Introduction & Author's Note

Author ’s Note

Upendra Singh Rana obtained his BCA MCA from IME college, Sahibabad. He is an
Internet marketer, social media optimizer, guest blogger and online reputation
management. SEO is in my blood.

Introduction

Technical book writing is a simple Job. Pick up a technology that appeals you, spend
some time understanding it, browse the net for some additional information
and then keep writing till the time you do not reach the end.

I have tried to make this book different in one more way by giving personal experience
with you.

Acknowledgement

 

Thank you, dear reader and friend, for picking up my SEO book. Whatever I have achieved today in life is thanks to you. Here’s thanking all those who helped me with this book:

                 

                My immediate family—Shaily. My mother, Kamlesh and my father, Ranvir singh Rana. My brother and his wife, Arvind and Anjali.

                 

                My father is an inspiration and role model for me. A guy from very common family and making his name and fame at other state i.e. Arunachal Pradesh as a principal in Govt school.

                 

                Friends who make life worthwhile like Manohar, Rashmi, Shweta Himanshu & Megha. My extended family on Twitter Google plus and Facebook. When I started writing, my motives were different. I wanted to make it. I wanted to prove a point. Today, I write for different reasons. I write for change. A change in the mindset of Indian society towards SEO and SMO.

                 

                It is a lofty goal, and I am not foolish enough to think' I can ever achieve it. However, it helps to have positive intentions and a direction in life, and I am glad to have found mine.

                 

                I want to reach as many people as I can—through books, blogs, I am human; I will falter and I will have ups and downs. If possible, try to maintain your support and keep me grounded through that process, One more thing; don’t give me your admiration, Give me your love. Admiration passes, love endures. To know more about me just type my name in Google i.e.

 

“Upendra Rana” you will get all info related to me.

Unnatural Link

 

1.1. What’s an Unnatural Link about and what’s the connection with the penalties?

 

As indicated in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, an unnatural link is any link that intends to manipulate the PageRank or the search engine results, be it a link to your site or an outgoing link from your site. The creation of links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page can be considered a violation of the Google Guidelines and can lead to a penalty.

 

From their statements, we infer that Google’s main concern is to keep users away from bad search experiences, providing them with the most relevant results.

 

The “naturalness” of a link is, up to a point, an editorial choice. It all boils down to your ability to link to a site from your site based on usefulness. For instance, you are a fan of British Airways and you choose to talk about this company on your blog, your site or on forums because you really had a good experience with this brand. You really want to tell the world what a great company they are and how their services helped you a lot in a certain situation. This is not considered a violation of Google’s Guidelines. However, if you write about British

 

Airways because this company promises you free flight tickets or saves you from paying taxes for your extra luggage, then we are talking about an unnatural link. (unless you mark the link with the rel=nofollow HTML attribute)

 

 

Unnatural Link Synonyms

 

 

Some people refer to unnatural links using the following synonyms:

 

• inorganic links

 

• toxic links

 

• low quality links

 

• artificial links

 

• manually created links

 

• deceptive links

 

• manipulative links

 

• impact links

 

 

1.2. Where Is the End of “Natural” and the Beginning of

 

“Unnatural”?

 

 

If you find it hard to draw the line between natural and unnatural in terms of links, here’s what you can do. You need to ask yourself:

 

 

“Would I still be linking to that site if the SERPs didn’t exist?”

 

 

 

Would I still be recommending this site/blog/company, etc. if search engines didn’t exist? If the answer to this question is yes, then we are talking about an organic or natural link. If the answer to this question is no, then that link is most likely a violation of Google’s guidelines and, therefore, is considered unnatural.

Long story short, unnatural links come down to link selling. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about money, gifts, a massage, a 6 Pack or any sort of material compensation. It is still a sort of transaction. The same applies when we talk about excessive link exchange. It is still a sort of unnatural transaction that does not occur naturally but is artificially generated with the purpose to influence the ranking in Google.

 

The war against link selling is meant to maintain the competition on a level playing field, offering equal chances to all websites. You wouldn’t want somebody who just has more money to automatically be able to rank better on the search engines.

I know that as nice as this “equal chance” story may sound, AdWords still exists and, like it or not, is a kind of link selling with the difference that you get an invoice for the transaction. Without getting into ethical issues, at the end of the day, AdWords remains a Google accepted form of selling links that often brings results for those with deep pockets.

 

 

 

 

1.3. The Most Common Unnatural Link Examples

 

 

Much like the law, the “naturalness” of a link can be can be interpreted in our favor. For instance, excessive link exchanges or linking to low quality sites are practices that are in disagreement with Google’s Guidelines. But how much is excessive? How low should the quality of a site be? In order to avoid this kind of ambiguities, we will give you some examples of common links that have an unnatural flavor, according to Google’s Guidelines:

 

• Any link that is generated due to a payment in money

 

 

On the surface, things seem pretty clear here: if you offer money in exchange for placing your link on a site, that link will be considered unnatural. However, things are a little more complicated than this.

 

Let’s say you organize a charity event and you want to link to a company that donated an amount of money to help you out with the event. Is it considered to be an unnatural link? Well, it depends. If that company gives donations in exchange for links and uses these actions as a link building strategy, then it is surely a violation of the “Guidelines”.

 

If the donor company has just a couple of links thanks to some sponsorship campaign it did, then it is very likely they are organically generated.

 

 

 

 

• Any link that is generated due to an exchange of goods and services

 

 

If you receive or give any good or service in return for a link, then that link is considered to be unnatural. Let’s say that a company selling frying pans sends one of their products to 100 cooking bloggers, encouraging them to write about the frying pan received as a gift. Will Google consider the links that the bloggers will generate as being unnatural? It will surely do. But, if the frying pans company wants to stay on Google’s good side, they have to prove that they didn’t have the intention of manipulating the PageRank. Thereby, they should ask bloggers to mark the links as no-follow so they cannot pass PageRan

 

Links that are widely distributed in the Footer of a page or on the

 

If in your blogroll you are linking to pages relevant for your content, then those links are considered to be natural. But if you have 100 links on your page and more than half of them can be found in the blogroll, then it is clear that the situation is not “natural”.

