Manual Penalty VS Automated Penalty - Our Google Experience

[420friendly]

Ok ya'll going to give a little info on our dealing with G for the last couple months... first a little about us.

Site: adult niche EMD .com as well as the .net and .org each domain about 12years old been #1 for tons of terms related to my biz for a long time, even above wiki.

Monthly Google Searches: Global 20M / Local 5M

Traffic: 50k+ daily uniques

User Stats: Bounce Rate 20-30% / Time on site 3min average

Site Income: 6figs

Linking: bought 2 rounds of linking from BH vender around 1/1/12 other than that mostly links from users and social (however had about 10k links from Youtube spam video accounts, DOH!...)

Date of Unnatural Links email on subdomain.site,com: 3/22/12 Notice of unnatural links detected.

Traffic After Penalty: Penalty went into effect on 4/11/12 tanking traffic to 10k give or take ;( Still indexed but way in the back of the bus. Hell, 1k of those are people typing in our EMD .com LOL

Movement: none, still back of the bus to date

Stuff I did to try and combat: I deleted my G webmaster tools, then deleted all subdomains going to site waited 1 week and opened up another webmaster tools just under the .com and boom email was instantly there after I verified the site even though originally it came in only on a subdomain. So then I was like oh well the penalty must have carried over...

I then decided to remove about 5-10k in "spammy" links including suspending our own youtube accounts (mass flagged the videos LOL) and also added some PR5-7 do follow links under tons of different terms (click here, link etc.). still nothing, no movement...

After racking our brains over and over again as to why we can not seem to move at all, I decided to see if the penalty was manual or automated (I was under the impression that the unnatural links email was always automated). If automated I would just wait it out... if manual you really need to take action.

Well, I read a lot of people where doing the re-consideration request with decent results and get the auto email that your penalty was automated and will not be reviewed hurry up and wait. So I decided that I needed to know if it was really manual or automated like I thought. Crap got an email back saying that my site will be reviewed in the next couple weeks sit tight... meaning I was manually dinged (I assume for the 1000's of spam Youtube accounts lol).

The email we sent them was very politically correct laying out what happened (outsourced seo), what we did to try and fix (deleted 1000's of links) and what we have done for future marketing (in house seo only) so that we 100% adhere to G rules/policies.

We are ready for the review as we can show and they can see that we have done everything we can to remove as much "spammy" linking as possible.

I will keep you guys updated on what happens in our situation... we really hope they have mercy on us!
We are hoping our experience will help others in the biz of SEO

Cheers!

 

[Alexx11]

Hope that manual reveview goes well, please keep us posted and wish you the best

 

[parasitus84]

I'm on the same boat, mate. Did exactly the same and got the same response Still waiting...

 

[kbos2hm]

I did have quite a few spammy links moved my blog to another domain kinda like starting again but that worked for me usually with Google they can be nice if they want and it is good for them. Good luck !!!

 

[turdface]

Good luck with your site. I'm going to say that the rules for adult sites are probably a little different than the rules for the rest of sites, though. So your situation may be a bit different.

Adult, pharma, and to a lesser extent gambling all sort of play by different SEO rules

 

[true3000]

Good luck man...hopefully your site won't be under even more scrutiny now that they'll be manually reviewing it...

 

[jon_xx_x]

So how do you figure out if it's manual or auto? You send in a reconsider and it will tell you if it was auto or not?
Here's my message, does it seem auto or manual review?

Dear site owner or webmaster of

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

 

[420friendly]

So how do you figure out if it's manual or auto? You send in a reconsider and it will tell you if it was auto or not?
Here's my message, does it seem auto or manual review?

Dear site owner or webmaster of blablabla.com

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

You will not really know until you submit for reconsideration... I was also thinking mine was auto as a lot of peeps got the same email as me however mine was manual due to the reply email I got after clicking reconsider request (Google: we will check your site out in the next couple weeks) btw... putting your site url in post on the forum is not good idea

 

[navimeister]

Buying high PR links probably got you in more trouble. I am in the same situation. I had used BMR and I suspect they are the reason I was hit with the message. OK I thought, time to buy some other blog network links, high PR of course, to replace the lost juice. I have waited a month and no movement happened, but constantly sinking rankings. I decided to submit a reconsideration request to see if it was manual.. I have got an answer in email saying that my site is still violating webmaster guidelines and they gave 3 examples, ALL high PR links that I recently bought. So I am in the process of removing them all. Also, after the email I have seen a bigger drop, like 200 places for all keywords. Sucks!

