Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?

[Benbug]

Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!

[MattJanaway]

Do you have a link to your site please? In order to help, I think we would need to have a good look around your link profile.

Matt

[Benbug]

No problem, thanks for your time. www.accidentsdirect.com

[MattJanaway]

I see a problem already, although it could be that these links have been disavowed (there is no way something like Open Site Explorer can tell this).

Check out the image attached. You have used some very aggressive link building tactics which target exact match anchor text links - and lots of them! Very unnatural indeed.

Can you confirm that these have been disavowed?

Matt

bROmGPS.jpg

[KevinBudzynski]

Looks like your site is getting indexed.  Is the penalty referring to rankings?

If so, some sites pre-penguin experienced high rankings because of their backlinks. If some of those backlinks' "value" were pulled (spammy links) your rankings fell.

Even if some of those spammy links were successfully taken down, doesn't necessary mean you get the organic position you lost after penguin.

This may or may not apply to your case--but generally speaking.

[Benbug]

Yes, you are right!

About a year ago we outsourced our SEO work to a company in india and they were extremely aggressive with these industry specific keywords.

Needless to say when penguin rolled out we pretty much disappeared.

I cannot say we have disavowed all of them but we have been working on removing these unnatural links for the past 9-10 months or so. So everything we found which we couldn't get taken down or no-followed we disavowed. As you can imagine the disavow.txt was longer than my arm!

The point is we have done everything we can and shown evidence of this but Google fails to recognize this.

[Benbug]

Yes the penalty is referring to rankings, and while we are being indexed we are still under a manual penalty.

We know we have a good site, and have seen natural links since we dropped last year, but it is the old spammed backlinks which obviously spurned Google on to hitting us with this penalty.

[MattJanaway]

Hmmm, I understand. It can be frustrating.

The problem is that even if you are trying (and trying hard) to sort the issue out, if they still see bad links they wont lift any manual penalty.

I'm not saying that it is worthwhile in your case but sometimes it can make sense to throw away a domain and start again. Does it take many sales?

Just remember that if you start again with a new domain, do it properly and don't outsource to people who can't be trusted

[Benbug]

It is something we have considered, but it is a very good source of income.

Obviously this only when it is ranking. It has a whole lot of history (granted this is why it is not ranking) and the domain is our brand as well. Basically we would rather keep it if we can.

Kindly thanking you for your advice Matt.