 

 

BlogrollIf for blogrolls things are pretty clear, when it comes to links

 

 

that appear in footers, things get a bit complicated. Let’s start with blogrolls:

 

When it comes to links distributed in footers, Google is being a bit ambivalent. Let’s say you are a web design company and you place a link to your webpage in the footer of the designed sites. Google might consider this action as OK but they might also considered it unnatural, claiming that it is a self-made link or a link that is generated due to an exchange of service. How does Google decide whether this kind of links are natural or unnatural? Depending on the intent. It should be clear for Google that the webmaster is linking to a site on purpose and not because it was required to. OK, you’ll say.

 

And how can Google accurately identify the intent? Well, I think that’s something only Google knows.

 

 

 

 

 

• Any link that is a result of a “link to me and I’ll link to you” campaign

 

 

Let’s say that you are the webmaster of a financial audit site. On your page you have a section where you recommend several accounts, attorneys and tax experts. Maybe some of those you recommended also linked to our page. Is this considered “excessive link exchanges”? Most likely no. But if on your website you have a list with hundreds of recommendation from a wide geographical area, and most of your

 

“recommendations” also link to your page, then it is very likely that you’ll receive a penalty from the “Google Penguin”.

 

 

 

• Links on low-quality web-directories or bookmark sites

 

 

This looks quite clear also, doesn’t it? If you have many links on low-quality web directories, they are most likely to be considered unnatural. But then again, the question arises:

 

Who draws the line between low and high quality? Google, of course. We are playing in its yard.

 

 

 

And how does the big “G” decide on the quality of a web directory? Most likely, a web directory is considered to have a high quality if it has some sort of human interaction, such as an editorial process. In this case not all sites can auto-submit their links and there is a whole process whereby the web-directory decides the relevancy of a certain site in list with links.

 

• Links with optimized anchor text (articles, press releases, etc.)

 

 

These kinds of links are very common and the digital world is full of articles stuffed with anchor text. I’ll go back to the frying pan company to give an example on this. Let’s say that our company writes an article on a cooking blog and it contains passages such as the following:

 

It is great to cook using good frying pans. Depending on the frying pan you are using, you can prepare tasty food in no time. Frying pans add value to the quality of your food and make cooking a pleasant experience.

 

 

 

It doesn’t look very natural, does it? I bet Google agrees on this one, too.

 

 

 

1.4. 27 Types of Unnatural Links & Link Building Strategies

 

 

1. Link for Link

 

I’m referring here at exchange methods of link building. For example, if you’re a car sales rep and you have links to several car service centers and insurance brokers around your area and they link back to you, it won’t probably raise any suspicions. But if you have hundreds of such links, not only from your area, but from all over the world, you’re going to raise some flags back at Google.

 

1. Money for Links

 

Offering money in exchange for links or content that incorporates links is one of the most obvious methods to acquire unnatural links. One form of practice that is not so flashy is to obtain links to your site after making a donation. In a small number, it’s accepted, but if you keep doing this, Google will consider it an unnatural tactic and you might get in trouble.

 

 

 

1. Goods or Services for Links

 

If the method of exchanging money for links is straightforward, there’s a thin line regarding bartering services or goods for links. Matt Cutts created a video explaining this method. If a person receives a laptop from a company and then writes an article with a link pointing to the company’s website, it is considered link buying. If that company lends the laptop and the person then returns it and ends up writing a review with a link to the company’s website, there’s nothing unnatural there.

 

So the difference lies between giving away and lending.

 

1. Guest Posting

 

Recently added in the not-so-select group of unnatural link tactics, guest posting may be harmful for your website if it’s done improperly. To understand the fine print on this quality guideline violation, you’ll need to differentiate between polished guest posts (where the author shared his knowledge to publish a high quality article) and spammy guest posting (where the author may be sending the same article to whoever is willing to publish it).

You need to proceed cautiously, because it may turn an opportunity into a problem.

 

 

 

 

1. Automatically Generated Links

 

It sounds like a sweet deal when someone offers to build bulks of links overnight on certain targeted keywords. In any case, those people are using automated programs that post links in the form of comments, forum posts, wiki posts and so on. This is one of the most harmful link building techniques in terms of “internet pollution” as it adds literally no value to the users and is very annoying for everyone.

 

 

 

 

1. Widget Links

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A form of link building technique which uses “WordPress like” plugins. The person who created the plugin has the possibility to inject links on all the sites which have that particular plugin installed. If the plugin adds real value to the user and webmasters have the choice to link or not back to the website, Google might consider them natural.

 

 

 

1. Advertorials

 

Advertorials are articles published by sites as a form of advertisement.

 

 

Google may consider this as a form of paid link tactic IF the links pointing back to your site are not tagged as nofollow.

 

 

1. Text Advertisements that Pass PageRank

 

Same story as in the case of advertorials. They may be considered unnatural when they are left as do-follow and directly influence the site’s ranking in the search engine.

 

 

1. Articles & Commercial Anchor Text

 

It’s a good thing that people write about your product or service and link back to your website. As long as a person creates links in a natural way, using brand keywords or navigational phrasing like “click here” or “visit this”, you won’t have any problem.

 

You’re gonna feel Google’s wrath if they catch you stacking links with commercial keywords.

 

 

 

 

1. Web-Directory Links

 

It’s been around for a while now and it seems like it hasn’t become an obsolete link building tactic yet. People used to abuse this type of sites by placing links on hundreds of web directories. If your site’s link portfolio has mostly this kind of links you might get the unwanted attention of the Webspam Team. There are still high quality web directories on the internet where you can post your links, like

Dmoz and Best of the web, which filter the submitted entries manually.

