When to remove bad links.

[RyanKent]

Exactly!

[Quime]

Sorry to disturb you again, would this be a good first contact message on the reconsideration form?

'Our rankings dropped for this site. We are trying to do everything possible to make it compliant with Google's guidelines - please can you tell us if there is any manual action taken on the site that we can fix.'

James.

[RyanKent]

That would be just fine.

[Debdulal]

_You said your website is making progress in some less competitive keywords. If this is the case, I think this is not a severe penalty. But since this is a manual penalty, you have to [and I mean it] send a reconsideration request and wait for the response. And yes, there is no such beast exists here. You gotta problem and you have to fix this. _

[Marcus_Miller]

James, this is real solid advice here and you have to look at the long term picture. Just because you may (or may not) be penalised due to spammy links, if they exist, and you know about them, there is a noose their ready for your site to slip it's neck into.

If you have resources and care about the long term game get everything cleaned up and you can push forward in a positive way without having to worry about any potential problems rearing their head or the positive value of solid links being diminished by historical issues.

Great advice as ever from Ryan.

[Quime]

Thanks Marcus, I know it is solid advice, we have taken it on board and plan to use it.

[Quime]

Hi Ryan,

Just to follow up...

We got our response from Google today, the confirm no manual penalties from Google.

'We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam 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 that you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the web spam team.' (Google)

Would this indicate just an algorithm change, in this case would you still recommend disavow and removing links, they say we should not send another reconsideration request, so we are not really sure where to take it from here.

Many thanks,

James.

[RyanKent]

Hi James,

I am pleased to hear no manual actions have been taken on your site. You are correct in stating you should not submit any further Reconsideration Requests.

As I look back to your original Q&A, you stated you were impacted by a manual penalty on October 5th. What led you to make that statement?

If your site suffered a ranking drop, you can analyze your analytic data to determine exactly when that drop occurred, and what segment(s) were impacted. Did the drop only impact Google organic? If so, that would indicate an algorithm issue. If the drop impacted other traffic sources, it may be a downturn for your business or industry. In summary, a traffic drop analysis is needed.

If you know your site acquired spammy links (i.e. you hired link builders or "SEOs") then you may be impacted by Penguin. If you have low quality content, which includes thin and duplicate content, then you may have a Panda issue. There are other numerous other algorithm changes besides those two. There could be a new issue on your site as well. It's time to dive in to your analytics to gain all the data possible surrounding this drop in traffic.

[Quime]

Hi Ryan.

I guess I would assume this is a Penguin issue now, perhaps thinking it a manual penalty was incorrect and a little ignorant of myself.

I think it is caused by bad links, in my opinion the content is written normally, there are very few issues with it and it is quite varied and updated. Our links were from an SEO company who always vowed their methods were totally adhering to google, but that was before penguin.

Over the last month or so the SERPs have started to go up, after some natural link building with related sites with the same language (French). And some extra additions to the content.

We have been contacting the deemed 'spammy' link websites to ask them to remove, one out of a few hundred have so far.

(Is 'disavow' still a tool we could eventually use in your opinion?)

I guess we are a little in the dark as to if the site is penalized, or if the link juice from the spammy sites has disappeared after penguin, which I guess would be the better reason fro serp loss for our site.

[RyanKent]

Our links were from an SEO company who always vowed their methods were totally adhering to google, but that was before penguin.

I have heard this exact statement countless times. I hate to be harsh on my own industry but things are quite bad for clients. They do not know who to trust, with good reason.

• many "SEO agencies" have little to no SEO knowledge. They skipped everything and built links, which worked too well in the past and now many site owners are paying the price.

• many of these same agencies outsourced 100% of their work to other countries were the work was performed in the lowest quality manner, despite assurances to the contrary

• many sites offer the appearance to be US or UK companies, but a quick inspection shows the veil is very thin and these are actually companies from India or other countries who pay for a virtual office or a single small office in order to funnel business.

Companies and site owners need to know how to navigate the shark infested waters of SEO and work with quality service providers.

Regarding your Penguin issue, based on the information provided your efforts are not even close to what is required to resolve the issue.

1. A comprehensive backlink report is necessary to capture all known links to your site. I use data from Bing, Google, OSE, Majestic and AHREFS. Once combined, this report is the most comprehensive list in the industry. There is no single source, nor any two sources, which can be used to properly capture all the links to your site.

2. The links need to be properly identified. Most site owners and even SEOs struggle in this regard. It cannot be done by any automated tool as there are far too many errors.

3. A comprehensive Webmaster Outreach Campaign needs to be conducted, and it needs to be successful. On a bad campaign the success rate should be about 25%. On a good one, the success rate exceeds 50%. There are numerous factors involved.

I know you are probably thinking "no way! I only get 1 out of 100 site owners to respond". The problem I see is most site owners chose the easy way out when they built manipulative links, and they similarly choose the easy way out when attempting to remove them. That is why forums are full of site owners sharing "I have turned in 10 Reconsideration Requests and all of them were declined".

You need to eliminate a "significant" number of links before using the Disavow Tool. My recommendation is to seek out a quality SEO provider with experience in resolving Penguin issues. If you cannot afford the cost of cleaning up the manipulative links, you can also change domains. The cost of losing all your good links and changing domains is very high in the long term, but in the short term the expenses are quite minimal.