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Almost every piece of text on my sites is within some kind of div.  There's nothing wrong with using divs at all!

However, if you were trying to hide the text within a div for manipulative purposes then this would be against Google TOS.

I had this happen on a client's site and it was a nightmare but eventually we got it fixed.  What happens is that Google sees that the new site is the same as the old site that is still in their index.  It seems like they apply an invisible canonical tag so that the links from the old site are all applied to the new.

For us, we had to use the url removal tool to remove all of the old site's urls from the index and the cache and then about 1-2 weeks later the links were gone.

Something funky is definitely going on in the SERPS in one of my niches for the last few weeks.  For our main keyword, our site is jumping from #3 to #10 or anywhere in between.

I can see why people would say not to do any linkbuilding while this is happening, because if your position dropped or increased you wouldn't know if it was due to your linkbuilding efforts.  However, I look at this a different way.  I wouldn't do any risky linkbuilding in this time period.  Gaining great quality links by developing great content, for example, is only going to help you.

I do personally think there is a major shakeup going on with the algorithm right now...and who knows how long that will last fror!

Hi Jon,

You mentioned that you submitted a file with your known bad backlinks and that you also disavowed those links, but did you actually make attempts to get those links manually removed?  Google wants to see that you have tried to remove as many of your unnatural links as possible.  You also need to document this well in a Google Doc so that they can see your efforts.

If you have indeed tried to remove backlinks then the next most common reason for sites to fail at reconsideration is because you haven't identified enough of your links as unnatural.  Sometimes what looks natural to you actually may be a link that goes against the quality guidelines.

Don't give up on this domain!  I've yet to see one that couldn't be saved.

I like long pages.  I have one longish article that is followed by over 500 comments which makes for a REALLY long page.  The comments bring in a huge amount of long tail traffic!

It sounds like you are doing the right things.  I have a few thoughts.

You mentioned that you can't show evidence of emails.  You definitely can.  What I do is make copies of my emails (original source - with the email headers to show proof of being sent and received) and put them in a Google doc.  You can reference the Google doc in your reconsideration request and the webspam team will view it.

The majority of the time though when you fail at reconsideration it is because you have not identified enough links as being unnatural.  A brief look at your backlink profile shows me a number of directory links.  I have worked with some sites that had unnatural link penalties because of an excess of directory links....especially if you have used anchor text containing your keywords.

Unfortunately in the few minutes I spent looking at your backlink profile I am not seeing many natural links at all.  A natural link is one that is earned and not self made.  This may be a case where you need to try to get all of your links removed in order to get the penalty off of your site.

I have it added to every page and I do think it helps with CTR.

One concern some have had, however, is that if you ever want to sell your site, then it is branded to you.

I think the answer depends on why you are wanting them gone.  If you have been given a manual penalty and have a warning message in your Webmaster Tools then you need to try to contact each of these sites to get them removed and then disavow the rest.  If you don't have a manual penalty and are trying to avoid an algorithmic issue like Penguin then disavowing these is enough.

For those urls you showed above, none of them resolve so they probably don't need to be dealt with.

If you have a bunch of spam links that are not created by you then other than disavowing them you really shouldn't have to worry about them.  Check out this webmaster hangout:

http://youtu.be/BAcEz_-ujCw?t=9m30s.  At the 9:30 mark John Mueller talks about a case where someone is concerned that a competitor is pointing thousands of spammy links at their site and John's answer is not to worry about them because the algorithm is already ignoring them.

Here is some reading that may help explain what changes Google is making as of late to combat unnatural linking practices:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-survive-googles-unnatural-links-warnings-avoid-overoptimisation

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-types-of-unnatural-link-building-tactics-10-quality-alternatives/44287/

Hi Andy,

Welcome to the challenging world of penalty removal!  Here are my thoughts on your questions.

First of all, don't worry about dmoz and 23searchengines and the like.  The 23searchengines sites are scraper sites and Google knows that they are not self made links.  99.9% of the time a dmoz link is ok.  The exception would be the case where a site managed to get an anchor texted link on there (usually by accessing a corrupt editor).  If your link from dmoz is anchored by your brand/url then just ignore them.