 

 

1. Footer Links

 

A tactic popularized by web design agencies and used by them to increase their site’s visibility in the search engines was to place links in the footer of their clients’ pages with wording such as “Designed by” or even commercial keywords such as “Web Design Agency Melbourne”. As long as you have a couple of those types of links and you don’t use commercial anchor texts you won’t have any problems. They will surely be categorized as unnatural if you use this linking tactic excessively.

 

1. Site-wide Links

 

When you create site-wide links, GoogleBot is going to see the link on almost every page of the website. One or two site-wide links won’t raise any suspicion but if you’re going to abuse this feature, most likely

 

Google will place it under the unnatural links category.

 

This type of link building is not recommended for new sites; it may be seen as a way to rank quickly … but it really isn’t.

 

 

 

 

1. Blogroll Links

 

A technique that’s been around and abused just as long as the one with the web-directory links. There’s nothing harmful if you have 1-2 links and they are placed on relevant blogs. When it represents a huge chunk from the backlink profile it becomes clear to Google that those links are unnatural.

 

1. Forum & Blog Comments

 

Comments on forums and blogs are often used as a way to get yourself known in the community. You relate to other people’s content and you create a conversation. When you’re overusing links with commercial anchor text in these comments (posted manually or with the help of automated software) they are surely going to be considered unnatural by Google.

Someone rarely links using a commercial anchor text in an informal conversation.

 

 

 

1. 100% Do-Follow Links

 

It’s not likely for a site to have 100% do-follow links. Usually, a natural backlink profile has a homogenous mix of do-follow and no-follow. People often create comments on do-follow blogs as a way of link building.

 

When a site has an almost 100% amount of do-follow links it raises a red flag.

 

 

1. Anchor Text Over-optimization

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When your keyword cloud doesn’t have a proportionate distribution and you have 70% commercial keywords like “pay day loans” and 30% brand keywords it’s a strong signal of unnaturalness. The anchor text keyword cloud must be diverse in order to look natural. If you don’t want Google to penalize your website we suggest staying as far away as possible from over-optimized anchor text structures.

 

1. Geographically Irrelevant Links

 

Let’s say you have a local business that sells ice-cream in Miami. It’s highly doubtable that you’re being naturally linked to web-directories localized in Croatia.

 

When Google encounters a lot of links that have this discrepancy, they will consider them unnatural as they can be easily

 

“fingerprinted”.

 

1. Contextually Irrelevant Links

 

Same as the above. If you’re selling ice-cream you shouldn’t have links from sites that are on mechanical or traveling topics. You should not allow these types of inconsistencies to occur very often.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Link Velocity Spikes

 

When you have big velocity spikes, either daily or monthly, compared with your overall website history averages, it means that either something important happened in that period or your site is trying to manipulate the site’s ranking in the search engines. The usual negative seo campaigns may also generate a high amount of links in a short amount of time.

 

1. Article Directories

 

Article directories such as EzineArticles are a source of low quality articles. Their only purpose on the internet is to generate pages with do-follow links in their content.

 

 

Because this type of link building strategies can be automated, a lot of people abused this technique and raised Google’s interest in this matter.

 

 

1. Link Networks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Private blog networks (in general) are sites that use different IP addresses which are owned by the same person, who controls them and posts articles with do-follow links at his own discretion. This type of black hat SEO tactic was created in order to simulate a natural appearance of links, and it’s against Google’s quality guidelines.

 

1. Press Releases

 

An abused strategy which gives webmasters the opportunity to use sites like Prweb to publish press releases (with the same content) on hundreds of sites in order to create do-follow links back to them. By doing so, you not only create a lot of links with targeted commercial anchor texts in a short amount of time, but you also create duplicate content.

Not all press releases are bad. Just those where you use do-follow links and/or commercial anchor text in order to influence the Google Ranking.

 

 

 

 

 

1. Bookmark Sites

 

These types of sites allow users to place personal bookmarks. If you have an abundance of links coming from this area, it means you’re using these sites as a link building strategy and you want to influence your site’s rankings in the search engines.

 

1. Resource Pages

An ancient form of link building strategy, which refers to certain pages from the site that look like “/links.html”, filled with links to

 

• variety of non-related pages.

 

 

1. Sites that Sell Links

 

On this type of websites, if you stop paying your link will be removed from the site, and replaced by another one. Google looks at sites that are constantly creating and deleting links from their site, and may figure out if someone sells links. After it figured this out, if you are linked from such a site you risk being penalized.

 

1. Social Profile Links

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you create 100 accounts on different social networks and they all link to your website, it may be sign of an unnatural link tactic. From what

 

Google declares, these links are used only for indexing, so they won’t have a direct influence over the results order in the search engine.

 

 

  

1. Any Link

 

That’s right! And it shouldn’t come as a surprise, because if you read Google’s guidelines regarding link schemes, you’re going to see the following quote:

 

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in

 

Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

 

 

 

If you emphasize “any links” and “may be considered” and you’re looking at the examples above, you’re going to see there’s a big gray area enveloping this whole unnatural link idea. Basically, any link building technique may be considered an intent to manipulate if you abuse it.

 

 

 

1.5. How to Find Unnatural Links

 

 

You can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you could use a specialized tool that outlines the links that may or may have caused the penalty. A tool that simplifies the “unnatural links” complexity and helps you remove the unwanted “guests”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Who Should Use a SpecializedT?

 

Everyone really and here are some reasons why:

 

 

1. Penalized Sites Owners

 

This is the ideal tool if you’ve received an unnatural link warning or have been penalized by the “Google Penguin Updates”.

 

You can easily check the links using the already generated screenshots. If we were wrong on the classification you can easily re-classify the link.

 

After the manual review of the entire list of links is completed, just hit the Google Disavow Export and you have the file ready for the Google Import. You can even send it directly to Google as you have this function, too.

