The Unnatural Links Warning in Google Webmaster Tools
Have you received a warning like this from Google in your Google Webmaster Tools? I know, it’s not nice, it happened to me too and it cut my income by 80% overnight. April 2012 was the worst month ever for me. However I can help, I cannot guarantee you will get back to where you where in Google before the penalty hit but I can certainly help get you back into Google’s good books. But first let’s have a look at what you have been through so far…
Google Reconsideration Requests
Maybe you have tried to do a reconsideration request yourself? I tried doing this 4 times before I got anywhere. Initially Google were very unhelpful and gave you a rather vague ‘your site still violates Google’s quality guidelines’. This message sent webmasters into a blind panic as they started to hack away vast chunks of their site, in the hope that some of the bad links would now point to pages that didn’t exist anymore. This was a bad plan of action and not what Google wanted you to do.
If you have already put a reconsideration request in and heard nothing back from Google it is probably because you took no action and just said ‘it wasn’t my fault!’. Google need to see that you have made considerable effort to manually remove bad links. They also want you to ‘grass up’ any shady SEO companies you have used too, but in my experience it is OK to say: “I had some bad SEO advice and then went crazy with SENukeX” or “I bought a backlink gig from Fiverr.com and they have now disappeared”. Up until the end of 2012 the possibility of removing all bad links manually was pretty much impossible for anyone who had done even the smallest amount of black hat SEO. This has now changed…
The Google Disavow tool was introduced in the latter part of 2012 and was thought to be the answer to every penalty sufferers problems. Well it would have been if Google had told us how to use it! Using it is simple enough, you just make a text file with all the URLS you want Google to ignore. This sounds ideal, but which links do you want to ignore? What is a bad link? What came as a surprise to me was when I did a reconsideration request in the summer of 2013 and received an answer that was different to all the ones I had received so far.
Links to your site violate Google’s quality guidelines
This surprised me, EzineArticles? I thought article marketing was a squeaky clean white hat form of SEO? Clearly not! In fact out of the 3 sample links Google gave me, the other 2 were a Weebly blog and another site of mine! There was clearly more to a bad link than I thought.
So now I use a system of collecting backlinks from more sources than just Google. Yes that is right, even in your Google Webmaster Tools they do not give you a full list of backlinks and they certainly won’t tell you which ones are the bad ones! Don’t worry though – our plan will find them for you.
This is the plan of action:
- Fill in the form on this page with your details; be as truthful as you possibly can be – there is no point hiding anything here, if you have used Xrumer, SeNukeX, Traffic Geyser or outsourced SEO jobs in India or on Fiverr – say so here!
- We will receive your information and do some initial analysis to determine what kind of penalty you have received and then advise you what to do next.
To get the best results you will need to pay attention to these points:
- If you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools installed on your site you will need to install it and make me a user – we will show you how to do this if you need help.
- You will need to tell us what you have done so far to try and get your results back
- Within 48 hours we will get back to you and advise you what to do.
The initial analysis is completely free so you have nothing to lose and all your information will be totally confidential.
