When To Call It A Day

First of all, thanks to Data Label to accept to share this kind of experiences. It’s really upsetting to have to change your business domain just because Google (or the search engine ruling at the time) don’t leave you a choice.

We have had some similar experiences here in the agency and all these steps worked out for us, but I strongly believe it was just matter of coincidence or something else. I’ve heard other SEO’s and friends of mine complaining on the same thing and have to do the same you have to do: move your business somewhere else.

If I were your, I would shutdown the old URL as soon as the people start using the new one. Make Google think it isn’t active anymore, maybe you can loose all your history with this and your client can recover their old URL someday.

Good read. A client of mine has the exact same problem, caused by their former SEO. They’re not in the position of swapping domains, so they’re still stuck between link removal requests, the link disavow tool and the default reply mails from Google.

I think there are three possible causes for the disavow tool not working (or at least not the way we want):
– Data: Even the data in GWT combined with MajesticSEO is not enough to lift a link penalty. The reason for this is that Google is constantly finding new spammy links and reporting them in GWT. So when you use the disavow tool on of of the links, Google has already found new links that may be just as spammy. I tried disavowing all domains (by using the domain: prefix) so I won’t miss out on any new dup URL containing the same link. Still no effect, Google found some new comment spam on old posts on new domains.
– Delay in the disavow tool: maybe the links are added to the main DB in batches or there is some other factor causing delay.
– Programmed ethics: You screw us, we screw you (so you’ll just have to wait a bit longer or put some more measurable effort into it)

Sander, have you tried sending removal request to all those backlinking domains? I know it is a pain in the a… but maybe it can help. I don’t trust in the disavow tool that much yet.

We already did and even got some of the removed and others nofollowed because the author thinks the link should stay in place. But thanks for thinking along!

one Problem with just No Following bad links is your just one template update away from been killed, I have seen site add and remove nofollow links in design changes, do you really want to take the chance, it’s like having a loaded gun around .

It is, but since I can’t get them to remove the link a nofollow and disavow will do.

Nice Post Rory, the frustrating thing about this is – if it had been a big brand, I’m sure Google would have already released it from its Manual Penalty.

Have you guys done any testing to see if a cross domain canonical tag passes a penalty?

Even more intereseting in that you are effectively 404’ing many of the links and in effect killing them (1). So, you removed a load, 404’d a load, and then disavowed, really, where else are you meant to go from here?

We are currently working with a few clients in a similiar situation and this whole process is a mess. My thoughts are that every site allows one disavow and they learn and move on. If they then go and do something crazy, well, that’s that but many folks have paid for link building services in good faith that have irreversibly damaged their domains.

Surely, this has spread enough FUD now and people can be allowed to recover via the dissavow or can we at least get some clarity from Google.

1. http://www.seroundtable.com/404-links-google-penalty-15667.html

Hi Marcus

This is another reason for the URL structure change and not 301-ing some of the OLD internal pages. We hoped that by doing this Google would see that most of the older links are in theory ineffective. The only thing that we couldn’t do was the root domain (Is this now the issue)

But I guess it either wasn’t the links to the internal pages causing the link warning message or that the penalty is still held against the domain

Hi Rory, thanks for a good post and good reading.
Special thanks to datalabel for agreeing to share their experience with us. I have similar situation with the website I work. The only difference is I can do nothing but wait and hope as we don’t really have a big budget to start a new website with new link building efforts. I have submitted around 60% of our links to disavow tool (as they were created by a previous spammy seo agency). And you know what? After 2 months I noticed that about half of submitted links disappeared from my webmasters backlinks. I appreciate that it’s a pain to wait for months but maybe you could wait a bit more and maybe you could see results?

Hi Suren

I can see what you mean about previous link building efforts.

DataLabel where lucky enough to have a spare domain that they could use and I appreciate that not everyone will be in that boat, and unfortunately waiting wasn’t a viable option for them.

Thanks Rory for this post… I was called into a similar scenario back in March 2012 when a (now) client had a previous unsavory SEO vendor doing their link building (supposedly unbeknownst to them?).

