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I have just posted on Google Webmaster forum regarding MANUAL PENALTY.  http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/webmaster-tools/5uv-9v_fDrU Someone was kind enough to respond and indicated that part of the problem could be Technorati.  Can anyone tell me if they are getting penalized from backlinks from Technorati as well? Kind regards, Cherie Young

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You may also find this YouMoz about recovering from a penalty helpful: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal It'll help us if you say if you've gotten any notices in Google Webmaster Tools, if you've submitted a reconsideration request, removed any links, disavowed any links, etc.

I guess you're right, but does that mean that Google wouldn't consider this a black-hat technique just because the link juice is divided by so many links? I thought it would actually be the opposite, that having only 5 or 10 links passing juice on a page would be okay, but something like 600 would be considered spam. I don't know, but perhaps Matt Cutts has said something about this specifically. Regardless, have you, or has anyone here heard the phrase, "If your intention is to gain rankings in Google, then it's black-hat" Basically anything you do, such as listing a bunch of links like this without a nofollow link and asking to trade links, based on what I've gathered from Matt Cutts, is considered black-hat. If I'm wrong, please let me know. But let's assume that everything you're saying is correct. How can we make the most of this situation? For me, for example, I actually went to Open Site Explorer and checked into followed external links and sorted them based on Page Authority. This was actually the most powerful link going to the site (I believe I was researching Quirky.com) based on what Moz was telling me. If what you're saying is true, then shouldn't Moz's algorithm be updated to take into consideration the amount of links on that page, then perhaps also they can take that and divide it with the Page Authority for the page and give us a new number based on that? That would probably be a much more accurate way of ranking pages based on how powerful they are, or how much link juice is going to them. Maybe there's a way to do that now and I'm just not aware. Do you have any strategies you use for this sort of thing, dividing link juice between the number of pages on the site?

How similar/different are these products? Are they marketed to slightly different audiences? Do they have slightly different uses? Or are the essentially the same product but one is blue and the other is black? If they can be marketed to different groups or have a big enough difference that they should be separate pages then I'd consider doing some research and copywriting to add unique, relevant content to each to set them apart. If they're really too similar then determine whether they definitely need to be on separate pages still or if the could be merged. If they can be merged, choose which on stays live, update the page as needed and 301 the old page to the one still live. If they definitely need to stay on separate pages still despite being so similar, consider canonicalizing one to the other.

In recent months google has taken a dim view of paid links in blogs etc. They prefer them to be nofollowed and show that its an advertorial. That being said lets assume your keeping this under the radar and are not going to have any issues with negative SEO. In my opinion it's hard to put a price on it there's diminishing returns as the volume increases however the exact numbers etc i'm not aware of. I would think if you have a link from them every few months it would show they like you but if you have too many to quick and the content is not relevant I would think the benefits would be less. From a PR and Traffic point of view its good publicity so i would price it based on the potential customer impact and slightly ignore the SEO side of things after the first half dozen or so.

The only thing I would consider changing is taking the "gb" off of "london-gb". It seems a little redundant to me. Other than that, I think it's a really intuitive structure.

We were hit with an unnatural links penalty on 23rd of July 2012. (full story here) The effects of the Penguin algorithm lead to the unnatural links penalty. Google claims to ignore all bad links but when you reach a certain point they want to make you aware of it and accountable. That's when you get the manual penalty. Without a warning there are tons of websites out there who are about to trigger a manual penalty because the website owners have no clue about this stuff. The disavow file can be used to protect you from the penguin algorithm triggering a manual penalty. The fact your site can also be affected by the links with no warning is so counter productive to good search results. If Google says they ignore them already then your site should simply lose the benefit of those links not also receive negative effects as a result. I am going to reconfirm this point with John at the next hangout.

I don't think anyone will be able to give you a concrete answer to this question. If you had a sitewide penalty and it was revoked, then you will likely find yourself returning to good rankings for brand terms.  If you had a partial match penalty then how you do after the penalty is lifted depends on why you were penalized.  If it was for a particular keyword, you can see some improvements. For example if you produced a widget that linked back with a keyword rich phrase and now you have removed or disavowed all of those, AND you have good links that could support natural rankings for this keyword, then, once the penalty is removed you could see a good improvement in that keyword.  I have seen some sites bounce back to top 3 in cases like this. But, what I have found is that many sites who have a partial match issue do not see much improvement in rankings.  The reason for this is that the previous rankings were almost completely based on the power of unnatural links.  So, removing those links is not going to make a difference. You may find that you see a further boost the next time Penguin updates as well.

