Google is squashing my rankings, insight please?

[AlanMosley]

do you have any actions against you in WMT?

How did you get 100k likes on Facebook? That's a lot, did you get them legit?

[marshill]

Hi Moosa. Thanks for pointing those out!  Yea those links happend several years ago when i did hire an SEO company to help us.  Google is not "surprised" by those links since they have been around a while (and I'm going to remove them now that you showed them to me).  But would those links be the reason I dropped recently?  Do you have any advice on building domain authority?  did you find the website easy to navigate and use?  We really want a good user experience.  Yes we got our FB likes completely legitimately, we did spend some money on FB ads within facebook (didn't spend anything in Google), not to mention we got lucky with a FB post that was viral and had 30,000 shares.  plus we put out great stuff on FB, every day, so the likes naturally happen.  I'm just waiting for Google to see our hard work and put us back in the green...:(

[marshill]

Bingo!  You are right!  I see the message from Google:  I had no idea...well that solves it.  i will get right on it.  I should use the disavow tool?

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Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

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. Learn more. |

[AlanMosley]

some good news and some bad news.

Links got long ago can come back and bite you any day.

The fact that google said that they have not penalized your site, but rather just the links, is not all good news. it means that they have ignored the links, that why your site has dropped, removing them will not lead to a rise in rank, it means that where you rank now isa where you will rank without those links, removed or ignored.

At least that is how I understand it. I would still remove them in case I am wrong

[marshill]

well it is a manual penalty.  i will do the right thing and ask for mercy, what choice do I have?

[AlanMosley]

none, but don't expect much.

[marshill]

since some of my 'bad links' are on blogspot and wordpress that an seo consultant created years ago, I have no access to remove them.  Does Google expect me to try to confiscate those accounts on Blogspot or can I just disavaow them?

[AlanMosley]

you need to explain that to them, and outline your efforts

[marshill]

thanks Alan.  I appreciate the help from the folks here, although I'm dismayed you said I might be out of luck.  At the very least, I will be unrestrained to rebuild my rankings for those pages right?  I mean, nothing will be holding them down anymore?

[marshill]

i actually have room to be optimistic.  when i submitted the reconsideration request, Google knew about my manual action and said if I was clear, they would remove the manual action...so who knows

[MoosaHemani]

Hello Marshill,

If you ask me I would say Yes, this could be one of the reason why your rankings are dropped and not coming back even after the extensive efforts you have put on the content. My advice here is to remove as many of these kinds of links as possible, submit the rest to disavow file and send it to Google for reconsideration request (now as you have mentioned that you have a manual penalty, you have to do this!)

Once Google will look in to your effort they most probably will lift your penalty and then good links will slowly take your rankings back. Incase Google reject your reconsideration request you have to go through the removal and disavow process again.

Hope this helps!

[AlanMosley]

The thing is, his site has no penalty on the site, only on the bad links, removing the bad links that are already being ignored will do nothing

"we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole"

[David-Kley]

When you submit the resubmission request, be honest and descriptive in your reply. State clearly what you have done to repair the manual penalty placed agaist your site, and that to the best of your knowledge, the issue is taken care of.