^^And if you can't delete the links, then move the site right away to a new domain, change the content on the old domain to spun crap, and start new projects to your new website.
The point: Don't waste time on a penalty - very, very rarely does anyone recover. I would just move the site, as in today.
1. Never delete your SER history in projects. Ever.
2. Very Important: Export all of the links you want to remove. You will need this later.
3. Right click on a project and select Set Status=>remove links
4. Hit start, and let it run for a while. You only really need to remove Tier 1 links. Frequently change to Set Status=>Reverify. In SER, a link hasn't been removed until it is reverified.
5. When you are done, export the links that are left over. SER isn't perfect, but you should be able to get most of them.
6. Compare the original list of links in Excel with the ones remaining after removal. You want to isolate the links you've removed and save them to a .txt file.
7. GSA is not perfect. If GSA has been able to get rid of 90% of the links, it should generally be good enough.
8. Run the deleted links through an indexing service. Google can't deindex links if it doesn't know they've been removed.
9. File a reconsideration request. Be truthful. Tell them how naughty you've been and swear allegiance to Matt Cutts. See an exorcist. Prepare an alter to sacrifice your first born child.
10. You can actually upload the links you've removed. Wait and pray.
11. You can get back 2 types of responses: they can decline, but they will generally give some clues as to what links still need to be removed.
12. If they remove the penalty, you still aren't totally out of the woods. It could take a month or longer for your rankings to improve. Rest assured that they will not come back all the way. You still may have a problem with a Penguin penalty, which is algorithmic, if your anchor text profile of remaining links is bad.
13. You will also be on permanent double secret probation. If you get hit again, it will be far worse, or permanent.
Doing a blanket disavowal will not work. Google forces you to take as many links as you can down by yourself. You will need to contact webmasters several times and ask them nicely to remove links. You will need to document this and upload it to Google.
Personally, I would use Link Disavowal as a last resort. You can be sure that Google is keeping a record of disavowals, and a domain that has lots of disavowals = bad neighborhood = gets everybody screwed.
^^Incredible post. The best I have ever read on the forum. That why I really like this guy, lol =D>
This is a clinic on how to do it with an extremely valuable website: Read: Client Website, Corporate Website or Big-Time Affiliate Website (as in $100,000+ per year).
If you just have the run-of-the-mill affiliate website, I would move it to a new domain. Works like a charm, and you will get your rankings up 10X faster.
Satans_Apprentice, ron -- Classic Advice... I posted this before... but it may be valuable to some. I won a reconsideration on a very valuable site before...
For those that ever have to, I have included what a "winning" reconsideration request looks like here"
Next we detail the process and the actions performed on the site http://domain.com, with the objective of optimizing the quality of it and following strictly and in comply with Google Quality Guidelines. We try to describe in detail what has been done for you to have a clear and specific statement of what happened and the actions we have taken to comply with your guidelines.
> Symptoms:
- Drastic reduction of the organic traffic site, consequence of lower rankings at Google search results. - Drastic reduction of Google´s activity on the site: - "Pages crawled per day": High: 60188 - Average: 4,738 - Low: 29 - "Kilobytes downloaded per day": High: 1,530,234 - Average: 127,542 - Low: 485
> Diagnose:
We proceeded to conduct a full audit of the site and identified two potential situations, according to your guidelines, which could adversely affect the performance of the site:
1) +40000 Landing Pages created from the same content, generating a big structure of duplicate content.
2) Backlinks from sites structures created for the sole purpose of positioning the site (unnatural links).
> Performed Tasks:
1) SEO Site Audit, to detect Information Architecture issues, Usability issues, and LinkBuilding issues, etc. to fix and improve them.
2) The duplicate content structure was completely eliminated (+40000 pages).
3) All external links from sites like mentioned next, were deleted: domain:blah.com domain:blah.com domain:blah.com domain:blah.com
4) From what is mentioned in the previous point, the information architecture of the site was completely changed taking into account issues such as:
a) Helping accessibility by search engines (sitemap xml, html sitemaps, robots.txt, breadcrumbs creation, optimization of internal links, 301 Redirections when was Necessary and optimization of 404 errors, etc).
b) Analysis of site´s usability in order to improve users experience at it.
5) Original and dedicated and user oriented contents were created for each page of the site.
