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Hi,

The penalty was automated. I have never gotten any manual penalties for the site.

Thanks for taking a look at my site. I have disavowed anything noted at toxic on the semrush scale above 50. I did this over three occasions in the last 6 months. If there is still anything showing up in site explorer its probably already been disavowed. I will take a look again.

And, yes, you are right. I have to double down on link building. I probably need to outpace my competitors but they are getting links from legit news outlets nowadays.

The market is decent actually, the big headlines say otherwise but there are buyers at every price point for luxury real estate. The problem is getting them from the site as opposed to word of mouth. This is why I am here

I have started doing best services for specific neighborhoods as a kind of guide for new residents of an area. In these posts I pre-emptively link out to businesses which are not ranked on the first page but have decent reviews on Yelp. So far no link backs, but it's a numbers game. I think I might be on to something but only time will tell.

Thanks. The killer content idea is a tough sell. Our competitors are blogging machines or 6 foot blondes on the international news circuit =(

I will keep trying to find a great resource and share it like crazy. But until then, I guess it's incremental gains here and there.

encouraging idea. I have been trying to do some guest posts lately. This will put the fire in the rear

Yeah, I kept the title tags pretty much the same (even though I'd like to improve those as well.) Thanks for the encouragement. I am going for it!

Thanks very much for your explanation.

I have gone ahead and temporarily blocked the pages in GSC.

I am working on the robot.txt and see there are no instructions for the crawlers to skip over these urls in question.

I understand that I should use the "*" operator to alert all crawlers to disallow the pages in this format:

user-agent: *

Disallow: /?spam string

Finally, I will send the suggested edit to Google and see where that gets me. Honestly, at this point, they cannot possibly be penalized the site any worse so anything working towards cleaning up the index for the site will be a step in the right direction.

The site in question was hacked years ago. All the security scans come up clean but the seo crawlers like semrush and ahrefs still show it as an indexed page. I can even click through on it and it takes me to the homepage with no 301. Where is the page and how to deindex it?

domain/com/?spam

There are multiple instances of this.

http://www.clipular.com/c/5579083284217856.png?k=Q173VG9pkRrxBl0b5prNqIozPZI

The site in question was hacked years ago. All the security scans come up clean but the seo crawlers like semrush and ahrefs still show it as an indexed page. I can even click through on it and it takes me to the homepage with no 301. Where is the page and how to deindex it?

domain/com/?spam

There are multiple instances of this.

http://www.clipular.com/c/5579083284217856.png?k=Q173VG9pkRrxBl0b5prNqIozPZI

Thanks very much for your explanation.

I have gone ahead and temporarily blocked the pages in GSC.

I am working on the robot.txt and see there are no instructions for the crawlers to skip over these urls in question.

I understand that I should use the "*" operator to alert all crawlers to disallow the pages in this format:

user-agent: *

Disallow: /?spam string

Finally, I will send the suggested edit to Google and see where that gets me. Honestly, at this point, they cannot possibly be penalized the site any worse so anything working towards cleaning up the index for the site will be a step in the right direction.