Regarding the foody's link, whether or not it's unnatural depends on the patterns your client has.  If you've got the occasional blogroll link it may be ok.  But, when you're auditing the links you'll soon see if this is a pattern.  If your site has a whack of blogroll links, especially if they are keyword anchored, then they are probably on Google's radar.  What I would do in my audit is mark this as "blogroll" and then, once I'm finished my audit I would decide whether blogroll links should be removed or not.  The exception to this would be if I know that my client has paid for blogroll links.  If that's the case then I would flag them for removal right away.

If you've got a pile of spammy links from your .co.uk site then removing the redirect is probably a good idea.

There is always middle ground when assessing links.

Good luck!

Marie

Something's not adding up here.  Did you have a warning in your webmaster tools about unnatural links?

Filing a reconsideration request is not something you do unless you've had a manual warning in your webmaster tools.

There is no point in filing a reconsideration request if you've been affected by Penguin as Penguin is an algorithmic change.  Once you've cleaned up your link profile, you can only recover from Penguin once there has been a Penguin refresh.

To answer the other part of your question though...if you had had an unnatural links manual warning and you filed a reconsideration request....no, Google does not tell you which links need to be removed.

+1 to everything that Robert said.  I wanted to add this info from John Muller at a Webmaster Central Hangout. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAQyHtRQxg and start watching at 23:30.

Someone asks John about a situation where a competitor is pointing thousands of spammy links at them a day.  John says that the algorithm is pretty good at ignoring those links but says that it may be a good idea to disavow them just in case.

One thing that I have found though is that a lot of people who think that they are under a negative SEO attack really just have a normal backlink profile.  Prior to Penguin, the average webmaster would not go through their links with the scrutiny that they utilize today.  You would be surprised of the kind of junk that is in the backlink profile of most sites, even if they have not done any link building!

Are you sure it is Penguin?  Penguin is usually about a spammy backlink profile and has very little to do with onsite quality.  If it truly is Penguin and you redirect to a new page then you'll just be redirecting the bad links to the new page and passing on the penalty.

Do you know what day your traffic dropped on?  There were Panda updates on either side of the Penguin update.  What you are describing could be a Panda issue.

If it's Panda you'd notice that there was probably a sitewide drop in traffic that started April 29th or 27th.  (Assuming it was near the time of Penguin that was April 25).

Penguin tends to affect one or more keywords as opposed to the whole site.  And those keywords are usually the ones that you have overoptimized (i.e. built up too many anchor texted links with the keywords and anchor.)

If this is Panda, then I don't see the point of making new URLs and redirecting to them.  Why not just change the current URLs?

And finally, in either case, if it's Penguin or Panda you won't recover until there is a Penguin or Panda refresh.

You'll get way more than 1000 links from WMT.  It says you get links from the top 1000 domains but it's usually quite a bit more.  I have had some spreadsheets from WMT that contain over 30,000 links.

John Mueller (Google employee) once said that WMT was all you needed in order to remove a penalty.  So, for over a year that's all I used.  However, in the last couple of months since Google has started to give examples of unnatural links when a site fails, many of those examples are not in WMT!  I think what John meant was that you could see the patterns in WMT such as articles, directories, etc. and then use those patterns to find additional links.  But, if you don't have a list of all of the links that you have made then that is not going to work for most people.

So, now, what I do is combine the links from WMT, ahrefs.com, majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer.  It's a pain.  I've written a script that combines them for me but it still takes me quite a while to put them together.

With that being said, I have removed penalties from some sites by just using the WMT links.  And then I've had other ones that Google has been really nitpicky on and has not removed the penalty until we addressed every single self made link.

Be careful about your anchor text and I really think you should be ok.  If you submitted to a pile of sites using keyword rich anchor text then you are likely to be penalized.  But if the majority of your links use your url or brand you should be ok.

Be careful with your brand though if it is something that could be interpreted as a keyword.  I've seen a couple of sites get hit by Penguin when they were targeting their brand as their brand was a competitive keyword.

In most cases, yes, you need to wait till the next refresh.  And even then, you've got to have the majority of your disavowed links recrawled before they are officially disavowed so you have to hope that most of your disavowed links are recrawled before Penguin refreshes.

We don't see a lot of sites recover from Penguin though.  The only ones that I have seen recover are truly high quality sites that have a good base of truly natural links once all of the bad ones are removed/disavowed.

What Google is trying to do with Penguin is to take away (or penalize) any benefit that a website would get from self building links with anchor text.

