Link quality warning from GWT and drop in keyword ranking.

[IanTheScot]

So last December we saw our hard work pay off as our Panda penalty was lifted and our traffic shot back up to pre-Panda levels.

Then in February we received this note:

We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

Since December we've lost position on 80% of our top 100 keywords. I've gone through our links and can't figure out what the problem may be. Maybe I'm not using OSE properly. We don't buy links so I'm not sure what the problem is.

If someone can walk me through using OSE to see what the problem may be I would appreciate it.

Our domain is http://bit.ly/rbkYkp

[Vizergy]

You have a link from http://www.slantmodels.com/marcelperes/ and it is FILLED with hidden content.  There are probably others but that is just the one I found.  Don't just look at your link report, look at the pages that link to you and make sure there is nothing shady going on.

Good luck - that's a long report to go through.  I jumped to the last page and found this one.

[IanTheScot]

Once I get to page 70 of the results I see some sites that look like spam sites linking to us.

I guess I can try to contact these sites to get links to us removed.

It seems strange that there are 70 pages of what seem to me real, normal results before any of these show up but we are getting penalized for these links at the bottom of the barrel.

[Vizergy]

I agree but that has to be it.  You could also try compiling a list of the links you never asked for (the spam sites) and going to Google spam report form and explaining everything in the 'additional information' field just to get this in front of someone on the spam team.  I did that for a client either it helped or it was a huge coincidence but their rankings were back in a little less than two weeks.  No promises, but it seemed to work for us.  The report is here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1&hl=en and I just clicked on 'Paid Links' and then just explained EVERYTHING (I know these arent paid links, my clients weren't either, but it was the only link related choice.

[IanTheScot]

I'm compiling a list now.

There are lots of sites in our niche (Catholic) that have linked to our store in their side bar over the years. Google wouldn't be penalizing us for that, would they?

[Vizergy]

I should honestly hope not.  Start with the spam sites and go from there.  I will be surprised if this isn't it.

[IanTheScot]

So I went through about thirty pages of links and found 45 from bad domains and submitted that to Google. I sure hope this is the problem because I don't know where to look next.

[Vizergy]

Give it a couple of weeks, that's about how long it took for my client.  Good luck!  The other ways are not nearly as easy...

[Vizergy]

Give it a couple of weeks, that's about how long it took for my client.  Good luck!  The other ways are not nearly as easy...

[IanTheScot]

We found another issue that, while not affecting this specific issue, could have been diluting rank. A while back we forced all of our urls to be lower-case but forgot to change the site code on a bunch of major pages to be lower-case as well so all of these links were 301'ing instead of being direct links. I've almost cleared that up now.

[Vizergy]

How are you?  Have you cleared everything up?  Just curious

[IanTheScot]

Our organic traffic difference between this year and last since we filed the spam link complaint has remained unchanged.

Our keyword ranking for most of our top keywords that we used to rank in the top five for is still down 20 -30 places since December.

[IanTheScot]

So  a couple of weeks ago I took Billy's advice and went through all of the domains that were spammy links. We hadn't asked any of these places to link to us but there were almost fifty of them. I put together a spreadsheet of them all and the action we attempted to take to get the links to us removed and then sent all the information through GWT for a reconsideration request. On Friday, after having this manual penalty since February, we received the following note. I still think we may be under a Penguin penalty of some kind but I'll have to wait and see what happens to our rank after this.

Thanks for the suggestion, Billy!

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.aquinasandmore.com/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.aquinasandmore.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated ourquality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

[Vizergy]

I am so glad that it helped!