Will a Google manual action affect all new links, too?

[Jonathan1979]

I have to say on my first quick look I cannot determine why you would have got a manual penalty.  Your link profile does not look spammy, and I wonder if google are specifically targeting sites that use PRweb.

With Ahref's I only see 77 dofollow backlinks, and to be honest you could probably be very brutal when it comes to dissavowing these links and starting again.

It is strange that the two methods of link building (prweb, and infographics) are two methods that Matt Cutts has recently (in the last few months) said that should be nofollow links.

But I cannot give anything definitive based on what I am seeing.

[barberm]

I don't know if that makes me feel better or not, but you basically confirmed my thoughts. I may do what you indicate and disavow everything, but I am going try one more time and cut a lot more deeply in actual link removal first.

Meanwhile, of course, I am top 5 for all my major terms in Bing and Yahoo. Joy!

Thanks

[Jonathan1979]

Just looking a bit more, but you could have been flagged for manual checking because from around the beginning of August you had a huge spike of links.  Based on Matt Cutts previous statements about Prweb, they would have seen it as possibly spammy.

From August you went up to nearly 125 referring domains, before dropping back down to 36 now.  Prior to PRweb, you were at around 30 referring domains.  I suspect this spike is what caused a manual review.

[barberm]

Agreed. But given that I had those removed in quick order and it has been several weeks since they have considerably dropped, any reason why they wouldn't have removed the manual action. I am essentially back to a pre-PRWeb profile.

[Jonathan1979]

I suspect you missed some and Google are being well... Google.

Ahrefs do a 7 day money back guarantee.  You can even find a 50% off coupon around for the first month.  Some people will even need to check majestic as well.

No one site will get all the links unfortunately.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Looking in Open Site Explorer, I'm seeing several suspicious links in the report.  These are links from sites that have nothing to do with medicine whatsoever, all with targeted keywords in the anchor text.  When I click to view the page and look for the actual links, I'm not seeing anything.  So, it seems the links are no longer there.

If the report from Open Site Explorer is correct, it looks to me like someone was purchasing links and has now removed them.  Did you purchase links?

Some of the suspicious links are:

• afghan-network.net/Bookshop/persian-books.html
• learnscratch.org/resources/why-learn-scratch
• www.tiltshift.com/

If these links are also in Google's link profile, I could see why the site is penalized.

[Jonathan1979]

Agreed.  Ordinarily it wouldn't matter, but once subject to manual review they would be.

[barberm]

Interesting. I hadn't seen these links before and have never purchased links. I'll download the list from open site explorer and review and disavow these and similar. Thanks for pointing these out!

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Michael,

"You are correct that it wasn't a single press release but 3-4 that all had the same circumstances."

It's quite unlikely that a few press releases are the sole cause of your penalty, although it is possible.  But I think you may have more links to clean up.  Here are two examples:

http://healthmad.com/health/when-las-vegas-gets-the-best-of-you-6-ways-to-get-back-on-your-feet-in-sin-city/ - self made article

http://www.cannylink.com/healthhospitaldirectories.htm - Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link

[JimJ]

Hi Maria

What do you mean by "Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link" -- Is there an issue with linking back from directories to your site?

Does this apply to submitting my website to social bookmark websites using a specific anchor text that am optimizing for?

Thanks

James