SEO Tycoon

**jim25** · 05-17-2012, 09:35 AM

Hi

Has anyone recovered or read about anyone actually recovering from the unnatural backlink penalty.

I have read guide after guide about how to go about it. But I haven't actually read anyone who has suceeded.

**chrishirst** · 10:59 AM

Quote:

unnatural backlink penalty.

It is not a penalty, it is simply your "most valuable backlinks" have now been given their true value and any "boost" you were getting is now gone.

If you care to read ANY of my posts here, that have been about links, in the past SEVEN YEARS you will now realise that what I have been saying about links all this time is now becoming obvious to the masses.

How to recover? start linking to and from your pages for the RIGHT REASONS.

http://webmaster-talk.eu/en/articles...ng-good-or-bad
http://webmaster-talk.eu/en/articles...secret-life-of

**jim25** · 05-17-2012, 11:15 AM

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your input, I know panda and penguin are algo updates, however we did a recon to Google before penguin, we got a messsage back saying the site violates the guidelines, we see unnatural backlinks, remove them and resubmit(short version).

We set about removing as many as possible, the penguin rolled out 1 day before we resubmitted. In the text from G about penguin it states it is designed to lower the ranking for sites that were in violation.

The site now recieves 0 traffic from Google, and it has been 22 days since we submitted our documneted efforts.

My fear is there is no getting back, I haven't seen 1 example so far of a site recovering from the backlink/penguin penalty. We have managed to remove over 1000 links.

**chrishirst** · 05-17-2012, 11:22 AM

Quote:

I haven't seen 1 example so far of a site recovering from the backlink/penguin penalty.

It's going to take longer than a few weeks for "recovery examples" to start appearing.

And of course link building for the right reasons will take a lot longer. Basically, you may as well get used to the zero search referrals, because it is probably going to be like that for some time to come.

**jim25** · 05-17-2012, 11:37 AM

Hopefully ours will be the first to appear, I will update the thread if there is a change.

**SEOGlen** · 05-18-2012, 03:40 AM

Nah. I haven't heard of any website that has been brought back to life after being penalized by the Big G. However, some sites are being asked by Google to fix this and that to be able to match the t/c of search engines.

**chrishirst** · 05-18-2012, 04:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SEOGlen

Nah. I haven't heard of any website that has been brought back to life after being penalized by the Big G. However, some sites are being asked by Google to fix this and that to be able to match the t/c of search engines.

Then of course there are companies (like the one in your signature) offering all the "valuable services"

services.png

that got most of the affected sites/pages into the mess in the first place!!!

**jim25** · 05-18-2012, 07:52 AM

Just checked my WMT account, message from Google reads as expected. We still see unnatural backlinks.

This is a major blow to us, and we are feeling pretty dejected. 1 idea I have had would be to rename all the pages that have bad links, then just focus on the homepage.

Do you think this would be a good idea. The only other problem is if we ever do get out of this penalty where will the site be in the serps.

**chrishirst** · 08:15 AM

Quote:

then just focus on the homepage.

Wrong thing, ALL pages should be getting links. All links pointing to the root URL are a definite give away for what are NOT natural links. Only the clueless SEOs & marketers think that a "site" consists of a single URL.

**jim25** · 05-18-2012, 08:16 AM

Hi Chris

When I say focus on homepage, I mean focus on removing links from homepage. But now you say it presenting G with a reconsideration request of a site that only has links to the homepage would look pretty unnatural.

What would you do?

**qwerty** · 05-18-2012, 09:01 AM

Took me 6 months to recover from a potential sting by Google, but I'm happy to say were back to an even better serp! I left the site in question untouched for that period of time. I didnt remove IBL's or OBL's, zero optomisation and zero changes.

I may have been lucky, I don't know, but that's my experience told.

**jim25** · 05-18-2012, 09:07 AM

Thats nice to hear, but was it a confirmed penalty. Did you submit reconsideration requests.

**qwerty** · 05-18-2012, 09:18 AM

No it was not a confirmed penalty, sorry for not being specific.