Unfortunately, I’m in the same datalabel boat w/ this (now) client except NOTHING has worked. It makes me seriously question the disavow tool (as I wrote about back in November http://www.seo-web-consulting.com/blog/post/google-disavow-links-maybe-maybe-not).

A last resort option that we are now considering is to pull the site down and move it to a new domain and ‘start over’ rebuilding the site’s former authority.

This has caused great financial loss to this small business.

Thanks again for your insightful post. If you can offer any additional suggestions, feel free to contact me via email.

Hi Valerie

Your post made good reading, we were are at the last resort with Datalabel and couldn’t justify been 3/4 months down the line and still been in the same situation. The Domain had history but lacked good links, so felt that it was time to swap domains.

Thanks Rory,

Yes, same with my assessment because this client has had this problem since MARCH 2012! It may be time to bite the bullet and swap domains.

Hi Valerie

Hopefully you have a similar domain to use.

That’s horribly depressing reading – almost like retrospective punishment.

Imagine buying this site (legitimately) in the middle of 2012. You see a business doing well from its web traffic – particularly organic traffic for Google – and the fundamentals seem sound. Then you buy the business and kaboom – Google drops the hammer.

You’d hope that Google would pay rather more attention to recent activity, rather than looking back at what was being done 2 or 3 years ago. Whatever you think of SEO, that’s a hell of a lot of water under the bridge and in more general terms, the business could have changed hands, hired and fired, changed focus and any number of things in the interim.

If penalties can be retrospectively to the order of years it’s a wonder that ANY well-established site can survive. As someone noted, I bet a ‘brand’ would get a free pass from this stuff (in fact, I know they do).

Hi Rory, thanks for sharing your experiences! It sounds like you’d done everything you could have. Link removal can be a drain on time. I am guessing this was a site-wide rankings penalty? Clients are sometimes keen jump to a new domain, but its difficult for SEOs to promise a return in rankings as some reconsideration work well and some cause confusion. your experience questions the very effectiveness of the reconsideration request process. However, I thought the Disavow links tool does not always ignore links, you are merely suggesting to Google to not consider these?

If Google keeps saying that the site violates their quality guidelines, have you looked at the site for issues, or just links?

Hi Dan,

In my case, the Google violation letter in WMT references links.

@dan the site is here now http://www.data-label.co.uk

I’ve been following a large number of these. We volunteered to work a bunch of people through the process earlier in the year. It’s not unusual to get through cleaning up links (up to 100% removal) and then get “there are still quality issues with your site” or some such.

I only took a quick look at the site, but a couple things made me wonder…

First off, they collect personal information (via the quote form for example) and:
1) Where’s the privacy policy / disclosure?
2) The form submission is insecure (not using https).

That’s enough to get an Adwords campaign shut down. I wouldn’t count on it not being a problem in other areas.

Second, and this may be over-paranoid, but all of the recent blog posts look like doorway pages to me.

Hmm, I see that comment link is nofollowed but you still want it removed. Nofollows are ok to leave surely?!

Hi Jon

You would think so, but personally i didn’t want to leave any stone un-turned

Great read and it is amazingly honest of Datalabel to be so open with their situation. Hope they do well at their new domain.

I have 4 clients that have been hit by the same problem. While it is a small data set to analyse I do have some interesting results.

With 2 of my clients I have attempted to remove links and what I couldn’t remove I got disavowed so as far as Google should be concerned both sites should have no links. Neither site has recovered as your example above they both continue to get a violation message.

2 other clients chose not to submit reconsideration requests but have just continued to add content and even build links but with variation in anchor text. 1 site has recovered in the rankings and is back to where it was before. The other still has not recovered.

What does this say? not a lot other than it appears that once you get the warning a reconsideration request is probably a bad thing to do and is probably a Google red herring.

One thing I think I have learned is that in the future I wont be recommending that clients submit reconsideration requests except maybe as a last resort. My recommendation will be continue as usual or as in data labels case restart elsewhere.

