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You remind me of me, 2.5 years ago.  I had a decent site but had no idea how to SEO it.  I went looking for an SEO mentor in the hopes of someone teaching me the ropes, but no one took up my offer.

I was so obsessed with SEO that I spent a good amount of time every day reading SEO forums, every article I could find on SEOMoz and I followed SEOs on Twitter and just read and read and read.  At first it's confusing because you don't know what advice is good and what is crappy, but you soon learn which people seem to know what they are talking about.

I then started to get active on forums and asked specific questions about my site.  You have to be careful doing this because just because 6 people respond with "do forum sigs and blog commenting" doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.  But, when senior forum members (who I learned to trust through all of my prior reading) gave me ideas, I listened...and implemented...and tweaked.

My site is still growing but it is actually profitable now and I can see that it has the potential to be my main source of income one day.  When I started learning about SEO I was getting 34 visitors per day.  I now average 5000 and I'm learning daily what things to do to increase that number.

One big tip that I would give you is to not get bogged down too much in learning SEO.  I ended up spending more time learning about SEO than working on my site.  I now see that content I made 2 years ago is starting to make me lots of money.  And now I realize that if I had spent more time working on my site and making awesome content I would have more ad income coming in today.  Speaking of that...why am I sitting her in Q&A rather than working on my site????  LOL!

Good luck!

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

**"Some people will argue that Google penalizes keyword domains, but I know that isn't true. " **

I think that a lot of people in the SEO world are confused about this. When the EMD algo first came out I studied a large number of sites that had taken drops. Google confused everyone because they made a big deal of announcing the EMD update and then sneakily pushed out a Panda refresh a couple of days later. A LOT of sites were affected by this Panda refresh.

At that time I had asked anyone who thought that they were hit by EMD to share their domain with me. A large number of these ended up being sites that, IMO were hit by Panda.

The sites that were affected by the EMD update were ones that truly did not deserve to rank, and only previously ranked well because they were EMDs.

There is no penalty for having an EMD.

Now, back to the original question. I'm unclear as to whether OP is saying that there is a single EMD that is ranking well, or perhaps you are saying that this company has a whole bunch of service+location EMD's that are ranking well. If this is the case, then whether or not they deserve to rank depend on what kind of unique value they are offering. For example, if this was a plumbing site and every single location had almost the same content on it describing their overall plumbing business then Google wouldn't like that. But, let's say it's a real estate brokerage and the brand has worked really hard to provide helpful, unique content for each city they service. I could see this working. Google still would prefer that a realtor ran just one site, but if these individual sites were helpful enough to users then they still could do well.

It looks to me like this isn't her website at all.  Instead, she has purchased space on the funktional designs website.  "www.designsbymaida.com" isn't a website - it's just a domain name that redirects to the designer's site.

So if there was any linkbuilding effort geared towards designsbymaida, then yes, funktional designs would benefit.

But, I don't this this is an ethical question.  I don't think they're trying to do anything shady.  They're just giving space on their website.  Now, if she wants to SEO her site she's got to talk to Funktional Designs about taking her content and putting it on a self hosted site.

The majority of people in the SEO world believe that if Penguin hits you, it hits you HARD.  But, I don't agree with this.  John Mueller from Google has said that it can affect a site incrementally.  I've seen sites that took a dip with a Penguin update of only a few positions, or perhaps from page 1 to page 2.  With this update so far I'm seeing some sites that improved from page 2 to page 1.

However, it's also possible that your drop is because you've got competitors who are recovering after doing a thorough link cleanup and now appearing above you.

"I'm inclined to simply focus on building better links rather than disavow given the lack of severity. "

Are you building links or earning links?  If you're building links what kind are you building?  These could be the problem.  A lot of what people used to call "natural" is no longer considered natural.  If you've been making your own links then it's possible a disavow is in order.

For crying out loud.  I have a day job.  And I'm supposed to be working.  How am I supposed to get any work done when there is so much great information that keeps appearing on SEOMoz Q&A?

Here are my thoughts.  My first strategy is to build great content.  But, it's true that no one will link to your content if they don't know about it, so sometimes you need to do other things to get your site noticed.