**chrishirst** · 05-18-2012, 09:25 AM

Quote:

I mean focus on removing links from homepage

?? It's not the links ON YOUR pages, it is an obvious footprint appearing for links pointing TO your root url. Forum signatures, "bookmarking sites", article dumping sites, blog "comments" and the like all pointing to the root is in no way shape or form "natural"

One thing that you HAVE to remember is that search enginges do not index and list "pages" or "sites". They index and list unique URLs, so looking for unnatural patterns is really not that difficult. It's simply statistical analysis.

A website that hasn't been infected by a SEO "expert" will have all kinds of links to all kinds of document URLs on the site, with smallish spike and a significanti "long tail" curve

Badly marketed sites will have a steep drop off from the median point and practically no long tail curve.

It is THIS shape (the bell curve) that Googlers mean when they talk about a "link graph", and if you draw a graph of results, patterns in data are so easy to spot.

What would I do?
First off, the genie is out of the bottle where your links are concerned and taking them down or having them changed to point to different URLs is probably out of the question. Which of course would be one of the best thing to do.

One "Googler", John Mu I believe, suggested that starting again on a new domain name would be the only way back for the severe cases, and of course all the usual suspects, who probably helped to get many into this position in the first place have come out of the woodwork offering more words of "wisdom".

So, if I was in this position, I would probably do nothing at all for a couple of weeks or so, at least until the "dust had settled" and Google are looking at "turning the knob down" a little. At that point the "least worst" offenders will be showing signs of recovery and the way forward will become clear.
However:
If I had been doing "agressive link building", the forum signature links would go, or at least NOT be "you most impotrant keywrod".
Any silly "link scheme" in whatever shape it happens to be would be gone.
if I had my own "web2.0" sillyness going on, rewording and repointing those links would be done, or them taken down.
"Article" link building would be gone, if the articles are any good and actually related to your market place put them on YOUR site.

And anything else that was done PURELY FOR "ranking" should go.

**jim25** · 05-18-2012, 09:48 AM

Thanks for the advice Chris,

Forum sig links have already been removed, articles at ezines etc are still live we will remove all these. We did have some link pages but these were removed. We have some directory links but only where authority sites are in, we assumed they would be safe(yahoo, dmoz etc). I don't know what web 2.0 is so hopefully haven't been affected by it.

As we have submitted 2 reconsideration requests we guess we are under a manual penalty, which won't expire with time. So the only way we can recover rankings is to submit a 3d recon once more links have been removed. Would you agree?

**chrishirst** · 05-18-2012, 06:40 PM

I don't think that it is a "penalty" it's simply that you had a bunch of links that were giving your pages a "boost" and now they have been devalued and are doing nothing at all. So no matter how many "reconsideration request" are made

I wrote this post a year ago about "keyword stuffing" and I'm pretty sure that a similar thing applies to links, at the moment the "dumping level" is up high and Google will do what they have been doing since 2002/2003 and start reducing the level until their customers (the searching public) are happy with the results.

Major algo updates follow pretty much the same pattern, a big upheaval at first and lots of marketers and "experts" crying into their beer about how Google is destroying their business which was built on a swamp in the first place, then it all calms down after about three weeks or so and pages that have been less aggressive in their "optimisation" and marketing begin to take the position that they have earned.

Google have several billion URLs to re-evalute and re-assign word weighting values to, that does NOT happen overnight.
Ten years ago Google used to do this every month, they rolled out their updates and recalculated the entire index and there was the three day "Google dance", but they only had about twelve datacentres to synch up.

Just hang fire, work on improving the content, monitor your logs and forget about "rankings".

**vimal1991** · 06-02-2012, 12:54 AM

no man

matt cutts himself stated that all those bloggers who hit badly by panda and penguin update the best way to recover their blogs are they should buy a fresh new domain and only do things that Google likes so i advise if you hit by this then buy a new one and try to build that blog rather than to recover these blogs

**chrishirst** · 06-02-2012, 12:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vimal1991

no man

matt cutts himself stated that all those bloggers who hit badly by panda and penguin update the best way to recover their blogs are they should buy a fresh new domain and only do things that Google likes

And do you have an authoritative link for that information??

**vultren** · 06-02-2012, 11:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Just hang fire, work on improving the content, monitor your logs and forget about "rankings".

Just to back up what Chrishirst said:

Quote:

Originally Posted by GOOGLE

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications
to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes
might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with
other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your
site's user experience and performance in organic search results.