GOOGLE PENALTIES- RECOVERY GUIDE - Upendra Rana (best books to read for beginners .TXT) 📗

request in the first try.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warning 3: Unnatural Links to Your Site (Impacts Links)

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a little bit more nuance when it comes to unnatural links that are pointing to your site. The difference between this warning and the one above is pretty much contextual. Google figured out that your site was involved in some unnatural link building schemes that point back to your site; if this is still unclear, Matt Cutts (former head of webmaster team at Google) did explain the impact links here.

 

As he states, this may be a result of your own doings or may appear without any involvement on your part. Google takes that into account when they’re considering a manual action. They will only penalize the affected part of your site.

Be aware! Google will want proof of your efforts dealing with unnatural links and removing them.

 

 

To clear the confusion out, even if you don’t have any control over these type of links, you should try to identify them and do your best to remove them. If you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking.

 

If you want your penalty to be revoked you should include any proof of the process with your reconsideration request. You can show emails sent to webmasters that have unnatural links pointing to your site, requesting a link removal.

 

Every step that shows your intentions of cleansing the site should go with the reconsideration request. It shows Google that you are committed and willing to do anything to go on the right path.

 

 

 

  

Recover from Google Penalty

 

 

 

4.1. When to use and not to Use the Google Disavow Tool

 

 

The Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process is simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard. The changes made to the algorithm, “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

 

 

 

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though, overall, the objective of the Disavow Links tool was to be used as a resort to resolve link problems, this tool is not as simple as it seems.

 

You may want to use this tool if you stumble upon a couple of problems:

 

Your site was the target of a negative SEO campaign.

 

Your search engine rankings are dropping fast because you have been penalized by a link penalty.

 

You received  a  “manual  link  penalty”  message  from  Google

 

Webmaster Tools.

 

For all the above you can easily solve your problem with a tool that will guide you through the process.

 

 

When consider using it, you should take into consideration a couple of things.

First of all, you need to make a quick audit on your link profile and see which links are harming your site the most. You need to carefully determine the bad and the good and see which links could influence your site’s ranking drop.

 

 

If you’re not careful you might end up losing some valid links that would otherwise pour some of that precious “link juice”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another detail you have to take into account is the fact that, before appealing to the disavow tool you could try to remove the bad links manually by contacting the owners of the websites that point to you. Before panicking and running straight for the disavow solution, you should carefully try to clean up your mess the old fashion way. It may sound like a laborious task but you can make use of third-party tools that can help you fasten with the unnatural link detection and outreach.

 

The whole concept of disavowing unnatural links must be taken very seriously as it may also harm your ranking.

This process should not be done on haste. You should take your time weeding out the bad and you should only submit a list to be disavowed only if you’re 100% sure of the links that you send.

 

 

You should also remember to try to manually remove the harmful links not only to show Google your good intentions but also because you don’t know how long the disavow process could take. While, these are cases when Google Disavow would have its best usage, there are also scenarios when you should not disavow the links:

 

  

 

No Drastic Ranking Drop.

 

 

The reasons for which you may experience a drastic Google ranking drop may vary from website to website and in generally there is a serious guideline violation. But if you don’t experience that you shouldn’t be panicking. You may just be outranked by a competitor. As a consequence, there is no need to rush and get the disavow tool from your link survival kit. You should try to analyze and track your competitor and see what is his SEO and content strategy. Also, you should maybe step up and improve your own approaches.

 

Not Sure if it is an Algorithmic Penalty.

 

 

When you receive a manual penalty the situation is pretty clear. Especially if you make use of Google Webmaster Tools (which we strongly recommend). You will receive a message in which they warn you about the actions taken against you. While this is easy and

 

straightforward, an algorithmic penalty is not that obvious. You’ll have to make a personal assessment to see if it’s a penalty or it’s just the fact that the links are low quality. And if it is indeed an algorithmic penalty, what is harming your site’s ranking?

 

 

 

 

 

Small Drop in Rankings.

 

 

It may just be a quick road bump in the road. You may always experience a flux in ranking that is unpredictable. As a golden rule, if you don’t have an explicit message from Google that you’ve been penalized or if you know you have an unnatural link profile, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Your ranking could just recover on its own after a day or two. Also, a small drop in search engine ranking may just be influenced by the fact that you have many low quality links pointing to your site.

