Comments on: Manual Link Penalties Revoked! (It’s Not Just Unicorns and Rainbows)

By: Tejas Thakkar

Tejas Thakkar — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:03:28 +0000

Thanks for this comprehensive explanation about manual penalties. I successfully got penalty revoked for one of my clients and within a week I saw very generic keywords ranking back on page 1 of Google SERPS. But the traffic improvement was not much because the website was always doing good with its long tail traffic. Overall it was a big achievement and we are happy about that because all the hard work that we had put in to remove links and disavow them finally worked for us.

By: Joeseph

Joeseph — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:06:55 +0000

As to revoking Manual Penalties in the post Penguin era, it is important to know that some sites will not recover even after the Manual Action has been Revoked. We are going on over 5 months since revoking our Manual Penalty and still to not see our site in the Top 200 Serp’s. It is quite frustrating to continue SEO without any movement which leads me and other professional SEO’s that there is a much needed Penguin refresh, so I would have to disagree with this post. There are also many other sites that have revoked their Manual penalty but still have yet to see their site inthe SERP’s – many of us are awaiting the Penguin refresh to see if there is any positive movement!

By: services company glasgow

services company glasgow — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 07:14:55 +0000

Jose you said right, many brands get popularity in a short time due to paid linking. Google would see that all of relevant actives and sort out. Jessica thanks for sharing a good link.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:20:50 +0000

Removing penalties really require a lot of work. One most of the bulk comes from finding what links hurt your site. Google won’t tell you exactly, and if your site has thousands of links, going through them 1 by 1 wastes precious time and effort. IMHO, the best solution so far is to buy an old domain, (white hat) optimize it, and make sure the new site won’t get bad links.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:37:02 +0000

Hi Jessica, thanks for posting this great article. I think one important tip that a lot of people don’t realize is that the disavow link tool comes last! Thanks for posting more about this so that everyone can see that it isn’t the first step, nor is it an end-all to the link issues.

By: Ty Carson

Ty Carson — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:22:16 +0000

Hi Joeseph,

Some sites will see a slow increase when the manual penalty is revoked. However, if the majority of your backlink profile were paid links, then you will not see a steady increase in organic traffic. More work is needed to build new natural inbound links to your site.

Avoid link schemes.

Please reference Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on “Link Schemes”: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

Good Luck!

By: Jessica Lee

Jessica Lee — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:45:30 +0000

Hey Nick, thanks for your comment! When you say the disavow can cause more harm than good, can you elaborate?

By: Jessica Lee

Jessica Lee — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:44:25 +0000

Hey John, thanks for sharing your experience (although sorry to hear that you were down)! What are your plans next?

-Jessica

By: Jessica Lee

Jessica Lee — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:40:30 +0000

Hey Joseph, thanks for the comment. That’s exactly why we wanted to write this post to show that sites can make strides. So thanks for saying so. I’m checking in with the SEO analysts to see what I can find out re: your question.

By: Jessica Lee

Jessica Lee — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:37:22 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Jose!