Manual action penalty by Google

[Tit]

Hello,

We have a big well-known brand - www.titanbet.com. This brand is well established and the site has been live for almost 4 years now ranking very well on some very strong KWs.

we received a message from Google on Aug 29^th saying “Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site” and that “Google has applied a manual spam action to titanbet.com/”

The past 2 weeks since the penalty was received we saw some of our major KWs drop in rankings. BUT all brand related KWs were still ranked 1^st

Over the last weekend the penalty has worsen and we no longer rank on any of the brands KWs (we find the site in 5^th page at best).

Moreover, when searching for a sentence from the any of the page on the site in Google, we see other sites ahead of us in the SERPs.

Based on the message we originally received from Google we have started cleaning some of the bad links to the site.  We found a lot of links from bad sites, some of them are not indexed and probably penalized as well, some are from affiliate websites and some are from some automatic indexation websites based in China and Russia
we have started reaching out to some of these sites to try and have them remove our links.

We are also worried about the duplication of our site. We have found many other sites (mostly affiliate websites) have copied and in some cases completely duplicated our content. Google for some reason has chosen to penalize us for this. Although we do not have control over these other sites. We have run copyscape to try and figure out which pages are the most problematic and we will try to re-write the content on these pages. But what if the other sites copy us again?

Any suggestions on the above would be appreciated as we try to understand why Google has penalized us.

thank you

Titan Bet Team

[MickEdwards]

The penalty is for links rather than thin or duplicate content, so at this stage I would primarily focus on your link profile.  If your content is indexed first with social signal pointing to it then Google will (should) know you are the originator.

You will need to systematically go through every single link coming back to the site.  If you have any URLs 301ed to your site then those link profiles will need close examination too.  If you have had a manual penalty you can't mainly get it right, you have to completely clean out anything with a whiff of toxicity.  Keep a close record of all your activities, possibly using a tool like Rmoov, when your have exhausted manual attempts use Disavow then file a reconsideration request.  There are some good threads and posts on here covering all these aspects.