No manual spam actions found - Now what to do

[SteveSchmidt]

In last Panda update on 22nd January my site traffic reduced 30% to 40% but still some of my keywords are ranking on first and second page in SERP.

With latest Penguin 2.0 update all of my keywords ranking is out of 100. Both times I send reconsideration request and get message that No Manual actions found on site. I just don't know what steps are better to get ranking back. Should I use disavow tool and remove backlinks to recover from Penguin or work more on creating quality links.

My Site : http://goo.gl/sSBes

Thanks,

Steve

[Mike_Davis]

Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty.  A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update.  The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back.  Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links.  This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.

Here is a good article on this update by this by Danny Sullivan, including a short section on recovering:

<a>http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463</a>

Other Tools Needed:

<a>http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/</a> - To locate which of your links are spammy

<a>https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal</a> - disavow tool (Use only after heavy research!!!)

Good luck!

Update: I looked through your link profile and have noticed that you have links from your customer pages.  Remember that Google takes issue with links from websites that have nothing to do with your site.

Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories.  You definitely got slapped.

[WorldText]

You might want to check out the responses to this question : http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover particularly the comments from Pete Myers regards reconsideration requests.

What I take away from all I've read on Penguin 2 is to proceed as follows:

• Clean up your backlink profile by contacting assorted webmasters asking for link removal
• Use the disavow tool on any you can't get successful removal via direct approach
• If you've used disavow, submit a reconsideration request - once you're sure your site and backlink profile is clean.  (I get the definite view that data obtained via disavow is only actioned at algo update, or reconsideration request;  hence a reconsideration may be needed even though you have an algorithmic penalty to actually push the disavow live).

Hope this helps!

[Mike_Davis]

That is wrong...from Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan:

<a>http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664</a>

Question:

Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?

Answer:

That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.

[WorldText]

I've seen conflicting views on this coming from Google, and I refer you to the link in my answer regarding Pete's comments about reconsideration.

So it may be wrong, but there does seem to be evidence that disavow does not action without either an update, or reconsideration.

Hence passing along the suggestion in good faith.

[seoagnostic]

_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty.  A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update.  The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back.  Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links.  This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.   _

Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories.  You definitely got slapped.

Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.

As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.

The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)

[Mike_Davis]

What Google considers garbage links has been changing for as long as I have been in search marketing.  The problem here is that certain tactics that have worked in the past and might even still work today are starting to get devalued (or worse).  Example: PR links, still have some value, but they will continue to get devalued.  Matt Cutts continues to say (over and over) that if you do anything in an effort to build links that is not organic in nature (web directories that don't drive traffic to your site, forum posts with links, paid links, etc.) you will get smacked.  It isn't a matter of if but when.

The thing that makes this even more confusing is the seemingly random nature of who these penalties affect.  Did this guy get hit by P 2.0 definitively? No, but considering the date of his organic traffic drop, it is pretty easy to prove correlation.  The fact that your websites have these bad links and that you haven't seen a drop in organic traffic does not prove that he did not get hit.  All it proves is that you haven't been hit yet.

Proof:

<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg</a>

<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2mv1KSktLo</a>

<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-UR7NETxrk</a>

[SteveSchmidt]

Thanks for the reply.

I will work on increasing content of sites and other suggestion you mentioned. Due to some lack of resources I am not able to update blog in timely manner I would try to post at least one post a week,