Google Penalty On An Old Site

[MASSEY]

I have just signed and old website up to google webmaster tools. The site used to rank really well on google for competitive terms, at the height of its success it ranked number one for 'small loans' and on page one for 'payday loans uk'.

The homepage of the site vanished from google for a period of time during its hey day, then came back into its positions and then vanished again. The inner pages survived.

I just looked and found the following message.

I had always thought it had been penalised being such a low quality site and having more notoriety than your typical website.

I don't quite get why it says request a review when they claim to have only devalued some or maybe all of the the links pointing to the site? What is the point of that?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

You have to clean up your link footprint submit a disavow, and request a review, because until you do it ain't gonna rank. The message says one thing, but does another. it claims to have taken target action against the links, but the targeted action will impact on links using the same anchor text.

 

[Mystro]

In My opinion that is the worst penalty to have, I have cleaned a few sites and only the partial matches really struggle after the penalty revoked, still there months later

I have 2 personal sites that had the exact same message, both have their link profile cleaned and are ok in Google's eyes, however they never recovered or budged, one of the sites i cleaned 1 just 301 to a new site and hey presto rankings recovered to near normal levels within a week, the other I dont want to move and 6 weeks on still down in the dumps

I found any keyword and i mean any that was anchor rich money keyword will not move, I am hoping that its a penguin thing so when they next role out a big update anything holding the other site back will be cut free but i am not too sure

As OWG says the only way to get that to rank is to clean it up,

 

[asbesting]

you need to check your backlinks and disavow bad with the help of Google Disavow Tool. you need to download backlinks list from the Google Webmaster Tool and check it. i can't post links and ad, but my profile contains info about a tool for checking. fortunately, it's my business. i hope, it'll help. you can use another, if you want i'm not insist. just advice.

 

[MASSEY]

Hmmmm, i'm not sure what i will do. I may just dump the site. I may disavow and see whether or not the site recovers ranks having lost all 40 of its backlinks? Hoping that maybe the 100 pages of internal links hold some weight. But this will mean i have to make the site look like a real loans site and i don't know if i can be bothered putting the effort into that.

Do you reckon a 301 will just pass the penalty onto the site it redirects to?

 

[Mystro]

Do you reckon a 301 will just pass the penalty onto the site it redirects to?

It will but add, the disavow from the old site to the new site as well so any links passing juice are disavowed, I kept my rankings when i did this its worth a shot for a few quid it will cost for a new domain name, but don't do it until the penalty has been revoked

 

[MikePNV]

HI

This happened because the low quality of your backlinks

 

[Remys]

Sounds like some bad backlinks. I've had a similar problem in the past, I fixed it fairly simply by getting rid of most of the bad links I could find.

 

[disawow]

I got exact the same message 2 months ago in my Webmaster Tools. I had found all of my bad backlinks and then submitted them to Google Disavow Tool. One week ago I got a message: "Manual spam action revoked"

 

[MASSEY]

I've decided to dump the site. All the links are built by me and i don't want to flag up any unnecessary attention. I'll probably use it as a negative seo test by forwarding it to...

I had always suspected it was hindered by those google tossers and ended up building a site in the same niche which is coming along for some tasty terms, it just needs a bit of a kick up the bum to take it to the next level.

 

[Mystro]

If your going to dump it, I would personally just clone and rename the site and 301 from old to new, and add a disavow list of the old sites links to the new, I did this with one of my sites and rankings came back and stayed to their previous positions within a week

Its worth a go if your just dumping it

 

[MASSEY]

If your going to dump it, I would personally just clone and rename the site and 301 from old to new, and add a disavow list of the old sites links to the new, I did this with one of my sites and rankings came back and stayed to their previous positions within a week

Its worth a go if your just dumping it

My thoughts were that if i disavowed the link profile its rankings would most probably tank making it not worth while.

I was thinking that if anything was worth a go it would be selecting some of the links that i think would be considered the most evil by google and hoping to scrape through a review. But as i say, the link profile is largely from sites i own and if google were to pay too much attention when reviewing they might nuke me. There seem to be too many unknowns.

It all just seems like hard work for probably little reward trying to revive it.

 

[Toni Anicic]

It's been a week since Google removed a penalty for one of the websites where I was working on lifting the "Unnatural links to your site - Impact links". So far no significant benefit from lifting the penalty in rankings.

 

[Sahasraa]

It happened because of low quality backlinks,I suggest you to upload disavow file,which consists of you website low quality backlinks in your webmaster tools account.

 

[webgeek]

It's been a week since Google removed a penalty for one of the websites where I was working on lifting the "Unnatural links to your site - Impact links". So far no significant benefit from lifting the penalty in rankings.

There's often a high probability that if you got a manual action, you've also picked up an algorithmic penalty (Penguin) which won't start to heal until the next refresh.

So, although you've fixed some/all of the problem, you may not enjoy the solution for months.

This is also a good time to consider the fact that you've erased the links which incurred the penalty, which happen to be the same links that were propping up your site in the rankings. When you removed the penalty-causing links, it very well could have removed the foundation which supported those rankings.

Penguin could refresh in a few weeks (give or take), so now's a good time to cleanup the bad AND build some fresh good social mentions and backlinks in general - with remarkable content being a great way to attract those mentions and backlinks.

 

[MASSEY]

What was funny about this site in question is that for a period of time it returned to its previous rankings. My guess is the manual actions expire after a period of time and they have to look at them again?

Considering google have so few employees in relation to their size, those of us getting manual actions must be incredibly unlucky.

I notice that one particular guy, who used to frequent this forum, gets a site ranking with a load of blatantly manipulative links and then 301's to a new domain name to hide his tracks a little. I think this is something i will try in the future.

Although the biggest barrier to ranking for high value terms these days seems to be google manipulating some of the serps pages manually. Meaning no matter what you do you may not rank.