Hi Courtney, I support the sound conclusion you've reached. As the marketer on the project, hands-on nearly always beats automation. Whitespark's service is terrific and if you're using that and hand building citations for your clients, they have an edge over other companies who have taken the automated route, simply because someone (read: you) has maximum control over their citation profile. Great responses on this thread.

It's $299 annual fee to be listed in the directory.That is Too Costly And I do not usually see yahoo directory listing being ranked on first Page of Google. So I think you better off Spending this Amount in other Link building methods. thanks

Hi To answer your questions: For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? This is really a "How long is a piece of string" question. It depends. If the site is for an established brand launching say a new site, then inbound links during that time could escalate to 1000s or tens of thousands wouldn't be unrealistic to expect. For an unknown, who knows? In one sense, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that those inbound links are producing results, both from people clicking on them and it benefiting your site from an SEO perspective. Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? Again, it would depend on whether or not the new site was for an established brand or for an unknown, but suspicion isn't necessarily based on numbers - although it would be fair to say that the higher the number the more it might flag up an issue. The main thing though is that Google's algorithms are sophisticated and able to detect link quality on the basis of a number of metrics, e.g. the social profile of a site. You could just have 10 links and it could flag an issue. I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have? As I said above, the more links accrued in short space of time, the more likely a yellow or red light might start flashing on Google's dashboard, but again it comes down to link quality which is evaluated on a number of metrics that will determine if there is an issue. I hope that helps, Peter

If you have tried to contact the web masters of the sites containing links on and have had no response you need to disavow these links.

Unfortunately this company is one of the largest - they're just raking it in.  So not only are they ranking high but the pages must be converting well for them.

Hi Dana, Thank you. I thought of that too but these pages aren't linked to anywhere in the site anymore so am I correct that screaming frog won't find them?

There are many link-based algorithmic actions that can hit a site, including Penguin, so just because you don't have a warning of a manual action doesn't mean that you're not in trouble. I can't see the data, but this doesn't seem to be speculative - you're basically saying that certain pages and keywords have clearly been devalued. If you've ruled out technical issues with the pages (including duplicate/thin content issues), and you know the spammy links are targeting these pages, then I think disavowing is probably a good way to go. Ideally, try to have some of the links removed first, as that will make Google take the request more seriously (and disavow is basically a request, although it's semi-automated). It's entirely possible, too, that you're already headed for a manual action, so even if you do nothing, the situation could get worse. If you were unaffected, I might suggest pruning some of the bad links and focusing your future link-building on better tactics, but you're already taking damage.

Thanks Mike, I just checked using the seobook.com tool, they're 404s No, no link equity is lost by not 301ing them. GWT shows no crawl errors.

Maybe it's the repetition of keywords in the titles and H1 that are causing the drop in ranking, like a title structured (just for example) brown shoes, athletic shoes | sportsauthority.com where "shoes" is repeated.

Just checking in here. How have things been going? Just wanted to add some info; did you actually receive a "manual action" from Google? If not, a reconsideration request is not needed, it's an algo not a manual penalty Hummingbird will not do this. The "date" of Hummingbird is not really a specific point in time, and it's definitely not the day Google announced it. The Hummingbird algo didn't act like Panda, Penguin or any other penalty. Disavowing links can take up to six months to have an effect. This info is straight from John Muller at Google. Google has to actually crawl the websites that are listed in the disavow file before applying the disavow. It's not good enough to only disavow. Google wants to see some effort to remove links as well. You may not bounce back unfortunately (tough to say without seeing the site). But if you were artificially ranking too high with bad links, now you might be ranking where you should have all along. Overall the best thing to do is remove and disavow as much as possible and work on moving forward as best possible to acquire new links and make the site better overall.

They use a ton of guest writers.  I agree w/Oliver that it's probably the writer placing the links. However, they should probably do more review/qa or else it could potentially hurt them in the long run. Great catch Paddy!