Manual Penalty VS Automated Penalty - Our Google Experience

Nope, all was indexed. +1 for rippy's post. It seems they are going over my keywords. In their first reply they gave example links with keyword4, then when I wrote them look I have cleaned up a shitload of kw4 links, they gave another 3 examples for keyword3. Looks like they are starting at the bottom, as my number one keyword is much more obviously overlinked than the 2 they already mentioned. #2 is http mysite.com. At least it looks natural.

***UPDATE****
Well after we submitted for a review we have received no conformation at all and the position rankings are worse now LOL (not funny)
We just don't get it we have looked at stats 24/7 and just can't seem to get going at all... Here is some more info we have come up with:

For our 2 word keyword 20M monthly global searches:

Currently:

#1 Wiki
Page PR=5
keyword density 2.8
domain= domain.com/wiki/blab_blab_keyword1_keyword2 < domain
no updates last 6 months
Social share of page: 0

#2 Large Corp Video Site (not youtube)
Page PR=4
Keword Density 4.3
domain= domain.com/topic/keyword1-keyword2
no updates last 3 years
Social Share of Page: 250 FB, 20 Tweets, likes 9 G+1's

#3 Large Corp News Site
PR=3
Keyword Density 1.2
domain= domain.com/story/video/bla/bla/bla/blabla-bla-keyword1-keyword2-blablabla
no updates 2 years
Social Share of Page 10 FB, likes 1 G+1

#4 Large Corp News Site
Page PR=4
Keyword Density 0.5
domain= domain.com/pb/rst/funny/blablabla-keyword1-keyword2-blabla
no updates 4 years
Social share of page: 0


#5 Large Corp news Site
Page PR=3
Keyword Density 1.2
domain= domain.com/news/09102010/id=blablablabla+keyword1-keyword2?=52554
no updates 1 year
Social share of page: 0


#? Us
Went from PR4 to PR2 after manual review
Keyword Density 2.4
Domain= keyword1keyword2.com also .net and .org
Update weekly if not daily
Social share of page: 500+ legit tweets/likes 1000+ legit G+1's etc. etc.

Seems to us Google is just fu^&&ng the little guys like all Large Corp.'s eventually do, even though we are exactly what the people are looking for... Google is instead sending the traffic to very large corp sites that have minimum info on the keyword subject (sometimes a stupid news article that is over 5 years old). None of the sites above give any mention as to where someone can go to actually get the real deal of what we do/provide and the customers are looking for. Hell you have to go 3 pages deep before you even find one of our legit competitors LOL

Anyways not sure what there is left that we can do so we are just going to let the site sit for a while and generate just normal social marketing and move on to some other projects we have been wanting to do for a while anyways (create some apps Google not required ;())...

F%^K U GOOGLE AND YOUR S%&T RESULTS THE PUBLIC WILL EVENTUALLY MOVE IF THEY KEEP NOT FINDING WHAT THEY ARE REALLY LOOKING FOR YOU IDIOTS SELL OUTS!

LOVE ALWAYS,
YOUR LOYAL SERVANTS

420friendly said:

F%^K U GOOGLE AND YOUR S%&T RESULTS THE PUBLIC WILL EVENTUALLY MOVE IF THEY KEEP NOT FINDING WHAT THEY ARE REALLY LOOKING FOR YOU IDIOTS SELL OUTS!

Click to expand...

You are absolutely correct, my friend.

I was looking to buy a banner design today. Seriously. I searched Google for "banners", "web banner", "buy banner", etc. I couldn't find any single fucking site that sells banners. Google results are piece of shit. I ended up going to Bing,
searching for "buy banner" and this is how I spent $106 on banner design.

Had the same happen to my adult emd sites. They all went from top 3 for the past ten years to 80 or 117 or worse. Never did any link building for them. To me it looks like emd is a spam factor for adult as seen by Google. Just my 2 cents.

I have some case before month ago. Get message for unnatural links in GWT. I write to Google team for manual review. I breaf explane than i pay for "white hat seo servies"(actual use ALN + other netwroks) and don`t know how to get this links, before i don`t understand how to make SEO, etc. After one month get answer that they review my site but he have yet unnatural links and of course i am in the end of the SERP.