 

1. Non-Penalized Sites Owners

 

For sites that haven’t been penalized by any unnatural link warning or update, the tool helps to manage the link risk by monitoring your site and your competitors’ on a weekly basis.

 

You will stay ahead of the game by being able to:

 

 

• Make informed Link Building Decisions.

 

• Know your risk to be penalized and monitor it weekly.

 

• Monitor your competitors’ link toxicity and risk.

 

• Monitor your site for Negative-SEO campaigns.

 

 

Some of the most important features of the tool are:

 

 

• Automatic unnatural link classification.

 

• Transparency & detail on each classified link. (why it is unnatural)

 

• Google Disavow Export.

 

• Fast Double-Check using the Link Snapshots.

 

• Flag & Tag Links. (bulk actions available also)

 

 

• Advanced Link profile segmentation using unnatural filters.

 

• Can be used both on your site and the competitors’.

 

• Ignore Links that are already disavowed or unimportant for the analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Google Penguin Evolution

 

 

 

2.1. A brief history of Penguin Algorithm

 

 

Google Penguin is a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. It’s main purpose was to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a different sites. According to Google's John Mueller, Google has announced all updates to the public.

 

The confirmed Penguin updates, as they rolled out, are:

 

 

• Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries)

 

• Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)

 

• Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries)

 

• Penguin 4 (AKA Penguin 2.0) on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)

 

• Penguin 5 (AKA Penguin 2.1) on October 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)

 

• Penguin 6 (AKA Penguin 3.0) on October 17, 2014 (impacting less than 1% English queries).

 

• Penguin Real Time (announced by Google representative Gary Illyes)

 

 

The launch of Penguin Algorithm changed the SEO industry and made a drastic shift to link building practices in particular. In fairness, Google has always pushed forward their guidelines and made a strong warning against spammy tactics in their guidelines.

 

However, Penguin forced the SEO professionals to up their game and find creative link building techniques rather than simply build links that manipulate Google’s search rankings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although Penguin has prompted mostly positive changes in the way webmasters and SEO Professional create their link building techniques nowadays, Penguin brought some negative consequences also:

 

 

• Negative SEO attacks have muliplied within the industry.

 

• Many controversies have apeared around ”unfairly” penalized sites.

 

• Google has been claimed to be slow to update and refresh Penguin.

 

 

2.2. What Does the Real Time Penguin Bring New to the Table?

 

 

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter in reply to a tweet that the new Penguin iteration “will be real-time which is a huge change”. It will basically mean that as soon as Google discovers that a link is removed or disavowed, it will process it in real time, and you would be able to recover from a penalty incredibly quickly. If, however, you’re trying to get away with some tactics that are not to Google’s liking, the Penguin will catch up to you really fast and you will not be able to use those tactics for any significant amount of time.

 

Moreover, future updates might not make the headlines like the previous versions did (particularly Penguin 2.0 and 3.0), because updates will become a real-time part of the algorithm. This means, quite simply, that the algorithm will be, in a certain sense, evolving seamlessly, as it will become smarter and at a quicker pace than before, as the search engine will be able to roll out changes as needed as opposed to scheduling one massive update.

What is clear is that this update is not meant to indiscriminately hurt sites left and right, but rather to refine Google’s ability to discern between the genuine and the artificial, between the

natural and unnatural.

http://cognitiveseo.c

COGNITIVESEO .com/                                                                                                                                                        25

om/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Penguin going real-time, the algorithm will now likely get a lot closer to fulfilling its ultimate goal: catch spam link profiles as quickly as possible and keep low-quality sites from ranking well in the search results. For the moment, let’s take a look at what Penguin 3.0 impacted in the digital marketing world.

 

2.3. Penguin 3.0 Penalties Examples

 

 

We’ve searched far and wide to see the “ravages” that Penguin 3.0 has made in the world of SEO. We will list for you some examples of sites that lost their ranks as a consequence of the algorithm update but we will focus on a website whose activity we found particularly interesting.

 

1. WeddingDressTrend.com Penalty

 

 

Wedding Dress Trend deals in exactly with what its name indicates: discount wedding dresses and wedding accessories from China. A short look at the linking profile quickly establishes the reason for the penalty. The percentage of unnatural links out of the total number of links is quite staggering: more than two thirds.

 

This site did not even exist before October 2013 and within less than a year it got to a pretty hefty SEO Visibility. Quite the success story, right? Indeed if you don’t care about lasting success.

With three quarters of the links being either unnatural or at the very least suspect, this looks like a linking strategy that was created only for the purpose of quick ascension in the ranking.

 

November 2013 shows an extremely disproportionate relation between the number of links and the number of referring domains, suggesting old-school SEO tricks rather than organic growth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They cover almost every basis of “unnaturalness”: suspect anchor text, low authority links, thin content, link networks etc. What is even more astounding is that until Penguin 3.0 this site enjoyed a growth in the rankings using this strategy.

 

Just how shady were the links? They include examples such as anchor texts in blog/forum posts, blog comments with commercial anchor text, anchor text in large link lists and so on. None of these are indicative of an actual SEO strategy, but rather of marketing based on shady techniques and quantity over quality.

 

Penguin 3.0 caught up on that and the results are showing: over a very short period of time in October the site has dropped by 3 000 visibility points in the rankings. Is this something from which it will be able to recover? Potentially, yes, as we are going to see in the following Penguin Recovery examples. But this largely depends on how much

 

 

Wedding Dress Trend is willing to invest in organic growth rather than fast-paced winnings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. More Penguin Losers

 

 

For a better understanding on what the Google Penguin 3.0 Updates doesn’t really like, we used the SEO visibility chart to find out some other sites that aren’t doing very well for the moment in terms of rankings.

