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Traffic Plummeted by 50% from Google -A Manual Penalty

by aadiv2011
12 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a huge forum (Nearly 100,000+ pages) and lots of new content added by members daily. It's one of its kind in its industry.

After I added the website in the Google Webmaster tool, I received a notification that the site had too many un-natural links and violates Google quality guidelines. Since it's a huge content rich forum, we found that too many websites were linking to it. Having little control over these websites, I didn't quite bother to contact all of them (long list) and sent a reconsideration request. (Although, the site enjoyed good traffic from Google). I got the same message from Google that the site still violated quality guidelines. Well, I didn't bother too much as my website enjoyed consistent traffic.

Suddenly, 3 days back (28th August), my website got badly penalized by Google and since then the traffic has plummeted by 50%.

Now I am looking into that long list of back links and trying to figure out on how to go about contacting all those websites that have linked to my website.

Any tips in this regard would be much appreciated. Thanks!!
#2013 #28th #50% #august #google #plummeted #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Complete waste of time.

    If "lots of new content added by members daily. It's one of its kind in its industry. "
    is true, who gives a rip about google?

    Forums violate google quality guidelines on a regular basis.
    Comes with the territory.

    Paul
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    • Profile picture of the author aadiv2011
      Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

      Complete waste of time.

      If "lots of new content added by members daily. It's one of its kind in its industry. "
      is true, who gives a rip about google?

      Forums violate google quality guidelines on a regular basis.
      Comes with the territory.

      Paul
      Thanks for your response.

      I had added all those spammy websites that were linking to my website in the Disavowals file, uploaded and then contacted Google. They don't seem to consider that as they claim. They want you to contact each of those websites and have your links manually removed.
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  • Profile picture of the author aadiv2011
    From daily 300,000 pages views (50% came from Google), down by 50%. That hurts!.
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  • Profile picture of the author mediamarket
    On Aug 27, My site was hit too, it was doing close to 500+ uniques with 1100+ views daily, it lost close to 90% of the traffic for no reason. I never even built links to that website. It was all user generated pages as well

    So im not sure.
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  • Profile picture of the author aadiv2011
    Could it be something to do with Google Servers?
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  • Profile picture of the author Moneymaker2012
    I wonder if it might be a negative seo gift for you from one of your competitors.
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    • Profile picture of the author aadiv2011
      Originally Posted by Moneymaker2012 View Post

      I wonder if it might be a negative seo gift for you from one of your competitors.
      Could u elaborate?
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  • Profile picture of the author Hansons
    It could be good if you didn't connect with Google Webmaster Tool...

    Connecting to Google Webmaster Tool, Analytic, Adsense means giving more information about your website and you get penalized...

    Why were Google not able to find your site before you used GMT?
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    • Profile picture of the author aadiv2011
      Originally Posted by Hansons View Post

      It could be good if you didn't connect with Google Webmaster Tool...

      Connecting to Google Webmaster Tool, Analytic, Adsense means giving more information about your website and you get penalized...

      Why were Google not able to find your site before you used GMT?
      I rely 100% on adsense so have no other option.

      My website was doing excellent with Adsense. Infact revenues doubled in June and were at peak in August.
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    • Profile picture of the author aadiv2011
      Originally Posted by Hansons View Post

      Why were Google not able to find your site before you used GMT?
      Makes sense. Traffic continued to soar even when I got that penalization message. So I never bothered to get rid of those spammy backward links. I have never done any link building so didn't bother.

      Google claims that content is King. Well, I don't believe it. My competitors have 20 pages website (mine is huge) and they rank better on every keyword. Same old crappy content and doing better.
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  • Profile picture of the author seekdefo
    Google Disavow tool doesn't work as well as they advertise it. It takes a lot of time to get your rankings back. Could you pm the link of your forum? By negative SEO gift what they mean is someone might have built a few thousand spammy links to your forum.
    1. You can perform a link audit to see the anchor text ratio and the kind of links that are coming to you. If those are wiki or forum links then they can be edited. What is a link audit and why should you perform that? - ComLuv

    2. There may be on site issues like broken links and your forum might be linking to de indexed domains and stuff like that, try to remove them.
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    • Profile picture of the author daver99
      Just a couple of thoughts. Successful Penguin recoveries can take a long time.

      To remove a manual review you do need to demonstrate that you have tried to contact some of the websites that have the bad inbound links.

      You need to go ahead with the disavow, and you also need to create new good quality links.
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