I have been Hit with UNWANTED Links and I need to know how to remove them?

[rdominey]

I have been looking at Google Webmasters Tools and saw that suddenly I have this huge amount of links form an unknown source “SiteLoki” never heard of it? Didn’t want it! Need to get rid of it!
My Website www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of presence on Google about three weeks ago. I first thought it was something to do with the new Google Algorithm.

I also contacted Google to be re-evaluated. They replied:
Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions foundMay 10, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team

I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
There was another post regarding canonical tag issues; resolved, I removed all canonical tags for now.

Today I discovered the links and I suspect that having even
1 link for this website will penalize you in Google.

Here are some Webmaster Tools pages for reference:

I also noted that the image for the link is from an old site hosted on www.Globat.com.  I don't know what that significance might be. I left them in January.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer,

Ray

Webmaster-Tools-Query_Your-Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photos-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki_links.jpg

[DeptAgency]

Hi Ray,

This doesn't sound good..

I'm not that familiar with sitemap.xml protocols but have you checked in webmaster tools that understands your sitemap correctly? Also there might be some info in crawl dates and crawl errors in your webmaster tools.

I can't imagine you've been banned from google because of just one link.

Greets,

Sven Witteveen

Expand Online

[rdominey]

Thanks for the reply ...

The first think that I did was to look at links using SEOmoz and I didn't and still don't see the links from "Siteloki" Then i read this blog from SEOmoz

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-minute-missing-page-audit

Then I look deeper in Webmasters Tools and found the 6,000 plus links from "siteloki"

All of these links refer to the website as it was prior to a rebuild that launched in mid January. This is also what is accounting (I think for all of the 404 errors).

I am beginning to think that this was a Hack Job!

Webmaster-Tools-Bad-Links-from_Siteloki.jpg

[rdominey]

Also and I suspect related are the 406 Permanent 301 redirects that showed up on a crawl analysis on SEOmoz.

See Below:

SEOmoz-406_301-Permanent-Redirect.jpg

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Ray,

First of all, I'm sorry to hear about your huge drop in traffic. it totally sucks. There's a lot of that going around these days, but it doesn't make you feel any better when it happens to you.

First things first, I wouldn't be too worried about the links from SiteLoki. It looks like an auto-generated site that probably links to millions of URLs, and Google is pretty good about discounting these types of links. It's not uncommon for most link profiles to contain something similar.

Here's the problem... paid link networks. A few weeks ago Google started deindexing link networks by the dozens, the most high profile being BMR. (http://searchengineland.com/google-eliminates-another-link-network-116513)

I pulled up your site's link profile on OSE and picked a number of URLs at random. Here's what I found:

• Link 1 - Not Paid, Indexed - http://www.examiner.com/article/retirement-means-time-to-think-futuristic-for-local-art-photographer
• Link 2 - Looks Paid - http://coolartdude.com/how-to-get-your-photo-on-canvas/
• Link 3 - Looks Paid - Also hidden text - http://goldcardreview.info/421712603coolche.php
• Link 4 - Looks Paid - http://waterproofcameraworld.com/blog/2011/03/31/photos-printed-on-canvas-a-unique-gift/
• Link 5 - Looks Paid - http://www.giftsandgadgetsnews.com/keep-fresh-and-live-pictures-with-canvas-prints-from-digital-photos/

So out of 5 random links, 4 of them look spammy and paid, and often have very similar or repeating anchor text. My best guess as to what happened to you is that several weeks ago, Google discounted much of your backlink profile that was based on these links.

What can you do? First of all, if you are still paying for links, stop now. It might help to try and clean up/remove as many bad links as you can. Read Dr. Pete's post on Penguin.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

In the end, you probably need to take a different approach with your link building, and begin to build good, white hat links over time.

Regardless, I hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[rdominey]

Thank you for your reply. To my knowledge I have not paid
for any links. I did sign up with www.attracta.com
 and even asked the question regarding paid
links and was assured that they only submitted our sitemap and provided our
business information including hours of operation to search engines and other
sites like yelp, yellow pages, attracta’s directory and that sort of thing.  They said they do not use paid links. Now I’m
not sure?

After several posts on several forums you have given the
most useful and logical reply. Now what I need is some help or guidance on a
recovery. How do I remove these unwanted links. I thought that the first step
was to set up an account with SEOmoz to analyze the problem and then hopefully
get help on resolving the issue. It is hard to see any light at the end of the
tunnel at this point. We are a small business that depends on the website for
30-40% of our sales. This is life or death to us!

So any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for your reply,

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Yeah, unfortunately somebody bought paid links, which was probably were you were getting most of your traffic from for awhile, until it stopped working.

To be honest, attracta doesn't seem like the type of company to do that, but you never know.

I'd like to say that by removing those links your rankings will automatically recover, but that may not be the case. At best, it may lead to partial recovery. In cases like these, some webmasters are even walking away from their URLs entirely and starting over with the same site at another address.

Regardless, the only way to really remove the links is to write each of the webmasters in question, and ask for removal. Sometimes this has to be repeated over and over again and even then you only see about a 20% success rate.

Over time, some of these links will disappear by themselves.

Really, the best thing you can do now is start building new links. In many ways you're starting from the beginning, since your previous success was built on something that wouldn't last.

(that said, if you do have major errors in your SEOmoz PRO campaign, I highly advise you to fix them)