 

For Testing Purposes.

 

Just don’t toy around with this tool, you may get fried!

 

 

 

The final advice on when not to use the Google disavow tool would be to not just use it so you can see how it works. Cyrus Shepard made such an experiment and here are his “sad” findings. The saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is very much true in this case. This is one of those tools that you just don’t want to learn at your own cost. It’s too powerful and the damage it may do if misused may be irreversible.

 

 

4.2. Should You Disavow No-follow Links?

 

 

The short answer is that there is no exact answer on this. There are 2 major, contradictory, opinions on this:

 

No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [GOOGLE APPROVED]

 

Yes. You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

 

 

 

 

Why shouldn’t I disavow No-follow links?

 

 

First of all there is an official Google representative that confirmed this. His name is John Muller and he is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. “No-follow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

 

Why should I consider disavowing No-follow links?

 

 

Nothing confirmed here, only some rants:

 

 

No-follow links are possibly transferring ranking juice in certain cases and there are also, some studies that prove that.

 

Google doesn’t always say the “correct” things. Negative SEO has been working for years, but the Google Guidelines denied it vehemently.

 

 

 

Google changed their wording, a while ago, in order to reflect the possibility of someone else ability to affect your rankings.

 

What about “link building” campaigns that dilute the signals of naturalness using no-follow link acquisition?

 

I bet you are confused now. The question still remains:

 

 

Should I disavow No-follow Links?

The safest bet would be to follow Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links. If a domain is sending both do-follow and no-follow unnatural links, just ask for a full domain disavow there.

 

 

 

 

 

  

People have reported successful recovery stories on both the cases so I think you aren’t risking anything.

 

 

4.3. How to use the Disavow Tool - step by step usage guide

 

 

Even if you are 100% sure that your site has been penalized, there are still some steps that we suggest you go through before before Uploading the Google Disavow File:

 

 

Audit: try to get as much information as you can about what Identifying bad links takes time. These can be links that use overly optimized anchor text (including phrases you haven’t targeted on your own), links from bad neighborhood sites, links from foreign language websites, links from sites created exclusively for SEO purposes, sidebar links etc.

A backlink audit is a complex procedure that must be done constantly; still, if you are in bit of a hurry and you put a sustained effort into it, you might get the job done in one day.

 

 

 

 

Data analysis & interpretation: Analyzing those links might take up as much time as identifying them. Some you might be able to get rid of without the need for disavow. Some may not be as harmful as you assumed at first. And some may actually be more useful than they appear. It’s also likely that not all bad links hurt you in the same way (or as much). Prioritizing is also important.

 

Assuming you have a pretty clear image of your site’s overall activity, 1/2 day should be enough to solve this matter.

 

 

Build solid documentation: Get up to date on Google policies and updates, but also on the history of the external websites that have caused you grief, and maybe even on your own history.

 

 

 

 

You need a compelling story, one that Google will believe, and those are usually the stories that make sense and account for everyone. Gathering the data all together should be another 1/2 day.

 

 

 

Contact Webmasters: If Google sent you a message to say they’ve seen unnatural links to your site, the first move should be to actually remove those links from the web. And in some cases, you may be able to clean up on your own. Write to the site’s webmasters and ask them to have your links taken down. Sometimes it is not possible to get in contact with everybody and sometimes you may have thousands of links on hundreds or even thousands of websites you have to deal with. You have to monitor this permanently and only after you’ve tried to manually fix the situation again and again should you use the Google Disavow Tool.

 

This could be one of the most time-consuming activities, depending of course of the number of webmasters you need to contact. Counting the hours it takes to send e-mails, waiting for answers, reply and so on…I would say at least seven days.

 

 

 

Uploading the Google Disavow File

 

 

After you ensure you actually do need to use the Google Disavow Tool, here are the options you have:

You can disavow all the links that you think are unnatural

 

You can remove just the links that you think are unnatural ( and then do a disavow)

 

 

 

 

In order to do that, first you need to find out which links should be disavowed. You can also spend some time on learning more about unnatural links.

 

Making a disavow file can really be a burden. Imagine that you have to correctly identify ALL