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I have a couple sites that have these, and I have done a lot of work to get them removed, but there seems to be very little if any benefit from doing this.  In fact, sites were we have done nothing after these penalties seem to be doing better than ones where we have done link removal and the reconsideration request.

Google says "I_f you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you’re able to get the artificial links removed, submit a reconsideration request__. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action._"

I would guess a lot of people with this penalty don't even know they have it, and it sounds like leaving it alone really doesn't hurt your site.

If seems to me that just simply ignoring this and building better links and higher quality content should help improve your site rankings vs. worrying about trying to get all these links removed/disavowed.

What are your thoughts?  Is it worth trying to get this manual action removed?

I have not heard of that until today.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-spammy-structured-markup-notifications-18061.html

Looks like it is brand new.

I have been doing exactly what you have.  Rmoov, link detox reports, manual review etc.

I think the link detox boost was 12 credits.. or around $300.

You have to decide if that is wroth it for you or your clients.  For me, after this experience, I wouldn't use it again.

How would you force google to recrawl them?

Those of you that have algorithmic penalties, how long after making changes did you actually see an improvement, or have you ever?

I have several sites that tanked after Penguin 2.1 and after doing Link Removal, Diasvaow files and building newer more quality links and adding content, I am STILL not seeing any change in rankings after several months.

I have heard from some people it can take up to 6-months for google to even crawl a disavow file.  I have also heard no matter what you do it won't matter until Google does another update.

I feel like we have made a lot of changes in the right direction, but I don't want to go overboard if nothing is going to matter until another Google Update is done.

What are your experiences?

Looking at your page, i am not seeing an H1 or H2 tag.  I would consider adding those in with your keyword.  Something like "Doll Houses and Accessories"

I would also get rid of so many outbound links in the text at the bottom and try and move that text higher on the page.  It looks like it is only there for search engines, so move it up and make it useful to your customer.

Also, your title tag needs some work.

Instead of "Dolls Houses 12th Scale Dolls and Accessories | Hobbies"

Try only" Doll Houses and Accessories, 12th Scale Doll Houses | Hobbies" -- note i didn't check the length here.

Hope that helps.

So I am working on a website, and it has been doing seo with keyword links for a a few years.

The first branded terms comes in a 7% in 10th in the list on Ahefs.

The keyword terms are upwards of 14%.

What is the best way to get this back in line?  It would take several months to build keyword branded terms to make any difference - but it is doable.

I could try link removal, but less than 10% seem to actually get removed -- which won't make a difference.

The disavow file doesn't really seem to do anything either.

What are your suggestions?

So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out.  One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant.  None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues.  Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better.

So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts.

What do you guys think?

I haven't been able to get a definite answer on this question.

My recommendation would be to try some Primary | Brand  some Primary | Secondary | Brand and some descriptive using the keyword.

Measure how they perform.

I will say I emailed Rand not that long ago and he said Primary | Secondary | Brand is

"Not a bad way to go generally, just make sure you're also writing in such a way that's appealing to earn the click in the SERPs"

Nobody knows.  I have heard some different theory's involving the "fetch as google bot" tools.

That is a question I am sure many of your have been asking since they launched the product several weeks ago.

Cemper claims they helped get a penalty removed in 3 days by using this product.  Sounds great doesn't it?  Maybe even sounds too good to be true.  Well, here is my experience with it.

We have been working to get a site's rankings back up for several months now.  While it has no penalty, it clearly got hit by the algo change.  So we have been very busy creating new content and attempting to remove as much "keyword rich" links as possible.

This really hasn't been working very well at all, so when I heard about link detox boost I thought this was the answer to our prayers.  The basic idea is link detox boost forces google to crawl your bad links so it know you no longer have links from those sites or have disavowed them.

So we ran it and it was NOT cheap.  Roughly $300.  Now, 3 weeks after running it, the report only shows it has actually crawled 25% of our links, but they assure us it is a reporting issue and the full process has ran its course.

The results.  No change at all.  Some of our rankings are worse, some are better, but nothing worth mentioning.

Many products from Link Research Tools are very good, but i'm afraid this isn't one of them.

Anyone else use this product?  What were your results?

Now that Hummingbird is really looking at longer-tail searches and almost a Q&A style search, should the way we do our title tags change?

Moz still recommends:

Optimal Format

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

But is this really right anymore after Hummingbird? Should we be more of a Q&A type title tag, while still using our Primary Keyword?

For example:  If I am targeting Red Nike Shoes, should my title tag be:

Red Nike Shoes, Nike Shoes | Shoes.com

or now:

We carry the latest Red Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or

Find Red Nike Shoes on sale at shoes.com

What are your thoughts?

Seems like our Google rankings are improving on most sites, but BING took a big hit this month for many of the sites we working on.  I have never seen them drop like this before.  Anyone else seeing the same thing?

I am wondering if it is because we are building a lot of brand links vs. keyword links and Bing still wants to see the keyword links.

What have you seen?

I guess that could make sense.  Google has really done a poor job with all these penalties and not telling webmasters what is going on.

A check of the rankings on this site do not look any better than the month before.  They are still much worse than they used to be.

I am not sure if I can.  When I click on reconsideration request it takes me to the manual spam action page, and then says no action taken.

Oh they suck.   But they have been getting better every week since, just not back to where they were.

One of my sites I work with got this message:

http://www.mysite: Unnatural inbound linksJune 27, 2013

Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to mysite.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

But, when I got to manual actions it says:

Manual Actions

No manual webspam actions found.

-- So which is it??? I have been doing link removal, but now I am confused if I need to do a reconsideration request or not.

I think you would have to turn flash off to see it on a desktop.

But yes, my recommendation is the dump the flash version, keep the HTML version and restructure the URLS.  Only then does it make sense to start SEO. (thought you could argue that is SEO)

I thought it was a full flash site also until I pulled it up on my IPAD.  There is a full html version there.

http://www.sweetlight-studio.com/

So I am looking at a site for a client, and I think I already have my answer, but wanted to check with you guys.

First off the site is in FLASH and HTML.  I told the client to dump the flash site, but she isn't willing right now.

So the URLS are generated like this.

Flash:

http://www.mysite.com/#/page/7ca2/wedding-pricing/

HTML:

http://www.mysite.com/?/page/7ca2/wedding-pricing/

checking the site in Google with a site:mysite, none of the interior pages are indexed at all.

So that is telling me that Google is pretty much ignoring everything past the # or ?.

Is that correct?

My recommendation is to dump the flash site and redo the URLS in a SEo friendly format.