 

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a site that claims to have one of the most comprehensive reference work cataloging of all the world’s known living languages. It seems that Penguin 3.0 didn’t really believe this piece of information, or at least, this is what we conclude giving the fact that it penalized this quite hard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The much translated site Giftsngames (we thought it’s worth mentioning the fact that it is translated in 12 languages; this says a lot about the wide audience they have) got hit really hard by Google’s latest update.

 

Enjoying a high popularity in the past year, the site in question has dramatically lost its rankings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We don’t know for sure whether the site below entered in a cleanup process or not but definitely it is facing some serious problems. Judging by their visibility before the drop, it seems like short-haircuts.com had a huge popularity. Unfortunately for them, their drop is equally huge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Penguin 3.0 Penalty Recovery Winners

 

 

What is interesting to mention here is that we find a quite impressive number of sites (we are going to list just some of them here) that follows the same pattern: penalized on the 6th of October 2013 and recovered one year later. There is no need to think at some paranormal activity or anything like that. All the analyzed sites were pulled out of rankings by Penguin 2.1 and looks like Penguin 3.0 was the knight in shiny armor for them. Let’s take a look at some examples!

 

1. First Penguin Recovery – CostumeWorks.com

 

 

Costume Works is a very typical example of a winning site. It gathers Halloween costume ideas from users all around, hosting a gallery which serves as inspiration to others, as well as organizing an annual costume contest.

More than a year ago, in May 2013, Costume Works suffered a rather severe penalty, most likely at the hands of one of Penguin’s “younger siblings”.

 

A site that had had a visibility score of close to 1 500 at one point suddenly dropped to below 200. It dropped even more after August and for most of the fall and winter of 2013 and spring of 2014 it was almost invisible on the search engine’s radar.

 

 

 

Looking at the linking analysis back then, it was probably well deserved: almost a quarter of the anchor text was commercial. However they became aware of that in the meantime, it worked: they dropped a lot of their links (a lot), but they have a much better outlook now: less than 10% of their links are commercial anchor text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty much everything about Costume Works looks better now. Their link profile naturalness is excellent, with just 6% of their links looking suspect and none looking unnatural.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not simply chance, or luck, but surely the result of intense link building strategy, as evidenced by the link positioning and webpage type analysis. The large majority of their links show up inside blog posts or on forum threads or in the form of short paragraphs of text.

Blog comments, which are usually a flag for shady or unnatural links, do not even add up to making 1%, indicating accidents rather than website-endorsed initiatives. Blogs, forums and personal sites represent 90% of the webpage type makeup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Second Penguin 3.0 Recovery – XtremeDiesel.com

 

 

Penguin 3.0 brought good news for XDP (Extreme Diesel Power) a site that commercializes car accessories and gadgets. The same fateful day of October pulled out Xtreme Diesel from Google’s golden list, leaving them to struggle for some rankings for not less than one year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As sweet as the victory might be, it doesn’t mean much if the reasons of the triumph remains unknown. Tormented by the investigator’s

 

http://cognitiveseo.c

COGNITIVESEO .com/ 34 om/

 

 

curiosity, we did what we know best and run the analysis to check out their website’s profile. Let’s take a look on what we found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before beginning to analyze the links’ profile, the system automatically gives us a helpful hand in understanding how things are standing, generating a message that speaks for itself: this site has a suspect link profile and should be investigated carefully. There is a high chance that this site might be penalized in the future for unnatural links (if it hasn’t been already).

We don’t know how this site’s link profile looked like before being penalized but judging by the fact that they recovered and still have some (not many, indeed) shady links, leads us to believe that there was a lot of unnatural activity in the house.

 

 

 

 

The “fishy” links they still have around are low authority with thin content, coming mainly from link network and forums. However, as judging outward appearances is not really our thing, we checked out some of their shady links in order to understand what we are talking about.

 

 

  

 

All you Star Wars fans, don’t get over excited and let’s figure out why the xtremediesel link on this forum is considered to be unnatural. It looks clearly to us that the profile created on this forum has no other purpose than creating links. It doesn’t seem like bringing added value to the forum nor generating high quality content but just some random thrown links. And Xtreme Diesel seems to have still lots of active links from forum profiles like this one. Yet, they are probably still in the

 

“cleaning session” and whatever they did to make things right, they should be proud as their work paid off.

 

1. More Penguin 3.0 Recoveries

 

 

Penguin 3.0 brought good news for some other sites previously hit by its younger brother, the Penguin 2.1 Update. Let’s take a look on what we’ve found!

 

ItsHot is an e-commerce site specialized in jewelry, watches and all sort of accessories. Dropped on the same 6th of October, this site encounters a modest yet notable recovery thanks to the newest Penguin update.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roundgames (it’s not hard to guess what is their field of activity is) also got hit by Penguin 2.1 but was powered up by Penguin 3.0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are to bring more utilities into your kitchen, shopworldkitchen.com is one of the places to browse. With a spectacular rise this month, it looks like this site is definitely Google’s cup of tea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voguewigs, a site specialized in synthetic and human hair wigs had the same faith as its predecessors. Penalized on October 2013, modestly but still going up recovery on October 2014.

 

 

  

 

 

 

It is possible that watchcartoononline.com might not have been on

 

Penguin 2.1′s taste due to some copywriting issues. The good news for them is that they are back on the track and it seems like they are on an ascending trend.

 

 

1. Detecting the Penalty

 

 

 

3.1. Auditing the situation

 

 

Firstly, you need to make sure that it’s a penalty you’re talking about and not just a simple drop, for instance. A penalty must not be confused with other situations where Google’s volatility plays a major role. If a site dropped just a few positions in the search results, it is very likely that it is not about a penalty.

 

Before putting the finger on a penalty, make sure that you take into consideration one or a combination of the following factors:

 

 

• Google Algorithm Update – Google makes systematical and periodical changes to its algorithms, leading to ranking fluctuations.

