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Do you know if there is a manual action against the site?  If so, in some cases, you can show Google evidence that you are the new owner and they will lift the action.  If they don't lift the action then you have to go through the full process of cleaning up the backlink profile (trying to remove as many bad links as possible and then disavowing the remaining unnatural links) and then filing for reconsideration.  This is usually what happens.

If there is no manual action on the site then disavowing the bad links will probably do the trick.  The problem is that there are so many unknowns surrounding the disavow tool.

If this is a site that is going to be important to you, and if the domain currently has an unnatural links problem then I wouldn't risk trying to clean it up.  I'd probably buy a different domain name.

With all of that being said, are the links to the site actually bad ones?  If they are primarily self made, low quality links then everything I said above still applies.  If it's just that the links are not relevant to your content then I wouldn't worry about that and I'd just go ahead and create my new site.

I have a theory that the cache date on a page does not always represent the date that all of the links on the page were crawled.  Google has said repeatedly that it can sometimes take 6 months to a year for the disavow file to fully take effect.  In other words, if you have disavowed a particular link, it could take a year for Google to revisit that link and apply the invisible nofollow.  BUT, I have never seen a page with a cache date that was 6-12 months ago.

It's possible that the cache just shows the on page information but that the data that Google gets and uses to update the link graph could take longer.  This could explain why we often see "new" links in WMT that were actually made months or years ago.

In response to Wiqas, who wanted to see an example of a Penguin recovery, they can happen.  Below is the non-branded Google organic traffic for a site for which we did a thorough audit, removal and disavow project.  It is important to note though that this site had a really good base of natural links and continues to truly attract natural links.  If that is not present then recovery is unlikely to happen.

penguin-recovery-brand-excluded-organic.png

If you remove these pages so that they serve a 404 or 410 error then it will essentially remove the links and Google will pay no attention to them.  More info: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296653/Removing-Unnatural-Links-by-Removing-Pages-on-Your-Website

You could definitely disavow these links and it would not harm your site to do so.  Do it at the domain level, not the url.  With that being said, if all of the links point at pages that are now removed then there's no need to do so.

Google is usually pretty good at understanding what is going on.  This type of link really shouldn't cause you harm.  With that being said, I would run the site through sucuri.net to look for malware as often hacked sites will be hosting malware.  If Google determines that there is malware on the site then it will try not to send users your way and you'll get a malware warning in WMT.

I would say that your site goes against the Google guidelines in regards to thin content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en

Part of the description of thin content includes "automatically generated content" and "copied content".

Have you checked your Webmaster Tools console to see if you have been given a thin content penalty?  Check Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.  If there isn't one though, then Panda is probably still the culprit.

If these issues caused your site to be looked unfavorably upon by the Panda algorithm, then you may see improvements within a month.  Google refreshes Panda approximately monthly and each time it refreshes it takes up to 10 days to fully roll out.  They no longer announce the refresh dates.

With that being said, sometimes a site needs to go through a couple of Panda refreshes in order to see an improvement.

I can't tell from your posts whether you are just trying to remove black hat work from a site or whether you're actually engaging in black hat methods. I'm going to say some harsh stuff.  I would say that if you have to ask these questions then you really should not be going down either road unless you are working on sites that you can afford to lose permanently.  Also, in some cases if you get caught doing black hat stuff Google can take action on ALL of your sites.

I know a number of people who are really good at black hat methods.  And a good number of these guys who have been gaming Google for years can either no longer do it or are finding that it is getting harder and harder.

I work with a lot of penalized sites and there are many different kinds of penalties.  For some you get manual notification of the penalty in WMT (not a warning...just a notice that it's been penalized).  For others there is no notification at all but the algorithms just stop trusting your site.  While recovery can be possible, a good number of the sites that I consult over are completely toast because of past SEO efforts.

If you are trying to clean up a site that has been damaged by former SEO work and you are asking the questions that you have asked above, then you probably need a lot of help.  I'd make it really clear to your boss that you are not experienced in penalty cleanup but that you're doing your best and to set expectations low.

You probably already know this, but still, I felt I should comment.

The type of SEO that this individual was doing previously used to work surprisingly well before the age of Penguin.  Sadly, many people who did this would call themselves "white hat".  The thinking I suppose is that "black hat" stuff was using SEO tactics that were illegal or immoral such as hacking in to sites to place links.  There is no official definition of what is white hat and what isn't, but what he is doing is definitely against the quality guidelines.  Then again, I would say that prior to Penguin, the vast majority of SEOs were doing things that were against the quality guidelines and even now, most of them are trying to see what they can get away with.

In regards to negative SEO, Google is really good at figuring out when a site is being blasted by negative SEO and just discounting those links.  However, I do believe that it is possible to do harm to a site via negative SEO if the site's backlink profile is already unnatural.  Unfortunately, if you've been having links created via articles and other self made links then you could already be at risk for damage the next time that Penguin refreshes.  And, if Google manually reviews your site (which could happen if the disgruntled SEO files a spam report on you) then you could get a manual penalty.