Than delete site from GWT, Analytics. Second buy new domain and new host, add fresh content. And make 301 redirect from old site to new. My 2 cents.

I have quite lot of adult sites, some emds with solo girls names and been hit really hard. I think you are right that google started to hate small guys. It is like in every other industry. 80 years ago there were hundreds of companies creating cars. Now? There is like ten big companies who rules this industry and I'm afraid the same process started on the internet right now. I'm afraid the golden times when average guy could make nice money on the web easily are gone, big guys wants all the money and it looks they have the power to get them. Well, I still wont give up and will fight to the end. There are other traffic sources than google and I still hope that maybe sooner or later we will find way how to rank again.
I also think that the manual review might take ages, how much people must have asked for that after penguin? I sent them lot of my sites also, but I'm really afraid they now have millions of sites to review...

For the most part, my adult sites with few backlinks weren't hit. The ones with lots of backlinks have been replaced, for the most part, by sites with few backlinks. I am starting to believe their approach to adult sites is "There's no way an adult site gets lots of organic links unless it's a tube --- so any adult sites with tons of backlinks must be guilty of something." I'm starting to build new adult sites without many backlinks to see if those will rank.

I guess manual penalty results in ban/deindex.

I guess you had bad link ratio.

Question, if your site is under manual review, will the penalty be there until you fix it, or for a fixed period of time?

How do you figure that because you got an email saying that your site would get reviewed in a few weeks that it was originally manually reviewed.


Who is to say that a person that was not manually reviewed that put in a reconsideration request wouldn't get the same email!?

Would it make any difference though?
I just think some links put up a redflag and it was penalized by automation. That's my assumption.

*UPDATE 6-24-12*
Ok well it has been over 90days since the "penalty" went into place, we have cleaned up our back links and have had a good amount of real social media links added. We also did an entire site re-design with all 100% unique content. We have requested 3 times for a review and all 3 times it has come back as our site still violates bla bla bla... What to do??! I thought that the penalty would fall off after some time like they did for JCPenny's right at 90days as they still had "bad" linking when they had the penalty removed.

We are really looking for advice on what you guys think we should do as we are just baffled... wait longer? 301 site to new domain?

I mean hell we have 1000 new hits every day from people typing in our full url and not our keywords this is really starting to get old. grrrr!

My advice is to move all your content to a brand new (clean) registered domain and remove all the content from the old site. Then keep the original site indexed but delete the content and add only a big banner link on the front page saying the site has moved. DO NOT 301 redirect because that will likely pass on the penalty.

Or if its a niche where you can have 2 separate sites then i would just leave the original site as is....and maybe one day it will recover in next year or so....and in the mean time build a second separate site and ranking that in a Panda / Penguin fashion. Its alot easier to rank a new site these days than it is to fix a broken one.

bestmate said:

My advice is to move all your content to a brand new (clean) registered domain and remove all the content from the old site. Then keep the original site indexed but delete the content and add only a big banner link on the front page saying the site has moved. DO NOT 301 redirect because that will likely pass on the penalty.

Or if its a niche where you can have 2 separate sites then i would just leave the original site as is....and maybe one day it will recover in next year or so....and in the mean time build a second separate site and ranking that in a Panda / Penguin fashion. Its alot easier to rank a new site these days than it is to fix a broken one.

Click to expand...

any update mate?

Ok guys and gals here we go... got this email from the Google Web-spam team on the 21st...

Dear site owner or webmaster of http...........com)

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http..........com) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

We got to this point by removing (used the disavow tool the day it came out) a simple fucking forum signature that we had no control to remove and the webmaster was being a di$% and would not remove it either, we also removed 2 site wide links from a pr3 and pr5 site about a week after the penalty came through... the pr3 went to n/a and the pr5 went to pr3. So after removing those and after using the disavow tool on the forum signature link 3weeks later we got this email from them saying the penalty had been revoked.

The only issue we are seeing now is that yes we have had small boost in traffic but nothing to write home about at all... before the manual action we where getting like 10's of thousands of hits a day from G #1 everywhere we wanted to be for the most part and now lucky to get 1k from Google even 20 days after the manual action was revoked and still sitting at the back for most terms we need. The other thing to note that maybe some people don't realize is the UN-natural links penalty is ONLY affected by DO-FOLLOW links... you can have 100k in shit links and as long as they are no-follow you will not get an UN-natural links penalty as all they care about are do-follow only (as those are the only links that affect your juice/rank).

