Link removal

[Discountdisplays]

We were hit by penguin and have been going through the process of removing bad links. Things were looking up but then wasa 20% jump in our bad links.

They all seem to be related. There are over 100 different domains that all seem to go back to mbiz. examples include

http://www.5stone.com.cn/Literature-holders-.html

http://www.building-stone.com/Display-furniture.html

http://www.china-tombstone.com/Display-exhibition-products-.html

It looks like they have automatically gathered data from google to create these pages. I would hope that the guys at Google are clever enough to be aware of these sorts of links. But if not I need to get them removed.

I have tried whois but I cant find out how to contact these guys. Has anyone got any bright ideas?

Thanks

[WilliamKammer]

Google tries to be smart enough to recognize when this sort of this is going on. They get it right the majority of the time, but I've  encountered times where Google didn't recognize some sites as scrapers like this, and our client's site was still incurring a penalty. I know for a fact that is was scraper sites like this, because Google told me as much when they responded to my first reconsideration request.

Short version: Probably won't hurt you, but it is possible. I would disavow this stuff to be safe.

[MarieHaynes]

These links are popping up on pretty much every link audit that we do now.  Often they are nofollowed, but it appears that yours are not.  They're not ones that you made yourself and I really believe that they can be ignored.  With that being said, there's no harm at all in disavowing them.

If you've got an algorithmic issue (Penguin) then contacting the site owner is nowhere near as important as when you have a manual penalty.  As such, I'd just disavow and ignore.

[gazzerman1]

John Mueller at Google has said many times before that if it is not easy to find contact details don't waste your time, disavow and move on.

The web spam team want to see a good faith effort, not a miracle. Create an excel spreadsheet of all the links and mark next to each link if you were able to find contact info or a form and what action was taken. A word in each column as a reference is enough. Upload it as a google doc with your reconsideration request.

If they can see you really worked hard at going through all the links even if you have little removal success you stand a high chance of getting the manual penalty removed if you have disavowed all the bad stuff.

[Discountdisplays]

Hi Marie thanks for your response. Have been reading through your blog with interest. Re penguin you said

"I am still really cautious in my use of the disavow tool.  I use it for getting manual unnatural links penalties removed.  At this point though I still do not condone using the tool as a method to recover from Penguin unless you have a site with which you are willing to experiment

I realise that this was a few months ago and things move on but I'm concerned that submitting a disavow file might flag our site up for further investigation by google. Is there any evidence of this?

As i mentioned we have not had any manual penalty or unnatural links notifications

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks for the kind words Tim.

And...thanks for pointing out that statement on my site.  You're right...that post was written a while ago.  In fact, it was written before the last Penguin refresh.  When Penguin refreshed in October of 2013, the only sites that I saw making any kind of a recovery were ones that had done a thorough disavow.  As such, I now DO recommend using it for Penguin recoveries.  I've edited my post.

Submitting a disavow will definitely not flag your site for a manual review.  John Mueller has mentioned this several times in webmaster central hangouts.

[MarieHaynes]

This is true Gary, but only if you're dealing with a manual penalty.  The OP has a Penguin issue so no one from the webspam team is going to be reviewing their links.  Still, there's no harm in making a spreadsheet in case the site were to undergo a manual review in the future.  And, there's no harm in working hard to get links removed rather than just disavowing.  But, in most cases the ROI just doesn't make sense.  For Penguin issues I generally try to remove the links that I can easily remove and then disavow the rest.

[JaneCopland]

You should definitely be able to ignore these as they're quite common (not specifically these websites, but these types of links). That said, if you are under penalty and can't work out which links are causing it, having cleaned up all the rest, I'd go for a disavowal. If you are 100% certain that the penalty is due to Penguin, approaching the manual webspam team isn't likely to help you at all. But getting that disavowal in before the next Penguin update (which, despite Google's updates of this week - Panda and "payday loans" - can't be far away) might help.