 

[parasitus84]

Buying high PR links probably got you in more trouble. I am in the same situation. I had used BMR and I suspect they are the reason I was hit with the message. OK I thought, time to buy some other blog network links, high PR of course, to replace the lost juice. I have waited a month and no movement happened, but constantly sinking rankings. I decided to submit a reconsideration request to see if it was manual.. I have got an answer in email saying that my site is still violating webmaster guidelines and they gave 3 examples, ALL high PR links that I recently bought. So I am in the process of removing them all. Also, after the email I have seen a bigger drop, like 200 places for all keywords. Sucks!

But what if somebody else submitted a link to your site or you did a guest blog post? How much f... white seo do they want? I'm getting frustrated with them. Next thing will be: We've found a link to your site on a tennis forum. You've written over 3,500 posts but our secret thematic research based on your gmail account tells us that you don't plays tennis but cricket. Website banned!

 

[420friendly]

Buying high PR links probably got you in more trouble. I am in the same situation. I had used BMR and I suspect they are the reason I was hit with the message. OK I thought, time to buy some other blog network links, high PR of course, to replace the lost juice. I have waited a month and no movement happened, but constantly sinking rankings. I decided to submit a reconsideration request to see if it was manual.. I have got an answer in email saying that my site is still violating webmaster guidelines and they gave 3 examples, ALL high PR links that I recently bought. So I am in the process of removing them all. Also, after the email I have seen a bigger drop, like 200 places for all keywords. Sucks!

How long did you have to wait for the reply email, was it automatic or did you have to wait a week or so?

 

[navimeister]

Just checked, the email came 4 days after I submitted reconsideration request. I think it's a template but someone definitely looked at it because they have given examples of bad links. I quickly removed those example links and some others and replied in email. Answer came in 2 days later, stating that there are still inorganic links, giving 3 more examples and asking me to reply with my efforts once I cleaned up. I think it was another template.

 

[reallife]

Thanks for the detailed info. I have a ton of adult sites all hit --- and (DOH!) I have hit all of them, at one time or another, with Xrumer blasts. (The domains are all aged and the blasts did great at the time lol). I haven't bothered trying to submit for reconsideration since I obviously can't remove all the bad incoming links. Did you have anything like that going on as well, or mainly just the YT links that were problematic?

 

[googlemonster]

Just checked, the email came 4 days after I submitted reconsideration request. I think it's a template but someone definitely looked at it because they have given examples of bad links. I quickly removed those example links and some others and replied in email. Answer came in 2 days later, stating that there are still inorganic links, giving 3 more examples and asking me to reply with my efforts once I cleaned up. I think it was another template.

its a bot no one looks at it

 

[Windmill]

Spill please. What were these bad link examples that they give? What type of links?

 

[navimeister]

They were all from high PR blogs, from services here on BHW and others. The funny thing is I bought them after the initial webmaster tools notice after the BMR crackdown.

 

[rippy]

Some insider info.

They will look at your linking profile.
It should look something like this:

TOP 5 Anchors used to link to your website:
1. www.sitename.com
2. sitename.com
3. sitename
4. site name
5. read more

If it looks something like above you'll be fine.

If looks something like this:
1. buy viagra
2. buy cialis
3. Fuck and suck
4. barely legal
5. www.sitename.com

This is not good.

 

[dirtythirty]

...
The email we sent them was very politically correct laying out what happened (outsourced seo),...
Cheers!

Woah, that's a first for me! You admitted that you outsourced SEO? Is this a common thing for high traffic sites that play by different rules? I've always read that if you are hit, then shut the he11 up and don't give Google any more info than they already have!

 

[420friendly]

They were all from high PR blogs, from services here on BHW and others. The funny thing is I bought them after the initial webmaster tools notice after the BMR crackdown.

was the domain example they gave you a de-indexed url by any chance??

 

[420friendly]

Woah, that's a first for me! You admitted that you outsourced SEO? Is this a common thing for high traffic sites that play by different rules? I've always read that if you are hit, then shut the he11 up and don't give Google any more info than they already have!

Yeah we are to busy most the time to get seo work done as this is just one site of many that have daily updates etc. etc. Not to mention SEO is so damn boring LOL.

Unfortunately the domain is a very high priced EMD and there is no way we are going to "abandon" it for a while unless we have exhausted every option, at wich time we will just move to the net or org