In conclusion, we want to let you know that we have carefully read your guidelines and used the information from your blog and forum in order to correct and optimize the quality of the site. We took the time and have worked hard to implement these improvements that complies with your search engine guidelines and turn into a better quality for our website.
Right you are Ron. If a "disposable" domain has been penalized, ditch it and start over with a new one. You can waste months dealing with detox. If it's a branded, corporate site, prepare for hours and days of aggravation.
BTW: Ron knows all about "Double Secret Probation". LOL. Most of our audience won't get that line...
If you switch domains, as well as the fantasic advice above, I'd suggest you add the new content to the screwed domain first, get some links to it, ping get all the new content indexed before putting the old good content onto a new domain. If the content of both sites is cached at the same time, you're gonna run into serious problems. It is recoverable simply by getting the old sites new content fully indexed but it's easy to avoid the issue in the first place as it'll take 2-5 weeks for the new site to recover.
Great thread guys, i've never tried to recover a penalised domain before. I usually just move to the next one - But i might give it a shot next time after reading all that info.
@marko77 - I can't comment on cloning over content to a new domain immediately for a long term site that was never intended to be penalized or tank, but when my churn and burn 3-5 month sites tank, I clone them same day and move the content over to the new domain immediately. Never had an issue waiting for the old domain + content to clear the cache. It takes forever for old content to be removed from the index/cache. If there is an element of Panda that is an offline filter, this might not be the best move for a site that is long term.
Cutts did introduce the notion of "entity based penalties" at SMX(I believe that's where it was). I interpreted this as an "add-on" to Panda that would parse newly crawled content against a database of previously penalized bodies of content and HTML structures and then the penalty could pass this way, since most of us just clone everything when it gets penalized.
Yea i think you are safer to have it re-written, for like $4 an article re-write it's not worth the risk. I've never cloned the context exactly as before i must admit, not that i tested it, it just seemed too obvious that G would eventually catch that scheme.
Comments
> Symptoms:
- Drastic reduction of the organic traffic site, consequence of lower rankings at Google search results.
- Drastic reduction of Google´s activity on the site:
- "Pages crawled per day": High: 60188 - Average: 4,738 - Low: 29
- "Kilobytes downloaded per day": High: 1,530,234 - Average: 127,542 - Low: 485
> Diagnose:
We proceeded to conduct a full audit of the site and identified two potential situations, according to your guidelines, which could adversely affect the performance of the site:
1) +40000 Landing Pages created from the same content, generating a big structure of duplicate content.
2) Backlinks from sites structures created for the sole purpose of positioning the site (unnatural links).
> Performed Tasks:
1) SEO Site Audit, to detect Information Architecture issues, Usability issues, and LinkBuilding issues, etc. to fix and improve them.
2) The duplicate content structure was completely eliminated (+40000 pages).
3) All external links from sites like mentioned next, were deleted:
domain:blah.com
domain:blah.com
domain:blah.com
domain:blah.com
4) From what is mentioned in the previous point, the information architecture of the site was completely changed taking into account issues such as:
a) Helping accessibility by search engines (sitemap xml, html sitemaps, robots.txt, breadcrumbs creation, optimization of internal links, 301 Redirections when was Necessary and optimization of 404 errors, etc).
b) Analysis of site´s usability in order to improve users experience at it.
5) Original and dedicated and user oriented contents were created for each page of the site.
In conclusion, we want to let you know that we have carefully read your guidelines and used the information from your blog and forum in order to correct and optimize the quality of the site. We took the time and have worked hard to implement these improvements that complies with your search engine guidelines and turn into a better quality for our website.
Best Regards
Your Name Here
Nice post @coneh34d !!
Man, you and @satans_apprenticeare just lighting it up. There's a reason I like this forum more than the others.
:-*Cutts did introduce the notion of "entity based penalties" at SMX(I believe that's where it was). I interpreted this as an "add-on" to Panda that would parse newly crawled content against a database of previously penalized bodies of content and HTML structures and then the penalty could pass this way, since most of us just clone everything when it gets penalized.
See here for more information: http://sugarrae.com/online-marketing/seo/meet-search-engines-smx-west-2014/
I've never cloned the context exactly as before i must admit, not that i tested it, it just seemed too obvious that G would eventually catch that scheme.