I got penalized

None of my keywords show up in the searches although my site is indexed. At the time of the penalty i had most of my targeted keywords in top 10. I'm asking what do you guys think was likely the cause? I dont think it's work trying to save this domain, new one i guess right?

The most likely causes:

- Bought 175 PBN posts

- Bought 30 very expensive and HQ SAPE links (~3$ per link)

- Bought 200 manual HQ comments.

- Bought 150 LQ bot made nofollow comments for diluting my d0follow links since i had only d0follow but at the time of penalty i still had like 95-98% d0follow, i gues they didnt indexed fast enough.

- Made ~150 web2.0 links (on ampedpages, Bcz,edublogs, fc2, iamsport, onesmablog, rediff,unblog.fr, webgarede blog, wikidot, wordpress) using gsa ser (serengines service) that never got indexed even though i added them to an indexer service and more than 7 days have passed since i sent them and from which ~50 were deleted. Maybe these sites reported me to google since i spammed them?

- Backlinks speed. I dont know if it was too fast or not, please give your opinion. Also the domain was registered on 11 october so pretty fresh site.


- Had another site that was manually penalized, deindexed and message received in webmaster tools (now called Google Search Console). But i dont think this had any impact, i dont think google registered me somehow on the "blacklist of people that will never rank a site again", or did it.....O.O? Also the new site wasnt added in webmaster tools/google search console.

- H@ck niche based website. Even though i dont think this was the cause since there's still a ton of this kind of websites.

- Used nulled wordpress theme

- Switched a few times back and forth between my old hosting provider and the new since i had issues on both.

Onsite SEO was 100% natural, no keyword stuffing or anything like that. Anchor text percentage was also perfectly normal, the biggest percentage was 14% for a keyword.

Hopefully my failure can became a case study so please feel free to give your 2 cents.

High chance because of your SAPE links, i had sites penalized in just 14 days after pointing SAPE links.

Other than that, the rest looks ok. You should add your site WMT and see what message you get.

Peter Ngo said:

High chance because of your SAPE links, i had sites penalized in just 14 days after pointing SAPE links.

Other than that, the rest looks ok. You should add your site WMT and see what message you get.

Click to expand...

So 1 vote for SAPE, thanks

Adding the site to WMT after i got the penalty? Do you think i'll still receive a message? Because in the eyes of google i'm dead.

Your site is still indexed in google. Too early to jump to conclusions.

Everything seems fine to me except the link velocity which could be the reason for google dance.

Give it some time.

nobody00 said:

So 1 vote for SAPE, thanks

Adding the site to WMT after i got the penalty? Do you think i'll still receive a message? Because in the eyes of google i'm dead.

Click to expand...

Yep you will still receive a message from WMT, my guess is unnatural inbound links but lets see, it should take more than 24 hours to receive the message.

Nah Google has better stuffs to do, what you should do now is create another site in the same niche, don't leave any footprint this time and lets see

SeoWrecker said:

Your site is still indexed in google. Too early to jump to conclusions.

Everything seems fine to me except the link velocity which could be the reason for google dance.

Give it some time.

Click to expand...

I know what google dance is and this isn't. In serpbook i have all my keywords with down arrow. The green one is just serpbook inaccuracy because i searched them all manually and they're gone.

Most likely a manual penalty. Check Google Search Console for penalty messages - in the hack niches it's quite common to receive either pure spam, thin content or unnatural inbound link penalties. Just part of the niche. Having said that, you can try a double 301 to recover rankings.

The main reason is link diversity and drip feeding.... you have built more than 300 links in a day but there in no that much of links are built in previous days. And one more thing is - you have built LQ links only to your website, we have diversify the links from various kind of back links.

These types of LQ links gave you the instant results but not for long term.

Where did you buy those SAPE links?

Just wondering...

Generally, you get penalized because you have violated the rules and regulations that are normally set by the organization. If you were usinjg ways that are very illegal, then chances are high that you messed up everything. Be sure that every time you are working around something, you are sure of what is needed and not bridging the set rules. I am sorry for that.

I may be wrong, but I searched you post history an have drawn a conclusion about what you did with SAPE. Again, I may be wrong, and please correct me if I am, but it seems you went through that "How to SAPE" guide, and then followed that method. The thing about doing it that way, as the article mentions, is that the majority of it is crap. Before you get the hang of things, you should have a few dummy websites to play with.