@Dan it was an Unnatural Link warning, We had already rebuilt the the website ..

Thanks for sharing David and Rory. It’s always good to hear of others’ experiences with this type of thing.

I have a few thoughts though. I think it’s unlikely that those comments were contributing to the unnatural links warning as they are all nofollowed. Google’s pretty clear that unnatural links are ones that were created in order to pass PageRank to the site and it’s unlikely that nofollowed links are going to do that.

You mentioned disavowing a large number of links, but for how many of those did you contact webmasters to try to get the link removed and then thoroughly document those attempts on your reconsideration request? If not, then just disavowing the links is likely not enough to get the penalty removed. When Bronco decided to disavow the remaining links and refile for reconsideration, were those disavowed sites all contacted to ask for link removal? Were those attempts all been documented?

With that being said, if there was not much value in the remaining links pointing to the site, I can see good reason to just start over. Those disavowed links will always be in the backlink profile.

And what would you do without the link warnings, with a site hit with the first Penguin?

I know the team at Bronco have tried their utmost to remove as many low quality links pointing to our site as humanly possible. Sadly despite numerous reconsideration attempts, Google claimed that our site still violated their terms and conditions. Despite every effort, we decided it would be quicker and easier to switch domains. Fortunately our new URL is very similar to the old, which should minimise any long term damaging effect to the company’s brand.

Firstly thanks for sharing your experience, a very familiar story.

I’ve also been working on a number of sites following GWT unnatural link warnings.

The vast majority of affected domains were in excess of 5 years old and had a lot of old back-links.

After months of removing bad or low quality links and using the disavow tool, still nothing appeared to make any improvement to natural rankings.

Switching domain name was a last resort, but in all cases the client sites have started to climb back up the natural listings.

Looking forward, our focus will be on regular content updates, social media and minimal back-links using a wide range of anchor text.

Hi Lee

Datalabel.co.uk was an old domain as well and had been occupied with a site since 2002.

I’m in the middle of this with a current client. We’re trying to do everything right – it’s just not going the way we’d expect or hope it would. We’ve removed, disavowed, removed again … and no good. Unfortunately, having X number of links has helped them but it seems when we remove 4000+ links, that means they need to build the *right* links back toward that number … I dunno. I’m frustrated with it and may need to “call it a day” on that site soon, too.

Helpful article. Thank you very much. Has anyone used Rank Tracker Tool? Any experiences? http://www.ranktrackertool.com

Since April 2012 we also volunteered to work with the web site business-trader.com.au to clean up their link profile because they we smashed from a manual penalty for on-page violations and inorganic / unnatural links, and later on also by the Penguin.

First we investigated to find the on-page violations which we found and fixed. And right away we have filed a reconsideration request which few days later we got a reply that the site is still in violation of inorganic / unnatural links which was obvious. But on-page penalty was revoked!

Then we began trying very hard to get inorganic / unnatural links physically removed, updating and sharing our progress with Google with an excel sheet with all links which have been removed and which were not.

In the mean while we change the URLs of the most offended pages though the toxic links and they were then pointing to 404s.

When the disavow tool was launched, the links we could not remove, we uploaded them via the disavow tool.

After 8 or 9 reconsideration requests in total, the last one was successful.

Here is the reply our customer received from Google on the 26th of November 2012:

###

Hello Peter,

Thank you for your request.

We received your request to reconsider business-trader.com.au/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444&hl=%locale%

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.

###

After all and only IMO, I assume that Google expects to see evidence that efforts have been taken to remove links physically, and not just uploading links to the disavow tool. Correct me if I am wrong.

At last I would like to add here that the site traffic comparing the last 30 days with the same period last year is still 90% down. I would assume that their indexing and ranking systems are not fully updated to reflect the new status of the web site, since we see key terms ranking, but the Penguin might be still suppressing better rankings and traffic.

It is obvious that we cannot expect to see the rankings of the site it had before the disaster, since many links that might have passed equity do not pass any longer.

