{"id":31718,"date":"2014-05-06T08:30:15","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T15:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/?p=31718"},"modified":"2017-02-27T14:45:47","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T22:45:47","slug":"9-tips-manual-link-penalty-removal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/9-tips-manual-link-penalty-removal\/","title":{"rendered":"9 Tips for Getting Your Manual Link Penalty Overturned"},"content":{"rendered":"

The effect that an unnatural link penalty can have on a website can be crippling. Make no mistake, there is a punitive aspect to these actions. Google is looking to teach webmasters a lesson, one that insures that they will not think about violating the search giant\u2019s quality guidelines in the future. To drive their point home, Google makes the process of recovering from these penalties very difficult.<\/p>\n

Link penalty recovery takes time, effort, and a substantial commitment of resources. Depending on your specific situation, you could end up reviewing and\/or removing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of links. And generally speaking, there is no shortcut to forgiveness.<\/p>\n

A good number of clients that approached our firm for SEO services<\/a> over the past year came to us suffering from some form of manual or algorithmic penalty. The good news is that we have seen a high degree of success in getting penalties overturned. What follows is a list of tips for getting a specific type of penalty removed: a manual link penalty.<\/p>\n

These tips are my own and as such are one analyst\u2019s experiences dealing with these types of specific penalties; every situation is unique, but generally speaking, if you follow these tips, you\u2019ll increase your chances of recovering from the penalty substantially.<\/b><\/p>\n

1. Removing Links Is Job #1<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a reason that this is the first item on the list. If you are suffering from a manual link penalty (or any link penalty, for that matter) your best chance of having it overturned is the removal (or nofollowing) of inorganic links from the Internet. Do not<\/em>\u00a0rely on the disavow tool; it\u2019s considered a last resort tool by Google and should only be used when every effort has been made to remove poor backlinks manually.<\/p>\n

While Google has never confirmed their exact method of processing reconsideration requests, my experience tells me that one of the main metrics they consider is the amount of live inorganic links that are removed over time.<\/p>\n

2. Be Thorough in Your Pruning Effort<\/h2>\n

The more backlinks you can gather for auditing, the better chance you have of offering Google a complete pruning effort. You should never rely solely on reported backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools. In fact, consider adding a second or third source of links. Bing Webmaster Tools, MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, and Moz\u2019s Open Site Explorer are all excellent sources of backlink data.<\/p>\n

\"Use<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are plenty of stories<\/a> out there that describe how Google has reported inorganic backlinks in denied reconsideration requests that are not listed in Google Webmaster Tools\u2019 backlink report. It behooves webmasters to make an effort to monitor backlinks<\/a> and create a more complete list if they hope to recover from a link penalty. If you paid someone to build links in the past, contacting them to try and obtain the original work log that listed the links built can be exceedingly valuable.<\/p>\n

You can take this a step further and use Google itself to search for boilerplate language that link builders used to create backlinks to your site. Snippets from articles or searches for forum profile names and descriptions can uncover links that even the backlink reporting services may have missed.<\/p>\n

3. Don’t Prune Nofollowed Links<\/h2>\n

Part of being thorough is making sure that you have gathered all of the pertinent data to assess your link profile. Nofollowed links do not pass PageRank and as such, they do not require removal or disavowing. You\u2019d be shocked by how many clients I have worked with (many of whom run large online listing directories) who have nofollowed all external links on their site, but still<\/em>\u00a0receive removal requests.<\/p>\n

It is important to note that Google Webmaster Tools does not offer data related to nofollowed or previously disavowed links (Matt Cutts, are you listening?), so you\u2019ll need to crawl the links provided on those pages to gather details about them (Screaming Frog<\/a> does a great job of this). Most link reporting tools like MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, etc., have a column that indicates if a link is nofollowed or not, but depending on the freshness of that data, the links themselves may not be live, which leads us to #4. . .<\/p>\n

4. Make Sure the Links on Your Sheet Are LIVE<\/h2>\n

Just because a link is being reported by Google Webmaster Tools or another backlink data provider, it doesn\u2019t mean that the link is active and live on the Internet. Depending on when your link report was run, the links in question could be long gone (and so could the site they appeared on). You can automate the process of crawling a list of links to ensure they are live fairly easily using tools like Screaming Frog or SEOTools For Excel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

5. Want Your Link Nofollowed or Removed? Ask Nicely<\/h2>\n

Some webmasters get inundated with link pruning requests and it\u2019s not because they run a spammy site. Oftentimes their only sin was allowing followed comment links or trackbacks to be published on their site. Put yourself in the shoes of those webmasters when you craft your removal\/nofollow request letter. How does the old saying go? \u201cYou catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar\u201d? This certainly applies to removal requests, so when crafting yours, be considerate and professional.<\/p>\n

I do want to mention that there are some webmasters out there that will be less than amiable when they respond to your requests. Some will ask for money to remove your links while others will virtually scream, curse, spit and complain about your request. We advise our clients to ignore these responses, preserve their professionalism, and put the offending domains directly into the disavow list.<\/p>\n

6. Disavow on the Domain Level<\/h2>\n

If you do have to resort to disavowing a link or set of links, it is probably better to disavow the entire domain as opposed to the individual URLs. Links that appear on blogs can often be republished on tag or archive pages and those pages aren\u2019t always listed in the backlink report you might be working from. If you\u2019ve decided the links in question have no value and can make the same claim for the entire domain, a domain level disavow is advised.<\/p>\n

7. Track and Share Your Work<\/h2>\n

A proper link pruning spreadsheet details:<\/p>\n