The other thing I noticed, was that you've been searching for an indexing service and found one, and then indexed all your links at once.

I started a website 1 day after you, and went on a similar link-building rampage, but while not worrying about indexing my own links. My ranking is SLOWLY improving, and GWT/GSC has only registerred 3 inbound links to my site, yet I've spent nearly $2k on link-building. I've got quite a few other projects I'm working on, so I'm not as bothered by the situation, but I am noticing a steady, daily rise in the SERPs.

Keep working on your site, consider disavowing those SAPE links, and keep link-building. Take a break on indexing. You'll be fine. Your site remains indexed and no ill messages from The Big G.

it seems unnatural links in a short period

Tosmekop said:

Where did you buy those SAPE links?

Just wondering...

Click to expand...

From sape.ru

Do you use sape ?

Tosmekop said:

I may be wrong, but I searched you post history an have drawn a conclusion about what you did with SAPE. Again, I may be wrong, and please correct me if I am, but it seems you went through that "How to SAPE" guide, and then followed that method. The thing about doing it that way, as the article mentions, is that the majority of it is crap. Before you get the hang of thinks, you should have a few dummy websites to play with.

The other thing I noticed, was that you've been searching for an indexing service and found one, and then indexed all your links at once.

I started a website 1 day after you, and went on a similar link-building rampage, but while not worrying about indexing my own links. My ranking is SLOWLY improving, and GWT/GSC has only registerred 3 inbound links to my site, yet I've spent nearly $2k on link-building. I've got quite a few other projects I'm working on, so I'm not as bothered by the situation, but I am noticing a steady, daily rise in the SERPs.

Keep working on your site, consider disavowing those SAPE links, and keep link-building. Take a break on indexing. You'll be fine. Your site remains indexed and no ill messages from The Big G.

Click to expand...

I think i did a pretty good filtering of the crappy links, only 20+ TF, 50+ referring domains and all manually checked. I used the bulk checker from majestic so most of them were filtered on this step.

About indexing, i havent added the PBN, comments and sape links to any indexer since most of them were already indexed, only the web2.0 links made with gsa ser and that didnt even indexed for some reason.

I dont have to disavow the sape links since i can just remove them.

I think ill start with a fresh domain, i dont think its worth the time with this website, once google take you in their cross hairs its pretty much over in the hack niche.

SAPE links are very safe now but on long run cant help you.Manualy review Google don't make.This is done by latest Google update.
I think you user harsh work when you think you are penalized.You are not because you say your web site is still indexed.
I can help you to solve this if you are willing on this.Will cost you some fees but I think all can be reverted.

Could be:

Sape, PBN posts all pointed to your site with money anchors. And you probably want to see how many social signals you dripped before you unleashed the onslaught of links to your site too.

A low velocity suddenly undone by a huge quantity of links with no correlating signals such as social signal activity, and all if not most of using money anchors is a pretty obvious sign of serp manipulation.

I'd probably get rid of the sape links first, drip a bunch social signals followed by diversity links to dilute your anchor text percentages first. Then drip social signals to those links too. Followed by more relevant PBN posts with social signals , and build tier two links to those.


The above is provided you do NOT have a manual penalty. Good luck.

What you did it's called SEO spam, of course you got penalized for this

oni365 said:

What you did it's called SEO spam, of course you got penalized for this

Click to expand...

Seo spam afaik is thousands of links a day not ~700 links in total

So this is what i plan to do next, hopefully this will take care of most of the likely causes.

- build a new site
- get a wider diversity of links not just pbn and comments
- drip social signals along the backlinks since i added none on the penalized site.
- make 30-50% of the anchors as naked url and domain since on the penalized site i only used money anchors.
- build the links slower 50-100 links a day
- get more nofollow links
- try sape on a test domain placing them at a slower rate like ~5 a day.

thx everyone for their input, got the message in search console. I thinks its penguin 4.0 that took me down, too many links in a short period of time with too big percentage of money anchor texts

Yeah, I thought that it's that message. I had a site that had sit on the first place and all keywords dropped to 40 and 50+ place and got the same penalty. Now with my new sites I write better posts and write more often to keep my sites updated. I've been good since then, but you never know.
BTW I didn't even try to recover the site, but the best bet is to make a new one. Good luck!