That is our experience. What do you think?

Hi John

Using your time scale you were sending around 1 reconsideration a month, until business-trader.com.au had any actions revoked.

Again working from your time scales it could be September before we would get any issues directly resolved but then would we still have issues where traffic and rankings may not come back to their original levels straight away if at all.

For a company that is reliant on business via their website waiting up to or over 8 months makes little business sense when you have a spare and still relevant domain that is available to use.

Rory I fully understand and to be honest we were playing with the idea to move to a new domain too. But after all the efforts we have put into all that, we came to the conclusion not to do so and take the journey all the way to the end.

One major factor that we did not switch to a new domain was that the web site was ranking Nr. 1 for the most competitive term “business for sale” before it was smashed, and had already gained a huge popularity.

So we had another idea which at the end we do not go for either.

We recommended to block the homepage with robots.txt and also attribute the links pointing to the homepage from the inner pages with a “nofollow”. But that again was just a temporary solution until we could get plenty of toxic links removed to get the penalty revoked.

Another option was to make the homepage just a nice and simple entry page with one single link pointing to the second most important page of the site attributed with a “nofollow”.

The customer felt like he could afford waiting, so we had luck.

Kudos to Data Label & Bronco for allowing this information to be shared, it really helps everyone to see practical examples like this.

It is a shame that in some cases, it appears there is no way back for a website, which is as the end of the day someone’s livelihood. Essentially one bad experience with the previous SEO company has forced this client into having to relaunch their whole site on a new URL. What’s worse, in theory someone could carry out this onto a competitor, rendering them defenceless against potential online sabotage.

The one positive point is that rankings seem to come quicker than they use to (pre the caffeine update), so starting again is not as painful as it might have been a few years ago…

Good post Rory!

This is very similar to a client of mine. The site in question had been heavily spammed for years with money terms by some SEO agency (who intern outsourced abroad it seems). The site was the US domain for a UK company. The US site was built ‘on sand’ in terms of links. The penalty handed to them wasn’t down to Penguin, but we had the same issues removing links. It took a full year to persuade the client to switch domains after attempting to remove them (with some success). We eventually managed to move the site in October 2012 to the new URL.

The problem with switching domains is that it’s extremely expensive for clients in terms of marketing material, as I’m sure you’re aware. We in fact put in place a redirect on the old domain because the client specified we had to (despite our concerns about passing the penalty)

We added a rel NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, 302 and a JS redirect to the old domain. We then manually contacted all the sites with ‘good links’ pointing to the site and asked them to ‘update’ the link.

To date this technique seems to have worked and it’s slowly getting back on it’s feet. (here is a quick view in Search Metrics screen shot. The old domain is the blue line and the new domain the orange. http://goo.gl/iZAFJ)

Some times removing links just isn’t cost affective as you say when it doesn’t leave you with much else!

Martin

Wow fantastic post – thank you for sharing this experience and to Data Label for allowing this case study to be brought into the open. I have not yet had to use the Link Disavow tool, however it seems from your experience that it’s nigh on useless. What is most surprising is that you removed so many links, some of which were genuine and valid, and yet Google still did not accept the request. It seems that something else is going on here, and perhaps Dan Thies suggestion to look more closely at the on-site would be wise. You’ve done all you can to sort the off-site, so that would be my next step. I wouldn’t trust that Google sent out the correct response to your last request – I don’t know how these are done, but I imagine if a human has read and processed your request, it only takes one moment for them to click the wrong message from their list of standardised responses, and boom you have misleading information. It’s a tough one – just seems very unfair.

There 3 problems with directories that I see most often:
1. Spammed Anchor text
2. Repetition
3. Submitting to directory networks that pay for the number of links you receive

Submitting to directories slowly over time with a thoughtful description and a title that reflects the title of the site, not anchor text you are trying to rank, can be very worthwhile. You can even get “some” anchor text with directories if you have excellent landing pages inside your site that are worth visiting in and of themselves.

When To Call It A Day

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