$10,000 Bounty! Help Us Overcome Google Manual Penalty...please :)
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I really wouldn't rule out individuals or shops that say they need 2-3 months to do the link audit, removal, and reconsideration. Even with successful cleanup, 2 months to start ranking again is an extremely short time period. I've worked on projects in the past (at a different company) where sometimes there were multiple cleanup attempts and reconsiderations that needed to be filed, and rankings started to climb back to where they were around the 7 or 8 month mark, but still weren't fully recovered to where they were pre-penalty. Penalty recovery is a very complicated and there are a lot of factors that go into it. Nothing is really guaranteed, so it's going to be very hard to find someone that's going to put in the footwork and effort only to possibly not be paid in the instance that they can't gain immediate success in your allotted time frame.
I suggest taking the time to find someone who really knows what they're doing, has a track record, but don't bind them to a specific time frame. Go with quality of work and expertise first. If the majority of your revenue is dependent on Google (which isn't a good thing to begin with) work on other ways to drive leads while cleanup and reconsideration is worked on.
Just my thought. Good luck.
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You are basically asking for a BLACK HAT techniques to clean the messy made by other black hat techniques. Fast and "guaranteed" solutions will hardly be long term.
Would like your rank back in less than 30 days?
I'll tell you how you can get your traffic back in 3 easy steps:
1 - Buy a new domain and host it in a new server.
2 - Upload a copy of your site for the new server.
3 - 301 your current site for your new domain.
You'll get your traffic back right away and Google might take up to 2 months to give you other penalty.
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Selena is right - no one can guarantee that your rankings will ever return and would be foolish to spend so much time for a possible (perhaps even unlikely) payment.
Take this example - you built 5000 total links and you are KILLING it in search results... G manually reviews your links and looks like 4900 of them are spammy/garbage... woops. They lay the smack down on your site and send you the "unnatural links" letter. You remove those bad links, tell Google and they remove the penalty. Do you really think you are going to rank just as well with those remaining 100 links? No.
That being said, I've successfully revoked manual penalties for 10+ sites and got it down to a science. If you have <10k links in GWT, I can submit a disavow and submit a reconsideration request that will be accepted in ~2 weeks. I can't make any promises about your rankings returning as there as many variables, but I can discuss future steps to recovery with you.
Shoot me a message if you are interested.
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I agree 100% with Selena...
Anyway, good luck!
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2 to 3 months can be a short amount of time, but that really depends on many factors. In fact, it can be done and has been done in many cases. Let's look at the very public case of Rap Genius. They had a penalty and within 10 days Rap Genius was back in the search index. This is an extreme example, but their penalty was lifted within 10 days.
There are several factors that might come into play here, though. For example, the number of reconsideration requests that have been sent to Google already... if Google has received several of them already, then you'll need to wait a period of time (about a month) until Google will even reconsider the site again.
And then it might not be physically possible to clean up the links within 2 months' time. For example, you might be dealing with millions of links. We've had success in the past cleaning up very large link profiles in the past. It's possible, but I don't know of any reputable companies that will do the work based on a contingency. Reputable SEO firms have people who we must pay to the do the actual work. That said, we'd be happy to investigate this further, it's difficult to give you any more specifics without knowing the URL of the site and the number of links you're dealing with.
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2-3 months is pretty standard for doing the work needed to remove these penalties, although many can take longer if you don't pass on your first attempt which is quite common. At one time we could get responses from Google in 5-10 days but of all of the reconsideration requests that we have filed in the last couple of months, the quickest we have heard back on any of them was 4 weeks now. Sure, you'll hear of the odd unusual case like Rap Genius that heard back in 3 days, but everyone who I know in the penalty field is getting responses several weeks after they filed.
It is definitely possible to do the work needed n a month (and then have the penalty lifted in 4 weeks when Google replies), but to pass on the first try you need to be EXTREMELY thorough.
The bonus idea that you are talking about is one that we will often do in our company, but we don't work on bonus alone. We take a base fee and then are paid a bonus for getting the penalty lifted in a certain time frame. We offer an expedited plan that is usually taken advantage of by large brands whereby we do all of the work needed and file for reconsideration within three weeks of the start date. To do a thorough job of manually assessing an entire link profile, developing and discussing a link removal strategy, contacting site owners multiple times, documenting things thoroughly, producing and filing a disavow and then filing for reconsideration within three weeks of the start date is a real challenge. What we do is put multiple staff on just this job. Often we work nights, weekends and holidays so that we can meet our deadline. For one project we had 8 staff members plus myself on the job so that we could get done on time. We successfully had that penalty lifted in 5 weeks' time. But for service like this, you're going to pay a base fee plus a large bonus that would end up being several times what you are offering.
With all of that being said, to lift your penalty AND have you ranking well again within two months is probably impossible unless you have a really really good link profile underneath the bad links. If you have a sitewide penalty, then once the penalty is lifted you will likely rank for brand terms again almost immediately. But, if you have a partial match, then in most cases not much improves in rankings once the penalty is removed because those links that were formerly responsible for your penalty are no longer working in your favor and never will come back again. Getting new links to put you back to that high level of ranking is no longer a matter of just building links. In this new age of Google penalties, the only links that count are truly earned links (although some self made industry related links can possibly be ok). That is something that just can't be done to scale and definitely can't be done quickly.
