No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work

[Townpages]

Hi Everyone,

i hope someone can help.

Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April.

We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious.

Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration.

There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove.

It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis.

Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name.

any help is much appreciated

[MattJanaway]

I feel your pain, Steve! Unfortunately these things take time. If you havent already, whip up a spreadsheet of all the remaining bad links. Add a column to explain what steps you have taken to get the link removed. Google will understand that sometimes you are not in control but you can only try. They might help with manual interventions. You can then use this spreadsheet to send them to ask to be reconsidered. It is important not to keep sending the request, fix the problem and then ask. Remember that they don't owe you anything so don't depend on this method - chances are they might not even reply!

Google have announced that a tool could be coming out soon which will allow you to tell them which links you wish to distance yourself from. Keep an eye out... Clicky.

In the mean time, don't just work on removing these bad links, concentrate on building much more good quality links in a variety of forms. Try and make your link profile look natural - over time these things will help.

On a side note, you need to add a canonical tag to your home page. Your domain loads a different homepage for http://www.yourdomain.com as well as http://yourdomain.com.

Check out the attachment to see why your link profile is so un-natural. You have 8220 links from ONLY 78 domains for one anchor text and 4047 links for another anchor text while your domain name only has 188 links.

EDIT: You haven't actually been de-indexed (see attached) so you don't need to submit reconsideration yet. You just need to sort that link profile out BADLY first.

As a token gesture to help you out in your time of need I have added a contextual link from one of my websites to your homepage with the anchor text "click here" - its a small drop in the ocean but every little bit helps make your profile look that tiny tiny tiny bit better.

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[Townpages]

Hi Matt,

Great answer and thanks for taking the time to help.

So is it a matter of us going through our link anchor text and modifying some of these to make more natural?

Again, many thanks

[Highland]

A fantastic place to find out where your links are unnatural is in the same place that told you it was unnatural: Webmaster Tools. Inside the page for your site expand Traffic then click Links to your site. This gives you links based on how Google sees your site. You can easily identify unnatural links (like sitewides) this way.

I don't know that I've ever heard of Matt's spreadsheet idea before. Does Google actually respond to such things? If he is being penalized, it's because of Penguin and Google has been adamant that there's no manual adjustments they can make to fix it (hence why re-inclusion requests don't work).

[MattJanaway]

No problems at all, Steve.

Your anchor text is only a small part of a big picture but it certainly looks like a stand out issue in your case.

You don't need to edit any internal anchor text though, it will only really matter for incoming links from external websites. It looks like most of these links are poor quality so instead of getting the anchor text changed, get them removed (if you can). If you do come across any links using that anchor text term which are from good and trustworthy sites then by all means keep the link and maybe ask them to change the anchor text.

You will need to concentrate on building good quality links from now moving forwards. A good place to start is with guest article writing, see if you can get some good content written and head over to MyBlogGuest, you will find blog and website owners all over the world who will be happy to accept good content in return for a link to your website within the content of the article. Remember to make your link natural - try things like "click here", "danbro", "here"... things that look like they aren't trying to manipulate Google's algorithm.

[MattJanaway]

It all depends on so many factors. It could be that the site hasn't been penalized but has simply lost its authority due to the bad links being ignored. If it has been penalized then it can help remove any penalty's. I have heard of one or two people trying this method and receiving responses.

Webmasters is also a useful resource for finding these bad links. Thumbs up.

[activitysuper]

Dump the bad links like your doing but try and gain some 'super' links as well.

Find some relevant blogs, maybe there is a hub website or a few in your industry and try and sort out a guest post or 2 on a few of these.