What I would do if I were in your shoes is look at all of your backlinks and identify which ones were created by this team.  Any link that was made for SEO purposes and not naturally earned is unnatural.  Put each of these in a disavow file and disavow them on the domain level.  I'd also keep an eye on new links that Google picks up each month and add new unnatural links to your disavow file.  If he's threatening to do this soon to you then you may want to keep an eye on things weekly.

No worries.  I haven't labeled you as a blackhat.  In fact, my apologies, but I didn't remember that I had answered a question for you previously.

So, your questions are mostly ones that can't be answered in a general sense.  They'd require someone to know the intimate details of your penalty/algorithm demotion/technical on site issues/etc etc etc.  There's no black and white answer to any of these questions.

Google doesn't often just completely deindex a site.  Most penalties cause ranking demotions.  If you get affected by an algorithm (ie Penguin for unnatural links) then your site won't rank well until the links are cleaned up AND Penguin refreshes again.  But for algorithms your site won't get deindexed.

Google does not give warnings to say that you are going to be hit soon.

Google says that any site can recover from a penalty or algorithm change provided you fix the issues.  But you've got to have good stuff there in order to recover.  In other words, if you got a penalty or an algorithmic demotion because of unnatural links and once you've removed those links there are no natural ones there then don't expect recovery.

I've written some articles on Moz that probably answer your questions:

http://moz.com/blog/google-algorithm-cheat-sheet-panda-penguin-hummingbird

http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase

http://moz.com/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

If you're able to share your url we can have a look and probably see what the problem is.

Do you accept guest posts?  Google cracked down on guest posting as a means for getting (and giving) links recently.  Most of the sites that I have seen with outbound unnatural links penalties got them because they published guest posts.  If this is the case, nofollow your links going from guest posts and apply for reconsideration and you should get the warning lifted.

In my experience, pure spam penalties are either super easy to clear or darn near impossible.

The easy ones are ones where someone buys a new domain and doesn't realize that the previous owner of the site had used it for spam.  If this is the case then you can file for reconsideration, tell Google you are a new owner and they usually lift the penalty.

But, if this isn't the case, then I'd be concerned.

I've seen other internet marketing companies get pure spam penalties on their sites when Google feels that they are breaking the quality guidelines in several ways.  In my opinion it's like Google saying, "We don't want this site in our search engine results so we're going to call you pure spam and remove you from the index."  Usually pure spam is a mixture of bad backlinks, on site content that is not good for users and other things.  Your backlink profile looks very unnatural.  Every link I am seeing is anchored with a keyword like "atlanta web design" and "atlanta marketing". But, a pure spam penalty usually goes beyond the backlink profile.  I didn't spend a lot of time looking at your site but I've seen SEO companies get pure spam penalties when they are using techniques that are against the quality guidelines for their clients.  Or, in other cases, if the website is describing how to manipulate Google then this can invite a pure spam penalty.

If you made the keyword anchored links then part of your recovery would involve removing as many as possible and disavowing the rest.  If you feel that they are negative SEO, then you still need to clean up what you can.  Google's generally good at not letting negative SEO happen, but if you feel that you are 100% innocent and did not build these links then explain what you can when you file for reconsideration.  Google is always interested in hearing about possible negative SEO.

Only you know what kind of techniques you are offering to your clients.  If the methods that you use for ranking go outside of the quality guidelines then I am guessing that you will not get rid of the pure spam penalty without a complete change of your business practices.  (I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case, but I do know that Google doesn't treat pure spam penalties lightly.)

Is the penalty related to the hacking of the other sites?  From what you have described I would guess no.

Thanks for the kind words.  

If you are certain that you have removed all of your guest posting links, then what you need to do is to convince Google that this site has a real purpose other than just to host guest posts.  This is going to sound a little harsh, but when I look at the site it kind of looks like it is an article directory.

You still have a "write for us" page that says you accept guest posts.  I'd remove that.

Can I ask what the main purpose is for your site?  Do you make money through Adsense?  Or was your primary revenue source from selling links? Do you sell a product from the site? If you get your penalty removed, what are your hopes for this site?

I think that in order to get the penalty lifted you need to convince Google that this site has a purpose other than to host guest posts.

Thanks Patrick.  

If you got a partial action warning when you redirected site A to site B, then there are a couple of possible reasons why:

1. If Site A has a lot of unnatural links pointing to it then those suddenly are pointing at Site B.

2. It's also possible that the unnatural links pointing to Site A were part of the problem but that it uncovered a problem with unnatural links to Site A.

If you know that Site A has had no manipulative link building done, then a quick solution would be to remove the redirect from Site B to Site A and file for reconsideration.  However, if Site A has unnatural links as well then Google won't remove the warning unless you clean up those links as well.

If removing the redirect is not an option then there are a few things you can do:

-Do a link audit of all of the links pointing to Site A AND site b, attempt to manually remove as many links as you can, document your efforts, disavow the remaining unnatural links and then apply for reconsideration.  The process of filing for reconsideration is extensive.

-There are also ways that you can redirect Site A to Site B and NOT pass any of the link equity.  You can do so by redirecting via an intermediate page that is blocked by robots.txt.  This is a complicated thing to do, but it can be done.  This would remove the link equity from ALL links that pointed to Site B so that they don't pass to Site A.  This includes removing the link equity from any good links that were there.

