How to respond to the information about unnatural linking in the GWT panel?
In order to do a link cleanup, you need to know one thing – every backlink is different and there is no one way to get rid of “those” bad inbound links.
First of all, we need to know what kind of penalty we are dealing with. There are two options in GWT notifications: either it is an algorithmic filter or a manual filter. Recently, a domain with a manual filter came into our hands. Using this particular domain as an example, we present a case study on how to clean up the links leading to our site.
So let’s start from the beginning. In March this year, our agency was approached by a client with her website. At the outset, she notified us that her site had dropped quite a bit after last year’s updates in the organic results. The agency she had previously worked with assured her that it was a temporary drop. As it turned out, however, there was a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a manual penalty for unnatural linking, but about that in a moment.
When doing the acquisition of the client, it turned out that GWT does not exist (we do not know how you can work with the client without having an account for the domain in GWT). Therefore, we set up a new account, but it took some time before the data appeared in it. In the meantime, we proposed a redesign of the site, along with changing the URLs, because the old version did not have friendly URLs (here again alluding to “pseudo SEO” companies, how can you do SEO without such simple and so helpful changes).
Bloomnet Agency, part of the Good One Group like us, worked vigorously on the new site, and we set about eliminating “bad links.”
For this, it was necessary to download from Google Webmaster Tools all the links/domains that are there – according to Google, this is a basic base, although …. about this later in the article.
Having already a list, we proceed to the next step, the appropriate segregation of links. The criterion for division, are forums, domain names, subdomains, directories, pretzels. In addition, we can be guided by PR, but this is not entirely subjective evaluation.
The first reading of links from GWT for the selected domain resulted in more than 12 thousand links. This is not a striking amount.
Examples of factual links:
Link analysis is tedious, practically every link should be analyzed. We can write to the admins with a request to remove the link, in case of no response we report it to the disavow tool. In the case of the client’s domain, more than 10,000 links were reported to DT.
After dropping the links in DT, after about 3 weeks, we got the information that the manual penalty was not successful, and the given example of unnatural links to the site “oh my gosh” did not previously appear in the links to your site in GWT. And how can you trust Google when it says the most important links are in GWT?
We waited another two weeks, after which more links leading to the site, which we had not seen before, “finally” appeared in GWT. And again we had to proceed with a re-analysis of the links.
And here is another “zonk” on Google’s part. Some of the links previously reported by us were again showing nicely, beautifully with information about links to the Client’s domain. Only that now the total number of links is about 8 thousand. After analysis and reporting in DT after two weeks another info from Google that the manual penalty was not removed, again those unfortunate links , which are not in GWT. From our side there were two more attempts, similarly fruitless as the previous one. In the meantime, a new site was launched, and as it turned out, the last attempt from our side with a manual penalty.
Last analysis, we reported 400 couple of links to Disavow Tool on October 1 and waited for Google’s response. The response came on October 23, and the information that appeared to us was as follows:
“Request for reconsideration of the site …. : we have canceled manual anti-spam actions”
And as early as October 29, the position for the most important keyword was back in the TOP 10 (see below).
In summary, it took quite a long time to get out of the manual penalty in this case, almost 7 months, although looking at what condition we received the domain in after the previous agency…. In the meantime, the client’s site was assisted with AdWords in order to get clients for her services all the time.
We should also remember that each domain, is a separate story and the time to get out of an algorithmic filter or manual penalty varies. Some can be exited after a few days or so, and there are some domains that take more than a year to filter out.