 

• Website Changes – Changes in the site architecture can lead to important modifications in the traffic index.

 

• Lost Backlinks – It is possible backlinks are causing some specific keywords to become lost and, thereby, ranking fluctuations can occur.

 

• Competition Outrank – Sites that were below might surpass your

 

Google Penalty Risk Analysis

 

 

With constant changes in the online world, the Google Penalty Risk analysis should be on the mind of every web master. Whether you are trying to avoid a penalty or are striving to recover from one, a back link analysis is absolutely necessary. A continuous monitoring of your link profile will help you stay in control.

 

 

 

It is unlikely that a site’s profile will be 100% natural but, from our in-house case studies at cognitiveSEO, sites with over 20 percent unnatural and suspect links are at a high risk of being flagged by Google for bad linking practices.

Constantly monitoring your link profile provides you with vital information about your risk of being penalized by Google. Having an unnatural link profile doesn’t necessarily mean you use shady tactics to manipulate the ranking. Negative SEO attacks could also influence the way a link profile looks like.

 

 

If you want to rank on the long-term in Google, it is highly recommended to closely follow Google’s Guidelines. Even so it is important to keep an eye on a potential penalty risk.

 

Monitoring the Unnatural Links Distribution allows you to avoid Google Penalties and also increases the changes of Google Recovery for penalized sites.

 

 

3.2. Manual Action Warnings vs. Automatic Google Algorithm Penalties

 

There is a lot of confusion regarding unnatural link warnings. There are two types of penalties Google uses: manual and algorithmic. This misunderstanding began with the first Penguin update was made and it’s still something lots of webmasters and website owners have trouble determining. To shed some light over this unsettling matter I am going to go over some differences between manual actions and Penguin penalties:

 

Manual actions, as the name suggests, refer to actions manually taken by Google employees who personally review your website and your link profile. If Google thinks you may have deployed some devious techniques in order to rank better in their search results, then you might receive a warning. Manual link warnings have nothing to do with penalties caused by Google’s algorithm updates like Penguin or Panda.

These types of warnings are deployed only when you’re in violation of Google’s guidelines. You will receive unnatural link warnings in the “Manual Actions” section of Google Webmaster Tools.

 

 

On the other side, penalties resulted from Penguin and Panda updates (called algorithmic penalties) are made when Google releases these algorithmic updates and automatically evaluates not only your links but your entire site. Google is putting a lot of effort in improving the algorithm in order to minimize the involvement of human reviewers. These penalties are automated, based on their algorithm, and evaluated on the spot.

The biggest difference between these two penalties is that if your site is affected by the Penguin or Panda update, you won’t receive any written warning from Google. You will just experience a sudden drop in rankings.

 

 

3.3. Unnatural Link Warnings and How to Deal With Them

 

 

Warning 1: Unnatural Links from Your Site

 

 

The first type of unnatural link warning is received by the webmaster when Google finds your link profile contains unnatural outbound links. This is what that warning will look like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot taken 02/08/2015 from https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

 

 

This means you are ranking using techniques that are against Google’s guidelines. The warning “Unnatural links from your site” is associated with a manual action that affects only the concerning part of your site.

 

This type of actions are classified as “Partial matches”. The other type of actions are called “Site-wide matches”, which affect the whole site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After you’ve acknowledged the violation, you need to attend to the problem and solve it. To do so, you need to identify which links are unnatural (Google won’t specify which links are violating their guidelines). Then, you should work to remove them or apply a rel=”nofollow” tag. Another way to fix the situation would be to use a 301 Redirect attribute through a page that’s blocked by robots.txt.

 

After you’ve identified and dealt with all the unnatural links, you should create a reconsideration request for your site. This request lets Google know that you’re on the correct path and you want the manual action to be revoked.

 

 

 

Warning 2: Unnatural Links to Your Site

 

 

The second type of warning comes when you get a message in Google Webmasters Tools announcing that Google exposed some unnatural links pointing to your site. Moreover, with this kind of warnings, Google provides a few links as an example of bad links pointing to your website. The main difference between this message and the warning above is that in this case Google detected a pattern of unnatural links that are pointing to your site.

 

 

This is also a violation of Google’s guidelines and will be penalized.

 

Because this may not be a devious scheme on your part in order to influence the search results, there will only be a penalty on the areas of the site which have many unnatural links pointing to them. As in the case of unnatural links from your site, this is also classified as “Partial matches”.

 

In order to get rid of your penalty, you need to get rid of the unnatural links. It’s a little bit more difficult than in the case of links from your site because you don’t know which domains have unnatural links pointing to your site.

 

 

You need to undergo a couple of steps:

 

 

1. Download a list of all your links to your site using Webmaster Tools

 

1. Check every link to see whether it’s unnatural or not. To make your job easier you should start checking the domains that have the most links to you. You can ease this job by using third-party tools which specialize in identifying types of unnatural links, such as cognitiveSEO (disclaimer: this is my company). There are a lot of types of unnatural links and you need to identify them all in order to get rid of your penalty

 

1. After you’ve identified the rotten links that are harming your ranking, you could contact the webmasters of those domains and request that they remove the link or add a rel=”nofollow” tag

 

1. Google recommends only after you’ve done a serious work contacting webmasters to remove the links should you use the Disavow links tool. Google created this tool to help you get rid of the links you were unable to get removed. Only after you’ve made an effort to remove the unnatural links that were violating

 

Google’s guidelines you might have the manual action removed.

 

 

1. In some cases, Google will remove all the bad links, and your penalty will be lifted. But usually, it takes more than a couple of reconsideration attempts to make Google lift your penalty and begin the recovery process.