My second plan of attack is to create linkbait.  I've had good success with designing a couple of calculators.  The trick is to find something that is REALLY helpful in your niche but that is hard to find elsewhere on the web and to make it easy for people to share on FB and other social sites.  These are not always easy to think up!  And you need to have the skill to program the calculator (or the cash to hire a programmer).  Another type of linkbait I use is to blog about current events, but give people a solution.  For example, when the earthquake in Japan happened, a lot of people in my niche were searching for a particular thing  in regards to radiation.  I wrote an article that answered these questions.  I made sure that I researched my keywords and crafted my title so that it ended up attracting a lot of SERP attention even without having backlinks.  Because that was a highly searched term for a couple of months it brought traffic and links to my site.

For my informational site the above is all that I do.  I will occasionally email a site owner to let them know about some great content that I have produced, but not often.  I let my readers promote my content.  I make it easy for people to share it in social networks.

I also run a real estate site.  It's new and I am currently in the stage of creating a great site so that when I start a link building campaign people will have quality stuff to link to.  My first plan of action for my real estate site is to publish a very comprehensive article rating the top ten neighborhoods in my city.  I have crunched census data and have my top ten.  Then I'm going to write a great article about each of the neighborhoods.  Once I have incredible content I will do some press releases, I will personally email local and national newspapers, and I will email people in my niche who will be interested in this type of content.  I may eventually add reviews of restaurants, hotels and other businesses within these areas in the hopes of gaining links from those businesses.  The possibilities for this one bit of linkbait are endless - I could offer badges (with an embedded link back) for the top businesses, I could have a contest for the schools in each area to come up with reasons why their school is best (which would encourage more linking), etc. etc.  My brain is so full of ideas that I don't have time to build all of these things!

I may do some manual linkbuilding for the real estate site such as a few quality directories.  I will analyze my competitors' backlinks to see if there are any good opportunities for me.  But, so far what I have seen in the competitive link tool are low quality directories that likely won't help.

I considered buying some links, but it's looking less and less attractive to me.  For a previous site of mine I bought some links from "sponsor pages".  The sponsor part was complete bull because you basically paid some money to sponsor a product you've never heard of and you got a link from a high PR page.  These links definitely did help my site.  And, I can see how it's tempting to go after them.  But here's my thought on link buying:  I think that Google is getting better and better at detecting paid links.  There are some that they will never get such as if I pay my neighbor to write a blog post about my business and include a link.  But, for things like sponsor pages and link farms and "buy an article on this page and we'll link back with three keywords", Google's got Phd's working on anti-spam algorithms.

So, I would hate to go through years of building up my business via linkbait and hard work and hours and hours of content production only to find that I get penalized a few years down the road because I bought some paid links.  I can't imagine losing first place rankings, and all of the income that goes along with that (especially for our real estate site) because I got penalized.

That's my strategy for you.

I was on the phone tonight with a site owner who may have been affected by Penguin.  I was explaining how overuse of keywords with anchor text can adversely affect a site and he asked me an interesting question:  "If that is the case, then why does the SEOMoz guide say differently?"

Here are some quotes from the SEOMoz beginner's guide:

"Anchor Text - One of the strongest signals the engines use in rankings is anchor text. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrase in that anchor text."

That pretty much implies that you should try to get as many keyword anchor texted links to your site as possible.  There should probably be some type of Penguin warning in here.

"Self-Created, Non-Editorial - Hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links through guest book signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These links offer the lowest value, but can, in aggregate, still have an impact for some sites. "

Granted, the text goes on to say this:

"In general, search engines continue to devalue most of these types of links, and have been known to penalize sites that pursue these links aggressively. Today, these types of links are often considered spammy and should be pursued with caution."

That's a good warning, but I think it could be perhaps made a little more clear that self made links like this are not wise to use as an SEO tool.  I think that to a beginner, it kind of sounds like the guide is saying, "There are lots of opportunities out there where you can get a link by making one yourself.  Go ahead and use them but don't overdo it."

Yes!

In almost every site for which I have removed a penalty, we keep seeing unnatural links that appear over time.  Some of them may be the result of old automated link building tactics that are still replicating.  Some may be negative SEO.  And I think many of them are old links that just couldn't be found by the link checking tools until now.

