Manual Penalty Revoked – A Case Study

Search Engine marketing/Optimization has become the world’s fastest changing industry. You can’t even guess what’s coming in the next morning and the total industry leaves stunned!

Like these, two of big shifts by the Major search engine (Google) are known as Google Panda (For Poor Quality Web Content) & Google Penguin (Fighting with web Spam). Since the days these two algorithms have been rolled out numbers of businesses are forced to shut down along with lots of SEO Companies.

Google Panda is soft, but it’s sometime beyond imagination to predict the depth of loss due to Google Penguin.

“Getting hit by Penguin is not a Joke or don’t just take it lightly. It can completely rip off the business or website traffic” If you get an email from Google “stating the number of unnatural back links” or observe a huge fall of your website organic traffic then don’t just delay. Email me for a Free Consultation.
It’s really important to get the right doctor for consultation when you have two choices such as get it recover or let it die (shut the website down).

Below I am going to share with you three of our Google Penguin Recovery stories directly from the account Managers.

How Salintherapy.com Recovered & got back the ranking & Traffic:

08th August 2014, will be a memorable day for the team of Salintherapy.com as well as Rosalin being the account manager for this project. Here is the email behind the happiness and proof of hard work delivered behind the project.

“Oh My God!! Oh My God!! We did it” – was the first line that came out impulsively with a loud voice without caring other colleagues sitting beside me. Then it was like a huge list of congratulations from other colleagues, managers, my boss and the ultimate person the “Livia “Owner of www.salinetherapy.com.

Here comes the Story:

This was my first penguin recovery project assigned to me by my boss just after my recent promotion and hope you can believe the intention behind it as well as the pressure. Two of my seniors have already succeeded in the Penguin recovery which is going to be discussed below and now it’s my term.

The early months of 2014 I was given the task of “Google Penguin Recovery of Salinetherapy.com.” Before we got work in MAY-14, the website got an email from Google stating unnatural back links on 04th Oct-2013 and another SEO agency made the things worst without understand the importance of that email.

Problem Diagnosis:

Being a content rich website, having original and useful content along with a neat & clean design, it was unexpected to be penalized. It didn’t take much time to confirm that the penalization is a gift of those poor, toxic, spam links created by his previously hired numerous SEO companies (link builders). Here We (I with my Team) were ready to hammer down those links and go for a reconsideration request as well as link disavow. But the problem was it had a huge list of unnatural back links, which were needed to be checked via various tools as well as manually.

We decided to collect all the back links created for the website as we didn’t wanted to spare a single poor link, using the best tools in the industry as well as the past link building reports. It helped us to get the maximum indexed as well as non indexed back links, over optimized keywords, quality backs being the reason of ranking achieved, as well as site wide links.

It sounds very easy when you plan this task, but in the reality it’s a challenge and mess with spreadsheets. Collecting reports using each tool, uniting them at one place, filtering them based on different parameters and so and so…

Operation process:

By Using Google Webmaster tool, Ahrefs, Link Research Tool, Open site explore, SEM Rush, Link Detox and couple of more tools along with all the link reports our customer had from the previous vendors.

Finally we found a huge list of links from various types of website was needed to be verified.

Identify the toxic/poor back links

First we targeted to remove the Site wide links, poor directory links, Book mark links, and articles pinged over article directories (for the purposed of getting number of links), irrelevant links and links from website’s having poor DA & Alexa rank.

Link Removal Process:

It was almost a process of one and half month and I was worried….

Hence, I decided to recheck most of the back links manually as my seniors did, though it was a matter of time. So now we were all set to do things manually as well as take the help of some extremely cool tools that were provided by the company.

This time we used all possible ways to get a link removed. We sent reminders to webmasters, called them, pinged over FB, twitted them and got some more links removed. This time we focused more on getting some links edited as well as no-followed.

In this process we got so many emails from webmasters asking of money (Which we reported to Google) and some ignored our messages with scolding. It was like hell to deal with directories, Bookmarks, blog comments as well as some extremely unprofessional article directories where neither the Logins were working nor the webmasters were responding.

Prepared another list of successfully deleted, edited & no-followed links as well as some links were from nicer pages which we just edited to maintain the link diversity and balance the over optimization. This time we were ready with a disavow report of links whom we couldn’t got able to delete due to numerous reasons.

Amending Disavow report:

We went for the second reconsideration request along with the “link disavow report” and it was near about two and half months of the campaign duration and figures crossed.

“Just like shattering the dreams I got another message after couple of weeks from Google that we still have some more unnatural links pointing towards the website.”

Change the date of this as I have said above its more than 2 months we started the work.
Without losing the hope, we again started the process and re-contacted some more people as well as deleted some more links and I am sure we had to scarifies some good links also in the suspicion but I took a special note of them even.

Along with the same process, we focused more on removing the site wide links and got ready for the third reconsideration request on 24th July as well as filed another updated link disavow report on 29th JULY 2014.

This time before going for a third reconsideration request…I worked on the On-page factors of the website along with a little content optimization.

TYPES OF LINKS:

The types of links I was looking for (and subsequently found nearly all of) included:

• Followed links from advertorials, sponsored posts and press releases

• Back links from low quality or irrelevant sites

• Back links with low link influence score

• Unnatural overuse of followed exact-match keyword anchor text

• A large number of back links from the same domain, Site wide links

• A large number of referring domains from the same IP address

For every link I reviewed, I marked my analysis down in the master spreadsheet, noted down the contact details of the sites I wanted to get in touch with for link removal or no follow requests.

The Ultimate Aim was “Link removals, no follow requests and disavow”. Here is the snap shot of the result and the success behind the hard work:

Manual spam action revoked: