GOOGLE PENALTIES- RECOVERY GUIDE, Upendra Rana [the read aloud family .TXT] 📗

where manual audits should be done. And even if these ones are not perfect either, they might take you closer to a correct link classification. Therefore, do not rely completely on automatic processes, even if it Google is running that process, as errors in the system can occur any time.

 

 

The Disavow Tool Does not Work on Negative SEO!

 

 

 

 

 

Negative SEO attacks can come in many shapes and ways. Black hatters had to up their game, resorting to all kind of elaborated SEO attacks towards small or large sites. Negative SEO can get companies penalized or entirely banned from Google. It can affect share price. It can even put companies out of business.

 

Yet, even in this case, the Disavow tool is highly useful. And we are not the only one saying that but our clients who were victims of negative SEO attacks. The big digital marketing agency, Jellyfish, experienced an aggressive form of a negative SEO attack and have a great recovery story all exposed on a previous post. Nevertheless, their recovery story implies the use of the Disavow Tool. As Jonathan Verrall, Senior SEO Manager at Jellyfish mentions, contacting individual webmasters, as you can probably imagine, is very time consuming when there are thousands of links, hence the usefulness of the Disavow tool.

 

Therefore, the Disavow Tool works even on the undesirable case of a negative SEO attack.

 

 

 

4.5. The Reconsideration Request

 

 

Step in Google’s shoes and think on what’s the best you can do to convince them you turned the corner, you fixed the problems and

 

“promised” it won’t happen again. Clear, compelling evidence is needed and here is where the documentation comes in place.

When checking the situation, what the big G wants to see is that the issue is fixed and that this violation won’t be happening again.

 

 

So, how can you convince the search engine that this is the situation, indeed? After removing the unnatural links you should do a well-documented reconsideration request. Ever heard the saying “A sin confessed is half forgiven”? Surely Google has. In the request you are sending you don’t have to speak only about the improved current situation and about how you are going do things from now on. You have to give details about the “dirty job” that you’ve done and how you got rid of it. When filing your request, here are some key points to consider Be very specific and give details on:

 

The current SEO state of your site.

 

What happened?

 

Who created those links?

 

What actions did you take to recover?

 

Confess everything you’ve been doing.

 

Accept responsibility.

 

Explain why it won’t happen again.

 

 

Include as much concrete and actionable information as possible. It’s great that you’ve stopped the violation of the guidelines, but what’s really needed is a clear and compelling case that you’ve actually stopped and it won’t happen again. As hard as it might be on the moment, the “mea culpa” attitude needs to be included in the reconsideration. It will pay off on the long-term.

 

 

5.Successful Penalty Recovery Stories

 

 

All the case studies presented below are TRUE, SUCCESSFUL & UNREQUESTED stories from our customers. They are not paid posts and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the authors.

 

They are the successful recovery stories from our clients, written and documented by themselves.

 

 

 

We were approached by a company in 2014 whose website had been issued with a Partial Google Penalty for unnatural inbound links. This post details the precise steps we took to resolve the penalty and everything we learnt along the way. The client wishes to remain anonymous so all references to them have been removed.

 

The Unnatural InBound Link Warning from Google Webmaster Tools

 

 

The chances are that you’re already familiar with the following message in Google Webmaster Tools. It means your SEO and Marketing efforts are going to be sidetracked for a while:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First thing was to establish if this penalty was genuine or as a result of a Negative SEO attack. This didn’t take long as it was clear that the company had already been hit by a Penguin Algorithmic Penalty in 2012 which decimated their Organic traffic.

 

 

 

They never recovered from the algorithmic penalty, and had moved away from SEO into Social, Affiliate and Paid Advertising. They had started to re-invest in SEO a couple of months earlier, and after their ex-digital agency built a handful of poor backlinks, they’d been given this partial manual penalty.

 

First Step – Mining the Links

 

 

As the penalty was justified based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, the next step was to either remove or disavow any toxic, followed, inbound links before filing a reconsideration request.

 

We collected as many links as we could from Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, cognitiveSEO and other link data providers.

 

These link lists refresh quite regularly, so it’s important to continually revisit these sources to get the latest list.

 

At the start, we thought we could automate it all ourselves. We tried to crawl all links to check if the pages were either still active, and still had followed inbound links pointing to the client website. This gave us our ever-growing list of every single active, followed link.

 

Next was to separate out the unnatural links. But it was slow and painful to manage this ever changing list of links.

 

 

We could exclude our obviously best links using a number of basic tactics – e.g. public sector domains, PageRank or looking at the number of inbound links a site has.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s dig a bit and see what we can find about the site. Checking the link velocity of the site we can easily see that the site existed for quite some time and its monthly link velocity is somewhat natural. There were a few spikes in the past but the site’s overall link history looks ok.