 

Google wants to see you make a real effort to contact webmasters for link removal before you use the disavow tool. It is likely that Google won’t accept your reconsideration request in the first try.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warning 3: Unnatural Links to Your Site (Impacts Links)

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a little bit more nuance when it comes to unnatural links that are pointing to your site. The difference between this warning and the one above is pretty much contextual. Google figured out that your site was involved in some unnatural link building schemes that point back to your site; if this is still unclear, Matt Cutts (former head of webmaster team at Google) did explain the impact links here.

 

As he states, this may be a result of your own doings or may appear without any involvement on your part. Google takes that into account when they’re considering a manual action. They will only penalize the affected part of your site.

Be aware! Google will want proof of your efforts dealing with unnatural links and removing them.

 

 

To clear the confusion out, even if you don’t have any control over these type of links, you should try to identify them and do your best to remove them. If you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking.

 

If you want your penalty to be revoked you should include any proof of the process with your reconsideration request. You can show emails sent to webmasters that have unnatural links pointing to your site, requesting a link removal.

 

Every step that shows your intentions of cleansing the site should go with the reconsideration request. It shows Google that you are committed and willing to do anything to go on the right path.

 

 

 

 

1. Recover from Google Penalty

 

 

 

4.1. When to use and not to Use the Google Disavow Tool

 

 

The Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process is simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard. The changes made to the algorithm, “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

 

 

 

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though, overall, the objective of the Disavow Links tool was to be used as a resort to resolve link problems, this tool is not as simple as it seems.

 

You may want to use this tool if you stumble upon a couple of problems:

 

• Your site was the target of a negative SEO campaign.

 

• Your search engine rankings are dropping fast because you have been penalized by a link penalty.

 

• You received  a  “manual  link  penalty”  message  from  Google

 

Webmaster Tools.

 

• For all the above you can easily solve your problem with a tool that will guide you through the process.

 

 

When consider using it, you should take into consideration a couple of things.

First of all, you need to make a quick audit on your link profile and see which links are harming your site the most. You need to carefully determine the bad and the good and see which links could influence your site’s ranking drop.

 

 

If you’re not careful you might end up losing some valid links that would otherwise pour some of that precious “link juice”.

 

 

 

 

Another detail you have to take into account is the fact that, before appealing to the disavow tool you could try to remove the bad links manually by contacting the owners of the websites that point to you. Before panicking and running straight for the disavow solution, you should carefully try to clean up your mess the old fashion way. It may sound like a laborious task but you can make use of third-party tools that can help you fasten with the unnatural link detection and outreach.

 

The whole concept of disavowing unnatural links must be taken very seriously as it may also harm your ranking.

This process should not be done on haste. You should take your time weeding out the bad and you should only submit a list to be disavowed only if you’re 100% sure of the links that you send.

 

 

You should also remember to try to manually remove the harmful links not only to show Google your good intentions but also because you don’t know how long the disavow process could take. While, these are cases when Google Disavow would have its best usage, there are also scenarios when you should not disavow the links:

 

 

 

1. No Drastic Ranking Drop.

 

 

The reasons for which you may experience a drastic Google ranking drop may vary from website to website and in generally there is a serious guideline violation. But if you don’t experience that you shouldn’t be panicking. You may just be outranked by a competitor. As a consequence, there is no need to rush and get the disavow tool from your link survival kit. You should try to analyze and track your competitor and see what is his SEO and content strategy. Also, you should maybe step up and improve your own approaches.

 

1. Not Sure if it is an Algorithmic Penalty.

 

 

When you receive a manual penalty the situation is pretty clear. Especially if you make use of Google Webmaster Tools (which we strongly recommend). You will receive a message in which they warn you about the actions taken against you. While this is easy and

 

straightforward, an algorithmic penalty is not that obvious. You’ll have to make a personal assessment to see if it’s a penalty or it’s just the fact that the links are low quality. And if it is indeed an algorithmic penalty, what is harming your site’s ranking?

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Small Drop in Rankings.

 

 

It may just be a quick road bump in the road. You may always experience a flux in ranking that is unpredictable. As a golden rule, if you don’t have an explicit message from Google that you’ve been penalized or if you know you have an unnatural link profile, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Your ranking could just recover on its own after a day or two. Also, a small drop in search engine ranking may just be influenced by the fact that you have many low quality links pointing to your site.

 

1. For Testing Purposes.

 

Just don’t toy around with this tool, you may get fried!

 

 

 

The final advice on when not to use the Google disavow tool would be to not just use it so you can see how it works. Cyrus Shepard made such an experiment and here are his “sad” findings. The saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is very much true in this case. This is one of those tools that you just don’t want to learn at your own cost. It’s too powerful and the damage it may do if misused may be irreversible.

 

 

4.2. Should You Disavow No-follow Links?

 

 

The short answer is that there is no exact answer on this. There are 2 major, contradictory, opinions on this:

 

1. No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [GOOGLE APPROVED]

 

1. Yes. You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

 

 

 

• Why shouldn’t I disavow No-follow links?

 

 

First of all there is an official Google representative that confirmed this. His name is John Muller and he is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. “No-follow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

 

• Why should I consider disavowing No-follow links?

 

 

Nothing confirmed here, only some rants:

 

 

1. No-follow links are possibly transferring ranking juice in certain cases and there are also, some studies that prove that.

 

Google doesn’t always say the “correct” things. Negative SEO has been working for years, but the Google Guidelines denied it vehemently.

 

 

 

1. Google changed their wording, a while ago, in order to reflect the possibility of someone else ability to affect your rankings.

 

1. What about “link building” campaigns that dilute the signals of naturalness using no-follow link acquisition?

 

I bet you are confused now. The question still remains:

 

 

Should I disavow No-follow Links?

The safest bet would be to follow Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links. If a domain is sending both do-follow and no-follow unnatural links, just ask for a full domain disavow there.

 

 

 

People have reported successful recovery stories on both the cases so I think you aren’t risking anything.