You will likely want to do monthly disavows for some time until you start seeing that no new unnatural links are appearing.

Keep in mind that when you update your disavow you are overwriting your current file, so you need to download your file, convert it to .txt, add on to it, and then reupload it.

Let's say I have a page on my site with the url www.mydomain.com/page1.php?id=234.

Let's say it can be accessed by the url www.mydomain.com/page-this-is-a-keyword-rich-url

And let's say that the second example is what I have set as my rel-canonical.

I wondered what would happen when people submitted the non-canonical url to twitter.  We know that Twitter shares count for something in SEO.  I didn't want things to go to waste if people were landing on my short urls and sharing them on Twitter.

Well, tonight, I shared one of my own urls on Twitter.  I was accidentally on the short one (not the canonical), but when I shared it via addthis the long one was shared.  So, Addthis must read the canonical and use this to share.

Very cool.  At least to me.  I may possibly be the only person on the planet that understands what I just wrote, but this is a neat discovery for me.

If the site was hit with Penguin then in order to see recovery the following needs to happen:

-Thorough link cleanup

-Google needs to recrawl the majority if not all of the removed/disavowed links to recognize that they are now gone.

-The Penguin algorithm needs to rerun. (More info here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-recovery-required-19115.html)

Given we haven't had a refresh of Penguin since December, this is why you haven't seen improvement. Now, there are other algorithms that use links, so some sites can see some improvement right after doing a link cleanup, but if Penguin is the issue then you're going to need to wait. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing when the next rerun will happen and I'm thinking it's going to be a few months yet given that the search quality team is working hard on Panda right now.

Another point to add - I have seen many sites recover from Penguin, but IMO the only ones that actually make a decent recovery are ones that have truly good content that has attracted links naturally.

Hi. I remember speaking with you last year some time about link issues. How certain are you that your link profile is clean aside from these pharma links? Usually Google is pretty good at just discounting these, but if you've got your own unnatural links I think that sometimes spam like this can possibly hurt.

Have you seen this?

https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo

Also, what are you trying to rank for? Your title tag is optimized for your url and brand.

It's not negative SEO.  These links have been turning up in every audit we are doing.

Someone asked John Mueller about links from this site in a recent hangout and he said that Google probably can figure out to ignore these links, but it's not a bad idea to disavow just to be safe so that's what we do.

Is it dangerous to have your H1 tag and your title the exact same thing?  My thought was that it's not be the best use of space, but that it couldn't cause harm.

What do you think?

Unfortunately neither OSE nor the link: command will give you a complete list of your links.  I have had some sites where the list from WMT is 10x as many links as shown in OSE.

Here is how you get a list of links from WMT:

Click on Traffic, then "Links to your site".  Then click on Download latest links.  (see image below).

I have found that this gives a very full list.

Now, some will tell you that you will need to merge the list of links from WMT with ones you can get from OSE, ahrefs and Majestic. If you have less than 1000 links then I wouldn't worry about this.

If you did have a LOT of links to your site then I would probably use ahrefs to get a list and combine it with the one that WMT gives you.

A word of caution:  You can easily shoot yourself in the foot by trying to clean up a link profile because you can end up removing links that are actually good links.  I would not recommend doing this unless you have a warning of unnatural links in your WMT.  If you feel that you have been affected by Penguin, then removing spammy links could help but at this point we haven't seen a whole lot of credible cases of recovery.  So, be careful!

downloadlatestlinks1.png

When Google released the disavow tool they made it pretty clear that it was really only meant to be used for sites that had received a manual penalty.  You were to get as many links manually removed as possible and then use the disavow tool for the rest of your unnatural links.

In the statement about the disavow tool Google said that if you felt you had been affected and you thought the disavow tool might help then go ahead and use it.  That's pretty vague though.

Before you do anything else you need to figure out why you have declining ranks.  Otherwise removing links is likely doing more harm than good.  Even though links from shady sources are not as good as good links, if you haven't been affected by Penguin or an unnatural links penalty then these links can actually help a website.  I'm not saying to go out and get more, but I'm saying that you shouldn't go removing links unless you are certain that it will help.  Disavowing more links could put you even further in the hole.

