Came in about 6 hours ago. Still holding the rankings but I assume they are going to drop soon. I assume these messages aren't sent out willy nilly, am I right? Part of me wants to believe it was by accident, lol, and everything will be fine -- but i know it's not true. First manual penalty I have had... and it blows after spending money on high powered links to a 8 year old domain and finally reaching the first page only to strikeout. The nerve of them to tell me to do their job and go find these so called bad links and disavow them and "hope for a reconsideration"..... Just sharing my frustration about getting back into the game and then getting stuck out 4 months in. -Sean
Get back at them and build more sites.That's literally all you can do except disavow the penalty. That never really works I guess.
That's why, networking is the best way for link building. Buying links will get you a penalty now or then.
Agreed, start a new one, I have had a couple of my sites hammered with a manual penalty, one actually came back and just began ranking after 3 years, but who wants to wait that long.
Just echoing the posters above - it's very hard to come back from a manual action. Abandon this domain and start anew. Save the content from your penalized site and re-write it for the new site.
Once you get the manual review, there's no point to even disavow because it'll take a very long time for them to look at it.
I got the same crap few days ago. Yes, my favorite site, old domain and all time and money spent ... So I did some study and asked few friends in business: Well, there is no freaking chance to get back. All that "reconsideration BS" is a formal way to let you know that you might still get lucky. No, only one case was and it took about 1 year. So, forget about it. It is manually set to de-index. And it is very easy thing to do, but impossible to undo. Just get new (not expired, not deleted) very new domains and start over. Sucks, yeah?
You obviously wasn't careful enough with building your backlink profile. Learn from it and move on, don't buy links from public places. Repurpose the old content on a new domain.
I understand others are telling you to give up but if its your money site, I recommend that you start cleaning links and keep record of things. I have used removeem in the past and went through all the links. Penalty was eventually removed after 1 year. Avoid buying links from anyone selling PBN links here because there is no such thing as PBN if its being sold in a public forum. If you have patience, i recommend building your own network and if that network gets penalized, you can remove the links right away and keep your money site protected.
I have been there multiple times during the last five years. Think of it as a part of the game, now rebuild your empire.