However, my guess is that if you got a warning for Site A that Site A may also have unnatural links, so you may have quite a job on your hands in cleaning this up.

With all of that being said, there is some debate as to whether you need to heed partial match warnings.  In some cases Google says you can ignore the warning because Google is simply not counting the unnatural links.  But, in every case that I have examined where a site got this warning, within a few weeks their rankings started to drop.  In my opinion, these warnings should always be cleared.

There has been a lot of turbulence over the last month. One thing that I've noticed on a couple of sites is that they will drop dramatically for a few days to a week and then suddenly pop back up again. It's terrifying when it happens, but the good news is they usually pop up again higher than they were before.

If you haven't made any significant changes on this site I'd ride it out for a few more days before hitting the panic button.

I can't see this causing you problems.  I've commonly noindexed huge numbers of pages, mostly for sites with Panda issues, and in several cases we've seen great increases in traffic with a future Panda refresh.

Weird.

I would think that if most times when Google visits this page they get a 404 error they would eventually drop it from the index.

Hopefully the DMCA will be successful.

In the meantime, have you tried rewriting the content on your home page? It may be that Google thinks your page is a canonical of the old-farmshow site and is treating it as an inferior site.

Usually Google is pretty good at figuring out what your brand name is, but your page only contains the phrase "LIC Dental Associates" in the title tag and then in the footer. I'd suggest adding a paragraph of content at the top of the page that has an H1 tag saying, "LIC Dental Associates" and then a paragraph that explains concisely what you offer. Be sure to put a few keywords in that paragraph, but don't keyword stuff it. Also mention the brand once or twice in the copy of the page as well.

I'd also change up the wording on the rest of the page significantly so that Google doesn't think it's a duplicate of the fake one.

Once you've done that, then I'd fetch and render using Google Search Console and submit the page to the index. I'm betting that will do the trick.

My answer to this question would depend on how well this content is being digested by visitors to your site. My concern wouldn't be so much with duplicate content but rather, with the potential for thin content.

Let's say that 5% of these pages are received well and 95% of this is content that is almost never engaged with. Then, I'd want to be doing something to get some of this content out of Google's index. But, let's say that almost all of these pages were getting Google visits. If that were the case then I'd keep them just as they are.

I wouldn't add text to these just to try to make them look like they're not duplicate content. That's not likely to add value to users. One possible solution that could work is to group these into categories if possible and instead of indexing, say, 10 individual pages, you could have 10 before and after photos on one page. If you do this, be sure to redirect the old urls to their new category page.

There are other solutions as well such as noindexing the pages that rarely get Google traffic or hiding them behind a robots block. But to me the answers would really depend on how much Google traffic they are currently getting.

If the site goes live again, take screenshots. It looks like the site is hosted by Continuum Data Centers. (http://www.whoishostingthis.com/?q=old-farmshow.net). You could contact them with the screenshots and an explanation as to what is going on and they may remove the site.

If that doesn't work, I'd probably get an attorney involved.

Good luck!

Great question!  I'm interested in see the results.

Here's what I have been doing:

-promoting on facebook

-making it really easy for others to promote (i.e. Addthis...making catchy titles that if someone saw it on facebook they'd want to click it and share it themselves.)

-contacting local news outlets

-dropping blog comments to people who are blogging about this kind of thing

And here's an important one:

-Making it super visible on my site.  I just created a link baiting calculator that my users would be interested in using and sharing with others.  I run an informational Q&A type of site.  When users see one of my answers, at the bottom of each answer it says, "Hey, check out our ____ calculator!".  I couldn't believe how many readers are clicking on it since I did that (and are sharing it on FB).

When sites get in trouble for having spammy links it's never because of one or two links. It's always because of a widespread pattern of self-made links that were made with intention to manipulate Google.

When I'm looking at link quality I really don't care what the DA is. I've seen good links from low DA sites and I've seen super spammy links from high DA sites.

I hear what you're saying though...We keep saying that a link is a good link if it's one that has a purpose outside of SEO. And sure, in many cases that is true. For example, when I did the Whiteboard Friday that Andy linked to above (thanks Andy!), that post linked back to my website. That link brings me traffic and has made me some money. It's a great link for reasons that go beyond SEO. But, there are also times where I get links that probably don't have a lot of value outside of SEO and still help me.

For example, for some of my clients we do a lot of HARO responses. If a dentist client of mine takes part in an interview about teeth whitening and he gets quoted along with a link, I suppose there is some value outside of SEO such as branding and good PR, but really...that interview wouldn't have happened if there was no link involved. I'm ok with that though.

So now that Penguin is simply devaluing spammy links rather than penalizing sites, when do I disavow?

1. If a site has a crazy pattern of ultra spammy links I'll disavow.

2. If there is negative SEO, I'm usually not worried but it doesn't hurt to disavow.

3. If a site has a manual penalty (as seen in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic -> Manual Actions) I'll try to remove unnatural links and then I'll disavow.

I'm not going to disavow the odd potentially unnatural link though.