If you've got a Panda issue then it has nothing to do with your links.  Panda is about on page quality and often has to do with duplicate and thin content issues.

Your first task is to be certain about whether or not you have a linking issue.  While Penguin first hit on April 24, there were Panda refreshes on either side of that date.

There are several people in the SEO industry that are now saying that removing and disavowing links is not likely necessary for Penguin.  I have a close contact who has done a lot of research on Penguin hit sites and he feels that Penguin doesn't penalize a site but simply disavows/nofollows all of your bad links.  So if you used to rank for "green widgets" because you had hundreds of anchor texted links, once those links were nofollowed by Penguin then you would no longer rank.  If he is right, then you can regain rankings by getting good natural links, but that's no easy task.

I am still on the fence about whether Penguin is a penalty or simply a disavowal of bad links.  I have seen sites that really should be ranking for certain phrases but are not to be seen on the first 10 pages.  To me this really seems like there is a penalty or some kind of flag put on the site, but I have no proof.

The point?  The point is that even those of us who are COMPLETELY obsessed with understanding Penguin don't fully know how the algorithm works.  If you do find that your issue is a Penguin one then waiting until more info gets published may be an option.  But there are other options such as creating new pages to rank for the terms that the old ones failed to rank for.  Or, for some sites, starting over may be an option.

But again...you really need to know what hit you before removing more links.  Who knows, it may not even be an algorithm change.  It could be that you have site issues, or that your competitors are doing better than you are.

The answer really depends on what type of penalty you have, but in most cases, your whole site will be affected and the new content will likely struggle.  There are some cases where only a certain part of a website or even certain keywords are affected by a penalty and new content could still thrive, but that's not as common.

Still, if you can add good fresh content then I would continue to do so!  This can be a sign of good faith to Google that you are actively working on improving your website.  You can even link to this content in your reconsideration request to show Google that you are doing all you can to make your website as helpful to users as possible.

I'm probably just repeating some of the great answers given so far, but here's my thought.

Are you absolutely sure this is Penguin?  Your traffic drop would have to be on or immediately after April 24 if that was the case.  If it was prior to April 24 then this is not Penguin so I wouldn't be so quick to go deleting links!

There was a Panda update April 19th and April 27, so if your drop coincides with one of these dates then I'd be doing more research into Panda which is primarily about on site quality, lack of duplication, etc.

How new is your domain?  If you were only up and running for a couple of months and then had a traffic drop it's possible you had a honeymoon boost and your site is now back down and that would have nothing to do with a penalty.

>>Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.

That can be a normal traffic pattern.

Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route  I would like to if anyone could help me  should i buy a new domain  and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back

You really need to figure out what the problem is first.  If you have a Penguin penalty and you've got too spammy a backlink profile to clean up or dilute with good links then, yes, starting over is a good idea.  Don't 301 the old to the new cause you'll end up in the same place.  If you've got a Panda issue then you should be able to recover without starting a new domain.  Whatever you do, don't just slap the same website up on a new domain.

It's also important to know how big of a traffic drop this is.  I've seen people freak out at what would be normal day to day changes or seasonal changes or something like a 5% drop in traffic.

There are other possibilities too such as malware issues with the site.  Or a robots.txt or accidental noindexing, etc. etc.

So, to sum up, can you determine the exact day that your drop happened, and how severe was it?

I've done both.  If it's possible for me to use a domain email then I do so, not for Google's sake, but rather, so that it looks more official to the people who are receiving the email.  If I can't, then I make up a Gmail account like sitenameemails@gmail.com and when I send the emails I include a line saying, "You may have noticed that this email did not come from an @sitename.com email address.  Because we are sending a large number of emails out we did not want to risk our domain being flagged as a sender of spam.  If you would like verification from a site owner of this link removal request, please email siteowner@sitename.com."

Here are my thoughts:

1. If you see a spammy site but you can't find your link anymore I'd still disavow.  There's no harm in doing so.  The link may have moved to another page or may pop up again.

2. If a site no longer resolves but you know that the originating link on that site was unnatural, then yes, disavow.

3. No, you don't need to include nofollowed links.  What disavowing does is ask Google not to count that link any more.  Nofollowed links already don't count.

Bonus tip: Make sure you disavow at the domain level.