On top of all of that, many sites with a manual penalty are also affected by the Penguin algorithm. What this means is that the manual penalty could lift but the algorithm could still be looking at the site unfavorably. In these cases, sites can make either an improvement or a recovery the next time Penguin refreshes provided that they have done a very thorough link cleanup and that there is a good base of natural links. But, as Penguin refreshes randomly and it can be 6 months or more between refreshes, there is no way to guarantee a return to rankings.
I would recommend that you revisit those companies who offered to do the job in 2-3 months' time. Make your decision based on their record of success. Ask for references. (Don't take an NDA as an excuse not to have references. Any company that is good at removing penalties will have loads of clients who are raving about them.) If one of those companies has a good service record then have them do the job but offer them a bonus if they can pass on the first try. Don't expect them to work just on bonus alone.
Best of luck!
Marie
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Perfect and true.
We received a manual penalty, took about 3 month to clean up the backlink profile and 3 reconsideration requests to have the penalty revoked. Even now, 2 month later, we barely see any organic traffic change.
It could be that it will take some more time, more good earned links or that our site still has an algo penalty, probably panda...
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WOW!! This is the perfect example of time is not money, at least not always… J.
Here are few things you should consider, even if someone says yes to your offer!
- It’s in Google’s hand!
Even if someone agrees to get you out of the penalty from Google within 30days, just keep in mind that no SEO company have family connections with Google that they can do that… it’s a process and it takes time. Even if anyone magically collect and audit all the bad links, send removal requests (get positive/negative replies), create a disavow file, submitted to Google within few hours and days… they cannot accelerate the time that Google will take to reconsider your request!
- Guarantee
This whole SEO world is living without guarantees so even after months of time, there is no guarantee that it will work! I am working with a client who got his 2 reconsideration requests rejected from Google.
Selena, is very much right! I have experienced companies that are in there 7-9<sup>th</sup> month and they are still not performing as good as they use to be before penalty.
It is a time taking process so try to find a good consultant that gives you the best use of your money. If you are good with budget (seems like) my advice would be to check the list of recommended companies by moz and contact them to get started!
Hope this helps!
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Manual Penalty! Being honest, I have worked many such cases and revoked penalties for dozens of client since April, 2012 but I have never seen a single site recovered 100%. Best recover ratio till date is 60 to 70% as far as my experience is concerned.
Even after revoking manual penalty, it takes months to stabilize. Google keep revoked websites under observation for sometime. It short, even after removal of penalty, you are not our of Google penalty for months. This is confirmed by John Mueller, Google Trends Analyst in Europe, was responding to a post made on the Google help forums who was filing for reconsideration request after disavowing links. While a lot of the discussion from other users revolved around the nuances of continuing to disavow links while filing for reconsideration requests, John Mueller mentioned :
"Finally, looking at your site’s history, it looks like you’ve done quite a bit for quite some time, and it looks like our algorithms have picked up on that too. So while resolving the manual action is a good way to start, you need to keep in mind that it can possibly take quite some time for our algorithms to regain trust in your site even after that."
So, there are no real time frames in deed. Try to recover current website and starting a new website is not a bad idea, who knows, with quality Link-building, robust On Page, consistent Blogging & social media sharing, you would rank your keywords earlier than old website!
Best of luck!
Regards
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Justin672,
This would be interesting if it were not so sad a statement as to how you view the value of real SEO. You paid someone to get you into this position. I will tell you what I see regularly from sites in your position. I have no way of knowing what happened with yours so this is not about you.
Companies put pressure on "SEOs" to get them "ranked" for this or that. My experience with others is that they push below average (cheap) SEO's to get them to rank and pay a small amount, relatively, for that work. (Better SEO's won't do the same things and they charge more for the work they do). Those cheaper "SEO's" want the business and will do anything to get the site to rank (and make the client happy), then OMG, Google did not like it and now everything is crashing and it is the previous SEO who is to blame. Well, the company must bear some of that burden.
To make a statement that you will pay someone a bonus or bounty to fix your problem in your time frame is, frankly, a slap in the face to any real SEO professional. Yes, you may find someone to give it a try and they might actually succeed, who knows? But those of us who have companies and do SEO, would not touch it with a ten foot pole. Why? Because it is a fool's errand. The upside is small (Yes, $10K is nothing for the amount of work necessary to fix your issue. assuming you have a site that has longevity and links over 3 or 4,000.) and the downside is while they are working to get you reconsidered, other links pop up that you were not expecting due to the directory submissions, etc. the previous "seo" did.
A professional SEO or SEO firm, will charge you and be up front it will take time and there is no guarantee of when the reconsideration will be granted. Yes, most good SEO's know how to get it done, but to make those kinds of promises, you need the type of SEO's who you hired originally. At the end of the day, who would risk minimally 100 to 200 hours of their time or their staff time when they do not control everything related to the site? Again, it is a fool's errand. You are asking the other guy to take the risk to fix your business; not very reasonable IMO.
I do hope you are able to get it fixed, there are some really good answers here.
Best,
Robert
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Marie,
You rocked this. Very cool.
Robert
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Hi Marie!
Yours is a professional, straight forward and thorough answer. I am more than convinced on asking for your advice and your crew´s, if we ever need to make a “big scale recovery” for any client who deserves, and is prepared to pay, for professional and experienced work in big scale recovery.
My sincere congrats, I do not see such experience in a specific subject in our everyday work!
Cheers, enjoying another sunny morning in southern Spain
C
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Justin,
I've had experience turning around link audits and removing penalties in a short time frame. Feel free to contact me directly and I can take a look and let you know what I think.Sean Green
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