In the past, if I wanted to rank for "green widgets" I could build a bunch of links containing the anchor text "green widgets", such as "Check out this website about green widgets!"  This type of thing would really work well.  But, Google has now caught on that this is a blatant attempt to manipulate the search results.  They don't want you to rank #1 for green widgets just because you've got good SEO skills.  Rather, they want the site that best represents green widgets to rank #1 for that term.

Sites that are getting affected by Penguin are generally ones that have overdone it with their anchor text.  Now, no one knows exactly how much is too much (although you'll read lots of theories.)  But what we do know is that a natural backlink profile has the majority of their links being their url or their brand name.

The problem is that the brand name is sometimes a tricky thing.  If your website is www.greenwidgets.com you could say that your brand name is "green widgets", but to Google, building a bunch of links using the anchor text of "green widgets" may still be anchor text manipulation.  For an example, see this post on how WPMU got hit by Penguin for having a bunch of footer links pointing back to them using the anchor text "Wordpress mu".

So, if you're building links (as opposed to earning them totally naturally), be careful not to go overboard on a keyword.  Ideally, build links using your url as an anchor.  The odd one with a keyword is ok, but until we have more data on what exactly is acceptable I would be very careful in using keywords as your anchor.

I've only had a quick look, but here is my theory.

If you noticed a sharp drop in Google in October of 2013 then there's a good chance that the Penguin 2.1 update on October 4 affected the site.  I do certainly see links that the Penguin algorithm would look upon unfavorably.  For example:

http://www.westdigitalmarketing.com/blog/funding-solutions-uk-digital-strategy/

http://www.startupoverseas.com/news/invoice-finance-for-an-exporter--cash-flow-and-peace-of-mind.html

http://21stguru.com/index.php?s=A&c=39&p=141

But, as Penguin was only a Google thing, it wouldn't affect your rankings in Bing and Yahoo.  Those unnatural links were probably supporting your rankings in those search engines. So, when you removed bad backlinks in order to clean up for Google's sake, you removed links that were supporting you in Bing and Yahoo and thus those rankings dropped.

There could be other reasons too, but that's my theory.

Hey there...got your pm.  I can understand you not wanting to share your url in public.

Take a look at your site in open site explorer and click on "anchor text".  You'll see that your most common anchor text is your keyword, and it's definitely not a brand.  You've got 191 links using that keyword as anchor text.  Your next most common is your url and for that you've got 16 links.

That's definitely Penguin material unfortunately.

It may seem unfair, but the Google guidelines tell us not to make links for the purpose of increasing our position on the SERPS.  It is very unlikely that 191 links with anchor text appeared naturally.

Unfortunately you're going to need to get the majority of those links removed in order to recover and that's likely a tough process.

If you had had an unnatural links warning in your WMT you could try to remove as many as possible and then show Google your attempts to remove the others.  But, because Penguin is algorithmic, the only way to recover is to do some drastic work at getting the keyword anchors removed or possibly changed to your url.

I have found that about 10-15% of webmasters actually respond to my requests to remove links.  That's just not going to work for a site hit by Penguin.  If you can't get the majority of these links removed then you may need to start over with a new domain.

Hi,

"To clarify, our link profile is very clean, but naturally people used the keyword from the domain name and the domain name to link to us.

It really comes down to the question:
How will google penguin value anchor text to the old domain and will 301 to new domain increase the risk of a penguin penalty."

It's not the exact match anchor text that makes the Penguin algorithm affect a site.  If you have natural links and those links contain exact match anchor text then that's a good thing.

The reason why the percentage of exact match anchors is stated by many to be a risk factor for Penguin is because sites that have built spammy links generally, in the past, did so with exact match anchors.  For most sites that have not had manipulative backlinks made, the most common anchors will be variations of the url and brand name.  If you've been building your own links in the past though, the most common anchors are often keywords because that's what used to work.  So, many people assume that Google looks at the percentage of keywords as anchors when deciding whether Penguin is going to affect the site.  I don't believe that that's what happens though.

Penguin is way more sophisticated than that.  The goal of Penguin is to find self made links and devalue them.  The reason for this is that Google wants only links that are truly natural citations to count towards rankings.  For some sites, if there's the odd self made link then when Penguin rolls around they probably just lose the link equity they once had.  But, if there are LOTS of self made links detected then  this sends a signal to Google that your links cannot be trusted and your site will not be shown as highly in the SERPS.

So, if the links are natural then don't worry about it, even if they do contain a keyword as anchor.