May 3rd, 2014 Published by: bharathipriya

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Google Manual ActionPenalty Guide

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Here are the steps to remove Google manualaction penalty. For more such blogs, visitmy Online Marketing Blog

Steps to RemoveGoogle Manual ActionPenaltyBy Bharathi Priya on April 22nd, 2014

Messages from Google & Steps followed :

Before :

I was handling SEO for a notable website whichhas been live for more than 10 years with goodtraffic and popularity. I was doing all kinds ofbasic on-page and off-page submissions to mywebsite. Apart from these backlinks, our websitegained a lot natural quality backlinks itselfbecause of the quality and user experience of theproduct. We were gaining quite improvements inSERP and we were really happy about the SEOpart of our website. Then came the first messagefrom Google.

The First message: (Dec 12, 2012)

Big traffic change for top URLSearch results clicks for {website} havedecreased significantly. The number ofclicks that your site receives from Googlecan change from day to day for a varietyof factors, including automatic algorithmupdates. However, if you have recentlymade significant changes to the content orconfiguration of your site, this change maybe an indication that there are problems.

We have noticed significant decrease in the brandkeywords and main keyword of my product.And i was looking for ways and participating inforums to find out the solution.

The Second message : (May 1, 2013)Big traffic change for top URL Searchresults clicks for {Website} have decreasedsignificantly. The number of clicks thatyour site receives from Google can changefrom day to day for a variety of factors,

May 3rd, 2014 Published by: bharathipriya

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including automatic algorithm updates.However, if you have recently madesignificant changes to the content orconfiguration of your site, this change maybe an indication that there are problems.

I got the same message again. And i can’tfigure out the perfect solution for this. I tried re-optimizing my website which didn’t work. Theni came to know about the “Manual Actions”section in my Google webmaster tools account.

There it said, “Unnatural links to your site”.Then i tried Linkresearch tools linkdetox tool tofind out the nature of backlinks to my website.

I was shocked to see thousands of backlinks fromfew penalized websites (Lost their pagerank andwhen you search for site:domain, you wont getany results, since the penalized websites wontshow up in google results)

Steps i have followed to remove google penalty :

Downloaded “latest backlinks” from Googlewebmaster toolsAnalyzed each and every backlink

Sort out the list based on natural and unnaturallinks (low quality directories, Paid directories,spam blogs, websites penalized by google &un-related websites). Directory links are losingtrust among google webspam team. So itsbetter to double check all directory links. Imyself removed almost all the directory linkseliminating only those with PR>5.

Try contacting all the un-natural link ownersusing the contact form or email addressmentioned in their website

Start preparing your disavow file (Below is asample file for your reference)

You can also add a google doc link to the disavowfile.

Inside the google doc file, you can mention thecontacted status of all the webmasters (mentiondomain & status) and make it private.

This disavow file and google doc shows youreffort to google on removing the google penalty.

Then upload the disavow file in this link . Onceyou uploaded the file, you get message fromGoogle as below.

Disavowed links updated The filecontaining disavowed links to {website}has been updated. You successfullyuploaded a disavow links file with {} URLsand {} domains. If this is unexpected, itmay have been updated by another siteowner. For more information, visit theDisavow links {link} page in WebmasterTools.

Steps are not completed unless you submitgoogle reconsideration request. (under manualactions -> request review)

Here is a sample google reconsideration requestfor your reference.

May 3rd, 2014 Published by: bharathipriya

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Dear Google Webspam team member,

Thank you for taking the time to readour request. I have been notified throughGoogle Webmaster Tools account thatmy site is identified as a manualspam due to unnatural inbound links. Ihave downloaded all the links from myWebmaster tools account and reviewedthoroughly.

We have worked hard over the last fewmonths to remove as many of these links aspossible. We have contacted webmastersusing their email address available onthe site and also via contact forms whereavailable. This spreadsheet shows all ofour links and what efforts we have takenfor removal:

{google doc link}

We have submitted a disavow.txt file to askGoogle to disavow the unnatural links thatwe were unable to remove.

Thank you again for reading this request.We have worked hard to resolve thequality issues on our site and arecompletely committed to following theQuality Guidelines from this point on.

Sincerely,

Bharathi Priya

But i failed to achieve the results in my firstattempt. I got a reply from Google as below.

Reconsideration request for {website}Links to your site violate Google’s qualityguidelines

Google has received a reconsiderationrequest from a site owner for {URL}

We’ve reviewed the links to your site andwe still believe that some of them areoutside our quality guidelines.

Sample URLs:

{Provided some sample backlinks}

Please correct or remove all inorganiclinks, not limited to the samples providedabove. This may involve contactingwebmasters of the sites with the inorganiclinks on them.

If there are links to your site that cannotbe removed, you can use the disavow linkstool. Keep in mind that simply disavowinglinks will not be enough to make areconsideration request successful; wewill also need to see good-faith efforts toremove a large portion of inorganic linksfrom the web wherever possible.

Removing links takes time. Due to thelarge volume of requests we receive, andto give you a better chance of your nextreconsideration request being successful,we won’t review another request fromthis site for a few weeks from now. Werecommend that you take the necessarytime to remove unnatural backlinks to yoursite, and then file another reconsiderationrequest.

For more specific information about thestatus of your site, visit the Manual Actionspage in Webmaster Tools. From there, youmay request reconsideration of your siteagain.

If you have additional questions, pleasevisit our Webmaster Help Forum.

Then i have removed all the URLs mentionedby Google by contacting the webmasters and re-submitted my reconsideration request.

Google has accepted it and you can see the resultin manual actions pages as well as in GoogleSERP results of your website.

May 3rd, 2014 Published by: bharathipriya

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Hope you are clear with all these steps. Havingany doubts? feel free to contact me