We are not sure how to move forward on backlinking now as we are so fu%^ing spooked... what kind of ideas do you guys have for us on linking that can pass a manual review. As our niche is very high competition and when we are #1 I am sure the site will be reviewed again and we want to make sure we can pass and not get yet another penalty and go through this crap again...

Cheers!

Hey,

Do any of you guys know anyone who can check a sites backilinks, figure out what looks bad and then remove them? I am working on 4 sites - which all have very good rankings. But I have outsourced my SEO in the past to really spammy SEO providers.

I would really like to delete all spam looking links before its too late!

Thanks

Google becomes more tricky day by day that's what i noticed

This is my favourite line of the whole thread- "Time on site 3min average.".

420friendly said:

Ok guys and gals here we go... got this email from the Google Web-spam team on the 21st...

Dear site owner or webmaster of http...........com)

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http..........com) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

We got to this point by removing (used the disavow tool the day it came out) a simple fucking forum signature that we had no control to remove and the webmaster was being a di$% and would not remove it either, we also removed 2 site wide links from a pr3 and pr5 site about a week after the penalty came through... the pr3 went to n/a and the pr5 went to pr3. So after removing those and after using the disavow tool on the forum signature link 3weeks later we got this email from them saying the penalty had been revoked.

The only issue we are seeing now is that yes we have had small boost in traffic but nothing to write home about at all... before the manual action we where getting like 10's of thousands of hits a day from G #1 everywhere we wanted to be for the most part and now lucky to get 1k from Google even 20 days after the manual action was revoked and still sitting at the back for most terms we need. The other thing to note that maybe some people don't realize is the UN-natural links penalty is ONLY affected by DO-FOLLOW links... you can have 100k in shit links and as long as they are no-follow you will not get an UN-natural links penalty as all they care about are do-follow only (as those are the only links that affect your juice/rank).

We are not sure how to move forward on backlinking now as we are so fu%^ing spooked... what kind of ideas do you guys have for us on linking that can pass a manual review. As our niche is very high competition and when we are #1 I am sure the site will be reviewed again and we want to make sure we can pass and not get yet another penalty and go through this crap again...

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Interesting, one of the sites I manage I link to a legit (10yr old) forum profile in a forum that I have about 6000 posts in, wonder if that sig is partly to blame for our penalty?

I just removed the forum link although I think it is crap if google actually penalizes this. That account was created well before I knew anything about SEO and I posted thousands of times over the years and it is in a martial arts forum and the sig referenced fitness/weight loss site. Anyway I changed it and I also had a hobby site with 500+ pages that I had blogroll links on (PR 2) removed them...will see what happens..

420friendly said:

The only issue we are seeing now is that yes we have had small boost in traffic but nothing to write home about at all... before the manual action we where getting like 10's of thousands of hits a day from G #1 everywhere we wanted to be for the most part and now lucky to get 1k from Google even 20 days after the manual action was revoked and still sitting at the back for most terms we need. The other thing to note that maybe some people don't realize is the UN-natural links penalty is ONLY affected by DO-FOLLOW links... you can have 100k in shit links and as long as they are no-follow you will not get an UN-natural links penalty as all they care about are do-follow only (as those are the only links that affect your juice/rank).

We are not sure how to move forward on backlinking now as we are so fu%^ing spooked... what kind of ideas do you guys have for us on linking that can pass a manual review. As our niche is very high competition and when we are #1 I am sure the site will be reviewed again and we want to make sure we can pass and not get yet another penalty and go through this crap again...

Cheers!

Click to expand...

First of all I'd focus on building links that I have control over.
Secondly, analyze your top 10 competitors that have decent profiles, try to attain the links that they have. For example if it's an unaffiliated review, leave a comment as a third person that your website should also be reviewed. Suck up a little bit. "I'm really interested in knowing your opinion as to how YOURWEBSITE compares with COMPETITORSWEBSITE and would love to see it up there with the other reviews"

EDIT: You are nowhere near the position you were at earlier because the links that were putting you up there are now removed, so naturally your position will be lower than what it was before the penalty