WMT semantics...

[Grumpy_Carl]

Wondering if anyone could help out here please. Cut a long story short, took on a client before Christmas last year and all was going well re seo until about June when the site got hit by a penguin problem. Search traffic went down 60% over night and a warning appeared in WMT saying we have penalised your site for spam links. Not good. Digging about more it appears that the old seo company, during their contract and what appears a few months after we took it, we engaging in some heavy forum spam.

When I say heavy forum spam, it was impressively heavy. They had spammed the message board of a country and western singer 17,000 times, for example. We removed as much of the article spam as we could but the blog commenting and the forum spam was too vast to do much about - what are you going to do if someone emails and says can you delete our link from 17,000 pages of your website!! We did a reconsideration request from Google and got denied, that was fine, to be expected. We did some more clearing and got rejected again. Upon the third reconsideration request things changed in our WMT.

Google messaged to say that we still have issues with your links, however in the warnings in WMT the message has changed from the one about having an penalty on the site to _'Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.' _

We are reading this one of two ways...google has just changed the way they word the message, OR, they have reviewed our request and accept that we cannot remove all the spam links and so are advising us that they are ignoring the links themselves rather than penalising the site itself. Rankings, of course, still haven't come back, but are going up slowly. This is very much to be expected, without the spam links the site wouldn't have been there in the first place, so we are perhaps back to where we should be.

Does this line of thought make sense to anyone else or have I spent too long looking at country and western forums trying to find our backlinks!!

Many thanks,

Carl

[TomRayner]

Hi Carl

Just a quick clarification - receiving a manual penalty message in GWT does not necessarily mean you've been hit by an algorithmic update.  You could be penalised by both of course, but the warning means there is a manual penalty on the site and, as such, should be able to be removed with link removal, use of the disavow file and reconsideration requests.

I see your train of thought there.  My interpretation is that the site is still being penalised for the anchors and search terms that those unnatural links are attempting to rank.

"Taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole." to me means that the site is still being penalised on the pages and/or terms the links are pointing to or optimised for - however for other terms, and specifically your brand terms, you would be able to rank again for.

If you wish to rank for the terms you've been penalised for, I would continue to submit reconsideration requests.  Try to document your process in as much detail as possible - detail dates and responses of when you've outreached webmasters (on multiple occassions), create an excel sheet describing the work done so far.  Show how, as a last resort to no positive response, you've added the URLs and domains to a disavow file and uploaded it in WMT - feel free to disavow whole domains by using - domain:example.com - rather than just individual URLs. That should help speed up the process.

And it's worth remembering that, should your reconsideration be successful, it does not mean that rankings will reappear.  Odds are, and you've already alluded to this, the spam links were boosting your site and so you will need to replace the links lost - this time though with high quality and contextual links of course.

In short: I think a penalty is still present on the site, but narrowed down to the terms the spam links were trying to rank for.  In order to rank for them again, you should carry out further link removal, disavowing and reconsideration requests.

Hope this helps.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks for the reply, Tom.

The statement you make about the rankings not magically appearing is great to hear. Have been trying to explain this to the client for a while so always good to see someone else agreeing with me.

For now will continue the strategy of trying to clear up the links as best we can and looking at keywords which were not being spammed to death before and trying to rank for those.