Helping You Remove the Dreaded Google Penalty Slap
Helping You Remove the Dreaded Google Penalty Slap
Follow these guidelines to get the Google Penalty removed faster.
Way back in February 2012, my GeekandJock Relationship Blog site was nailed by Google’s Quality Guidelines team as having ‘inorganic’ back-links.
Like many Webmasters at the time, I wanted the quality content and relationship and dating help that I was producing to get into the hands of as many people as I could.
The site wasn’t, at the time, geared to produce an income, though that was obviously the aim in the long term.
I was engaged in common practise of peppering other websites with back-links that, in hindsight, wasn’t natural and the site paid the price.
Real bad.
Google Isn’t Forthcoming in Back-link Removal Assistance
The site, like many of yours, is a labour of love and a part-time activity.
Getting the dreaded short notice, instantly had me shaking at the knees. What do I do next?
In short, here’s what you need to do:
- Check into Webmaster Tools
- Click your site in the list
- Navigate to Traffic > Links to Your Site
- Click to ‘Download latest links’ – this includes the date the link was first discovered by Google
- Get it as a Google Docs spreadsheet – so the Google Team can be given access on your progress
- I’d suggest you then manipulate the spreadsheet, move the data into their respective years, with their respective worksheets
- I also included a cover Summary worksheet for easier understanding for the Google Team too
Don’t Make My Mistake Either
I started off in a lazy mindset – that was a big mistake so that’s my first work of warning.
Be very ruthless and start a Disavow List. This didn’t exist when I was penalised
Getting my site removed from the manual penalty took more than 13 months. If I’d been far more severe and methodical, it would have taken less than a 1/3 of that time.
Slow and Steady and Check Them ALL
You want to get back into Google’s good books, yeah?
Understand they have nailed you.
They know the quality of every one of those links on your list so you will NOT pull the wool over their eyes.
Think about taking the short route and you’ll remain without Rank, Traffic and a huge portion of your site will be in Indexing-Limbo.
If you’ve got thousands or 10s of thousands of back-links in your list, be prepared to go through and check every one of the pages that correspond to the back-link.
It Isn’t All Disavow Either
You also need to be active in getting links fixed too.
I contacted hundreds of Webmasters.
I stalked them on Twitter and their site’s Contact forms. And I followed them up with repeated contact requests, for getting the link removed.
If you’re contemplating a mass Disavow list, Google won’t let you ‘Pass GO, and collect your $200’.
You’ve screwed up and they see it as you needing to prove yourself in making honest attempts to make amends.
You Can Tell the Smelly Ones
Now be aware of the plain smelly back-links.
You scan the page or the page HTML source and it is plain to understand a content-spun website used for keyword baiting.
Contact the Webmaster, if you can and insert these totally Spammy websites into your Disavow list.
Update your spreadsheet with the contact request, note it appears to be link bait and you’ve added the site to Disavow.
I’d suggest you exclude the entire Spammy domain in the list with domain:spammy.com so nothing else in the site comes back to bite your ass.
KeywordLuv Comments Will Nail You Too
Double Warning!
Here’s what I didn’t know that was (and still is) used extensively in the commenting arena of blogging.
CommentLuv which is a comment enhancing plugin that I absolutely love also has a feature called KeywordLuv.
Essentially, it allows you to insert your name as well as a keyword/s into the comment Name field and the Keyword/s becomes the anchor text to the back-link.
It was only after 12 months that Google gave me an example that pointed to KeywordLuv also causing issues, as inorganic back-links.
When checking each and every back-link, ensure you Disavow and ask Webmasters to revert or remove ‘Name field keywords’.
This is a real ass-biter and one I believe is going to cause future havoc for bloggers who comment (which we all should be doing).
Google Slap Removed
It was a long journey which I prolonged due to not knowing what really needed to be done.
[trafficblaster tracking_id="3972-63698709117648" theme="none" message="Interested to know what"s behind this door?
Then kindly help spread the word about us and we will let you in Free of Charge!
Simply share via either Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn and you"re in!" facebook="true" facebook_url="" google_plus="true" google_plus_url="" twitter="true" twitter_url="" twitter_text="" follow="false" linkedin="true" linkedin_url="" ]
There’s a lot of misinformation about how to get out of the de-indexing pool but if you follow diligently, you’ll get there.
Summary
- Download all known Google back-links
- Check each and every one
- Keep an ongoing Disavow list
- Be ruthless in adding any suspect site
- Be aware of keyworded comments
- Update your Google Docs spreadsheet with activity and update the uploaded Disavow List too
[/trafficblaster]
Good luck!
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Helping You Remove the Dreaded Google Penalty Slap
Comments
Post a Comment