Here is the timeline.

1) On February 23 I got the "love letter" from Google
2) On March 10 the site is in top10 for at least 20 high-competitive keywords with its three main landing pages.
3) On March 11 (sic! 15 days since the "love letter") two of those three pages go down in flames with their keywords falling from -5 to -300.
4) For a month almost all the lost keywords dance from page 5 to page 3 and back.
5) On April 18 I manage to get one of the lost keywords to #10 (it was #4 on March 10) but the next day it falls to #17
6) Something strange also happened with one completely unoptimized page that happened to get to #11 for a keyword with 40,000 US monthly searches. It had no "unnatural links" of any kind because I never purchased any. Anyway on March 11 it went to #418.

So the site has obviously received an algorithmic penalty but:
1) Not all pages with "unnatural links" got the penalty
2) Some pages with no external links got it
3) One landing page is still intact despite all "unnatural links"

My site does perfectly OK in all those "penalty diagnostics:"
1) Its on 1st place in Google for "mysite.com" and "mysite" query
2) The homepage is still #1 for "site:mysite.com" query

Additional info:
1) Some blogs I purchased links from got deindexed, so here is a possible reason for a penalty
2) Another possible reason - a sudden change in backlinks profile, because most of those lost links were from PR3-4 pages.

Any ideas on what it is???

Thanks

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Dentist

12 years ago

Negative SEO is possible. Anyone who says against it still leaves in the Stone Age. It will be so popular so soon that Google will have to go on a PR rampage to prove it is not possible. It is just common sense: When Google penalizes websites for something perceived out of their control (backlinks), you can do that to just any website and chances are you will get that website penalized. Now, some argue that you can't affect authority websites. I argue that even for authority websites you can get some of their pages penalized with the same approach.
Now, there is a big BUT here. I think Google will have to face Negative SEO very soon and has to do something to show the game still is in their control. They definitely don't want to lose credibility to such a dummy concept. To me the only thing they can do is to get back to their old policy of de-valuing spammy links instead of penalizing websites for that. I think that's common sense and Google people will have to get back to their senses. For now, Negative SEO is Possible!

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andrewp82

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Dentist

Negative SEO is possible. Anyone who says against it still leaves in the Stone Age. It will be so popular so soon that Google will have to go on a PR rampage to prove it is not possible. It is just common sense: When Google penalizes websites for something perceived out of their control (backlinks), you can do that to just any website and chances are you will get that website penalized. Now, some argue that you can't affect authority websites. I argue that even for authority websites you can get some of their pages penalized with the same approach.
Now, there is a big BUT here. I think Google will have to face Negative SEO very soon and has to do something to show the game still is in their control. They definitely don't want to lose credibility to such a dummy concept. To me the only thing they can do is to get back to their old policy of de-valuing spammy links instead of penalizing websites for that. I think that's common sense and Google people will have to get back to their senses. For now, Negative SEO is Possible!

I also think negative SEO works, especcially if your niche is small and your competitors are small (NOT CNN).

If Google can punish my site for building links unnaturally (it doesn't know I built them), then Google can do the same for my competitors (Google wouldn't know I sent those links to my competitors)

The "vote value" of back-links may become a thing of the past?

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winsoar

12 years ago

I am not saying it's not possible, I'm just saying if you have got a high quality off-site content strategy then no amount of "negative SEO" can have a negative effect on your website's ranking.

Otherwise you would see thousands of sites offering negative SEO services to ruin your competitors ranking.

By the way if you do see any service like that, don't fall for it, give Google some credit. They aren't going to allow any manipulation of the search results.

Low quality links are simply being discounted so they have no effect. If a site has relied on low quality links they will see their rank drop because in effect they have lost a lot of backlinks which Google previously were counting towards their ranking.

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opensky

12 years ago

Of course it's possible, and of course it is on the rise. It's only logical now. Regardless of whether rankings can take a hit or not, a business's reputation can change as a consequence of being associated with thousands of garbage irrelevant sites. This is another matter, but one no business owner can ignore since these crazy new unnatural link penalties have begun.

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winsoar

12 years ago

The fact of the matter is you cannot be responsible for external websites linking to yours. Google will only penalise if you admit that it was your fault or if you don't have any high quality links to balance things out.

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plsearch

12 years ago

Originally Posted by winsoar

The fact of the matter is you cannot be responsible for external websites linking to yours. Google will only penalise if you admit that it was your fault or if you don't have any high quality links to balance things out.

Where do you come up with this stuff? lol

Google will penalize you either way. I've seen it happen, you can talk all the fluff you want about getting negative SEO. They will just email you back saying you're still violating their terms.

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Manuel Aguirre

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Watch Store

If one received a unnatural links penalty in your Google webmaster tools account, whereby your rankings have dropped NOT de-indexed. I have heard conflicting opinions about how to fix it.

Some people say delete your website from webmaster tools and analytics, re-build high quality links and then re-submit your website later on.

Others say that it is if you have a penalty it will be very difficult to remove all the old links and it would be better to build a new website.

Anyone have any ideas ?

Thanks

Marc

Dont worry buddy!!

Just build more HIGH PR links to your site!!

maybe your website dance (Google dance) on positions but dont worry!! if you use ONLY STRONG LINKS google will reward you.

Regards!!

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Watch Store

12 years ago

Manuel

what ype of high Pr links ?
i used forum high pr links and was penalised

can i confirm you are saying even if you have been penalised you do not have to remove links ONLy build HIGH PR Links and ignore the old links

Thanks
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plsearch

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Watch Store

Manuel

what ype of high Pr links ?
i used forum high pr links and was penalised

can i confirm you are saying even if you have been penalised you do not have to remove links ONLy build HIGH PR Links and ignore the old links

I don't think these people speak from experience. My advice, as I run a company with over 100 clients (2 got in trouble recently) is remove bad links, wait a few weeks and see if things change. If most of your keywords are still beyond page 5 then file re-inclusion (if your business is really effected and you can't wait longer). When you're doing the reinclusion say you hired a webmaster to do your site and your overall marketing and you didn't know they were doing any kind of link building. Let them know you removed as many as you could and beg promise, etc.

IF that doesnt work (and it hasn't for one of our own) then I suggest you redirect the site to a new domain. Redirects often lose the penalty while keeping the good link juice. Hopefully you have another quality domain laying around that isn't brand new.

Oh and if you did any non relevant blog commenting or forum profiles directly to your site, remove those first. From what I've seen, that's what Google's looking for after blog networks. While you try to build higher PR links, dont build anymore links with keyword anchor text. Focus on brand, straight http links, and other stuff like "click here", "read about them here" and so on.

Thanks

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mosthost

12 years ago

Buy a new domain, quick 'backlinking' and rebuild rankings.

If you got clipped due to shady links, take the hit and move on. Such is life in the big city.

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bswanson

12 years ago

I think the best thing to do is monitor your site, and try to deduce how you were effected. This is a big part of fixing this issue or finding your next course of action.

If you had a few KWs hit, but the majority of them have held, you're better off not submitting a re-inclusion request and slowly start building links back to those pages.

If all of your KWs got hit, you need to start looking into other options such as creating a new site, cleaning up your links & submitting a request, etc.