Best Practices for Manual Penalty Removal?

Samwise89

Samwise89

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So I got a manual spam action in Webmaster Tools :(

I've never paid attention to all of the talk about it because it hasn't been an issue for me up until today. What do I need to do?

My understanding is limited to this:

I just need to get as many of my backlinks together as possible from any source, find out which are bad, try to get them removed by emailing the webmasters. Record every move I make with time stamps and dates, which get replies, how many times I tried, and then submit the failures into the disavow tool and pray for the best.
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That's like a general outline. But anyone who's successfully pulled this off... did you use Excel to keep track of things for Google? What all did you say to them? How many attempts did it take before you were able to get the action removed?

Basically I need guidance and to hear any war stories to help me through this trying time!

Thanks for the help.
 
Reconsideration requests take a ton of effort (finding all the bad backlinks), could take on average 6 months to get your site indexed again and most of the time are failures.

And if your site does get indexed, your rankings you'll find are far lower.

What to do instead
De-index the site, wait a week, copy everything onto a new site and then start your link building again.
 
Is this a Money site or a PBN site? I recently got a manual action removed in 4 weeks time and all pages reindexed within a day after the manual action was revoked.
 
Ugh, reconsiderations are a pain. It has been my experience that, more often than not, it seems to take 2-4 reconsideration requests before enough work was done that Google decides to lift the penalty. This can sometimes take 2-4 months.

First thing I would do is check the Manual Actions section of GWT.
  • What is the exact penalty that's listed?
  • Is it a partial penalty, or a sitewide penalty?
  • Also, if it's a partial penalty, what EXACT partial penalty is it?
Can you list the description here so we know? Some partial penalties are of the type that specifically impacts some backlinks to some pages (as opposed to the whole site), and Google even specifically states that it might not even be necessary for you to do anything, as they've basically just devalued what they feel to be the bad backlinks. If it's one of those types of partial penalties, you're in luck, because it may not be as bad as you think. For most partial penalties, a reconsideration request isn't necessarily even needed, and your time might be better focused elsewhere to simply go out and acquire some better links to make up for the difference of bad links being devalued and the corresponding loss in link juice.

The worst type of penalty is a full on sitewide penalty. With that type of penalty, a reconsideration request is necessary, and Google may even decide to deindex part of or maybe the entire site.

As far as reconsideration requests go, those are a big PITA. What I've historically done with clients is:
  • Find all of the bad backlinks you want to disavow (This in itself could take an entire thread to describe)
  • Disavow them immediately
  • Email link removal requests to any of the domains that have webmaster contact info
    • I've normally scripted this to operate off a spreadsheet or two, with an email script, that basically pulls in the domain, domain owner/webmaster contact email, and then pulls in the individual backlinks from that domain all into the email so that you're basically emailing the owner/webmaster while also providing them a list of the specific links you want removed. This takes a bit of setup to achieve, but then you can mass email to all of these domains very quickly.
    • From there I've archived and documented all of the emails sent, including meta data and contents, as well as any responses received, and taking note of some high level statistics (1,000 domains emailed, responses received from 300 domains, 300 links removed, etc.) for the reconsideration request.
    • I then copy ALL of the email/response data to a spreadsheet or two and save them on Google Drive, to provide trustworthy URLs in the reconsideration request, that Google can reference if they're actually going to see whether you've done some due diligence or not.
  • After a week or two of mass emailing and getting some responses, I'd then submit a reconsideration request, "detailing your understanding of the problem", detailing efforts taken to correct it, as well as links to the documents on Google Drive so they can see your due diligence. From there, it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to receive a response. In one case, after the third or fourth reconsideration, on the last one I received a reconsideration approval within 24 hours. With another client, it took something like 3-5 weeks to get a response. It's totally random, unfortunately.
Anyways, there's a quick memory dump from what I typically do or look for in a penalty removal process. Focus first on finding out what specific penalty you have, and let us know, as that will be a big factor in determining what you want to do next.

I should add, my perspective is typically from the "client side", with established/branded websites that absolutely have to be recovered. Considering how time consuming (and time is money) a penalty removal process can be, it's potentially a totally different game if we're talking PBN, affiliate, money site where you may also have the option of dumping it and moving to a new site.
 
Thanks for the great replies. Here's what my message says:

domain.com/: Unnatural inbound links
October ***, 2014
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 domain.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.​

I've just gathered a good bit of links that I think may be bad. I guess I need to "show an effort" of having emailed them and tried to get the links removed next.
 
Where did these links come from? Are they the type of links you'll be able to get removed? Were you expecting this to happen or was this a long-term project?
 
@Samwise89
I came across this link today and gave it a read. It's real solid and also provides you with an Excel and Word file that are templates for the work you need to be doing. It documents everything real nice for you as you go through the work of contacting everyone.

http://www.worldofsearch.io/seo/how-to-remove-a-manual-penalty/

The TL;DR version is that you need to pull all of your backlinks, isolate the bad ones into a list, and then record at least 3 attempts to contact the webmasters. List their email addresses, days you contacted, if they responded or not. Ultimately the ones that don't you can put in a disavow file. In the end, you can send the whole report to Google through Google Docs and show them the extreme effort you made. They say to be aggressive the first time around and just save time, because the responses are slow. The least times you have to go through it, the better.
 
^ @Devil Anse I read that and used the files and have pulled as many links as possible. It was confusing but removing all of the duplicates and boiling down to just top level domains was awesome. That link saved me a ton of time. I just have to go through and get all of the contact information now. I'll keep you guys informed!
 
Reconsideration requests take a ton of effort (finding all the bad backlinks), could take on average 6 months to get your site indexed again and most of the time are failures.

And if your site does get indexed, your rankings you'll find are far lower.
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I know every case is unique and different, but in the 3 cases i've been involved in, make me 100% disagree with this, unless your site is a thin site, that can easily be replaced.

If your site is a brand, then this approach isn't realistic.

Ugh, reconsiderations are a pain. It has been my experience that, more often than not, it seems to take 2-4 reconsideration requests before enough work was done that Google decides to lift the penalty. This can sometimes take 2-4 months.
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I agree 100%. This was also my experience every time. In the end it was worth every penny I spent to hire a firm to get it done.

I've actually had sites rank higher after a manual action removal
 
Tavin said:
I've actually had sites rank higher after a manual action removal
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I got to thinking about this the other day. Did those higher rankings persist after the new Penguin rollout? I wondered if they ran the disavow data finally and if that made a huge upset to guys in your circumstances who recovered reasonably well from a penalty.
 
I got to thinking about this the other day. Did those higher rankings persist after the new Penguin rollout? I wondered if they ran the disavow data finally and if that made a huge upset to guys in your circumstances who recovered reasonably well from a penalty.
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The rankings persisted after the penguin update, it almost felt like a reward from Google for giving up the disavow data and bad links . It's a smart play from them, because of course in the future I would then feel encouraged to submit more disavow data.

The disavow/manual action removal felt like they took the links and only removed the negative points/juice from our backlinks, instead of removing all links we diavowed.
 
thehobbster said:
I got to thinking about this the other day. Did those higher rankings persist after the new Penguin rollout? I wondered if they ran the disavow data finally and if that made a huge upset to guys in your circumstances who recovered reasonably well from a penalty.
Click to expand...

I've had the same question. I had a friend go through a manual action removal ordeal about a year ago. Today they're still ranking for a few of their keywords, but not nearly as high as they used to be or for as many keywords. This last round of updates put them further down. I haven't looked at their links in a while so that could be more the issue than anything.
 
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