 

 

 

 

 

Yet we are not dealing only with an “old” site, but also with a site that has a stable ranking in terms of SEO visibility. As it can be seen on the screenshot below, taken from 2 SEO Visibility providers we see that both of them report the approximate same trend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

At first sight we see no dramatic ups and downs, no signs of previous penalties or obvious linking schemes. On the contrary, we observed a healthy link profile that contains a lot of links from Topically Relevant sites pointing back to the analyzed site. This means that sites in the same topical category, “Health”, are linking back to the site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet, are these elements enough for Pharmacy2u to rank first for such controversial and highly spammed queries? Let’s do a more in-depth analysis to see what we are really dealing with. We should start with an Unnatural Link Analysis and see how the site stands up.

 

 

 

At a closer look, we see that the first appearance deceives many and things are not always what they seem. The unnatural – natural link ratio is not quite Google friendly. From our internal research, sites that have over 25% unnatural + suspect links are likely to be already penalized (or will be if they weren’t already). Yet, this is a very competitive niche and the rules might apply differently here.

 

As we can see in the screenshots, it is not very hard to identify the strategy Pharmacy2U has been using in the pursuit of higher ranks. We are dealing with an alarming number of links coming from Webdirectories, link networks or forums.

Google explicitly mentions that these kind of strategies may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s

 

Webmaster Guidelines.

 

 

 

For all that, the same Google gave Pharmacy2U a helping hand and helped it climb to position no.1. Most unnatural linked pages are directed to the main page, sign that in the past they may have tried some heavy linking campaigns.

 

Yet, if we take a look at the most common unnatural anchor text, we see that the number 1 on “buy viagra” doesn’t have a commercial anchor text heavy linking strategy. Mostly, they are using brand anchor text and this might be one of the reasons they’ve entered into Google’s good graces. Because of this fact, they probably did not trigger a red flag on the Google screen.

 

There are lots of forum links, blog links, Webdirectory links and also some blog comments and guest posts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet, let’s see some examples of one of their highly used (or abused) strategy, link dropping. Below, there are some screenshots taken from two random Pharmacy2U links, one is a blog comment and the other is an author signature. What do the two of them have in common? They are both sprinkled with overflowing unnatural flavor. It’s true that this strategy may be just a thing of the past and the blog comments and guest posting might not be in a huge number but still, it’s hard to believe that the omniscient Google might have missed this issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, how can a site with such a “going-to-be-penalized” profile can possibly rank at no.1?

 

 

 

We are doing reverse engineering here so we cannot certainly put our finger on anything, but we assume that this may have happened for two reasons:

 

First, Google might be applying the “of all the evils we choose the least bad” principle. Meaning that this particular niche is a highly spammed one and you can hardly find any site that would closely respect the guidelines.

 

As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, https://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/ was the only site from Google’s first page results that wasn’t a parasite host or a redirect, 2 months ago. Not much to choose from. In this case, the big G may have chosen to boost not the site with a flawless profile (as it didn’t find any), but the one which is somewhat close to its guidelines.

 

Second, this niche is a special one from so many points of view and therefore Google might not have detected this website as having an unnatural link profile, although in other niches, similar ratios of unnatural links would penalize a site.

 

Third, this site might be affected by a negative SEO attack. It is possible but not that probable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIII. Final Thoughts

 

 

It goes without saying that Google is trying to win a long term battle against those who seek to manipulate the search results for their own ends. However, with so many controversies and with so many sites that claim to have followed closely Google's guidelines and still got penalized, we tend to raise our eyebrows and wonder what is really going on.

 

Google's algorithm takes into consideration over 200 signals in order to

 

“arrange” the sites on the results list. The ranking factors are not, maybe justly, provided to the webmasters so a page owner can only deduce which signals influence its site rankings. However, it is well known that links are really a big deal for Google. If they hadn’t been, Google’s web spam team wouldn't have spent so much time in developing algorithms like Panda or Penguin, whose purpose is to identify shady link building strategies. Aside links, Google also puts a big focus on mentions. And that is understandable as websites aren't just static storefronts but dynamic spaces of interaction with the audience. A mention is like a vote of confidence that gives authority and trustworthiness.

 

It seems that Google is dead set on providing visitors with pages that have the most relevant content for their search and the trend of creating quality content in order to be more relevant to your target audience seems to become more of a need than a game played only by the cool kids. More and more SEO professionals are boarding this train and it’s no longer to be believed hype and a way to reinvent the so-called “dead SEO”.

 

If, in the past, our traditional ways of building links meant to meaninglessly spread out all over the internet, without thinking of relevance and essence, through the help of web directories, blogrolls, keyword stuffing and others, now we need to think of our target audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like in any business in the world, in the SEO world there has always been a competition for visibility. The archaic order of things was to aim