 

 

4.3. How to use the Disavow Tool - step by step usage guide

 

 

Even if you are 100% sure that your site has been penalized, there are still some steps that we suggest you go through before before Uploading the Google Disavow File:

 

 

• Audit: try to get as much information as you can about what Identifying bad links takes time. These can be links that use overly optimized anchor text (including phrases you haven’t targeted on your own), links from bad neighborhood sites, links from foreign language websites, links from sites created exclusively for SEO purposes, sidebar links etc.

A backlink audit is a complex procedure that must be done constantly; still, if you are in bit of a hurry and you put a sustained effort into it, you might get the job done in one day.

 

 

 

 

• Data analysis & interpretation: Analyzing those links might take up as much time as identifying them. Some you might be able to get rid of without the need for disavow. Some may not be as harmful as you assumed at first. And some may actually be more useful than they appear. It’s also likely that not all bad links hurt you in the same way (or as much). Prioritizing is also important.

 

Assuming you have a pretty clear image of your site’s overall activity, 1/2 day should be enough to solve this matter.

 

 

• Build solid documentation: Get up to date on Google policies and updates, but also on the history of the external websites that have caused you grief, and maybe even on your own history.

 

 

  

 

You need a compelling story, one that Google will believe, and those are usually the stories that make sense and account for everyone. Gathering the data all together should be another 1/2 day.

 

 

 

• Contact Webmasters: If Google sent you a message to say they’ve seen unnatural links to your site, the first move should be to actually remove those links from the web. And in some cases, you may be able to clean up on your own. Write to the site’s webmasters and ask them to have your links taken down. Sometimes it is not possible to get in contact with everybody and sometimes you may have thousands of links on hundreds or even thousands of websites you have to deal with. You have to monitor this permanently and only after you’ve tried to manually fix the situation again and again should you use the Google Disavow Tool.

 

This could be one of the most time-consuming activities, depending of course of the number of webmasters you need to contact. Counting the hours it takes to send e-mails, waiting for answers, reply and so on…I would say at least seven days.

 

 

 

Uploading the Google Disavow File

 

 

After you ensure you actually do need to use the Google Disavow Tool, here are the options you have:

• You can disavow all the links that you think are unnatural

 

• You can remove just the links that you think are unnatural ( and then do a disavow)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

In order to do that, first you need to find out which links should be disavowed. You can also spend some time on learning more about unnatural links.

 

Making a disavow file can really be a burden. Imagine that you have to correctly identify ALL the links that caused the penalty and you have to visit ALL of them to see what this is about. Doing this manually can take up to seven days or more of really hard work, depending on the size of the website.

A specialized tool like cognitiveSEO can make a huge difference on your working (and sleeping) hours, by significantly reducing the investment in time to one day.

 

 

To make things a bit easier for you, in the case of a manual penalty, in the message you receive from Google, you may be given some examples of problematic links. Don’t take those few examples as the source of your problem. They are only indicative and only disavowing them won’t solve your problem. These are just examples meant to give you a “flavor” of the types of links considered unacceptable by Google.

 

How do you actually use the disavow tool?

 

 

The Google Disavow File is actually a text file that contains all the links that you’d like to be ignored by Google. Let’s say your site is www.frypans.com and you want to ignore some links that you consider not to respect Google’s guidelines. You just need to make a text file and write the exact URLs you want to get rid of, one per line. For instance, if you want to ignore all the links coming from a specific domain that looks spammy to you, let’s say www.thebestfries.com, you need to write “domain:thebestfries.com” and all the backlinks coming from there will be ignored. After completing the text file, you have to upload it.

 

 

 

  

What if you want to un-disavow a link?

 

“To modify which links you would like to ignore, download the current file of disavowed links, change it to include only links you would like to ignore, and then re-upload the file. Please allow time for the new file to propagate through our crawling/indexing system, which can take several weeks.”

 

 

 

On the official Google Central Blog, you may find more about this issue.

 

 

Common mistakes

 

 

If the file looks bad, it will not be taken into consideration and the whole process will take even longer than you expected. So make sure you help Google help you:

 

• The file that you have to upload has to be just a regular text file (no doc, excel, spreadsheets, etc.)

 

• If you have a lot of spammy links coming from one domain, instead of putting each bad link per line is better to call out the whole domain.

 

• Don’t give details about the context or extra details in the disavow link text file. You should tell the whole story about your link problems in the reconsideration request, not in the link text file.

 

• Uploading the disavow tool (meaning taking care of every aspect, avoiding mistakes, completely fulfilling the requirements) could take up to a few hours.

 

 

 

 

4.4. Critical Myths That You Need to Know Before Doing a Google Disavow

 

Like any other list of this kind, we cannot say that this is exhaustive.

 

It’s true that it’s difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth, especially when you have knowledge of some cases when the situation might strengthen the myth rather than busting it. Yet, what is important is to analyze each situation in particular and react according to each.

A lot of things can be learned and applied from all the myths listed above. We recommend you to read them carefully, to come back to them any time when in doubt and dig deeper into each situation that occurs and not just take things as they are “urbanely” spread.

 

 

We did a lot of research in order to be sure that the information that we deliver is highly accurate and strongly backed up but we also asked some experts’ opinion on this matter. There were more than happy to share their knowledge with us: Mark Porter, Krystian Szastok, Marie

 

Haynes, Chuck Price, Gabriella Sannino, Rusell Jarvis, Emory Rowland, Davin, Cohen.

 

Without any other introduction, let’s meet the biggest myths of all:

 

1. The Disavow Process is Not Automatic. A Manual Inspection Is Done.

 

 

There has been some speculation that the disavow tool is not really the result of automated processes, but rather that every time it is used, a manual inspection is performed. Aside from the fact that this would actually mean a lot more work for Google, it has actually been confirmed that the disavow process is fully automatic and there is no need to follow-up with a reconsideration request. The disavow tool is

 

“automatic for any

algorithmic rankings (such as Penguin and Panda)”, supposedly said Matt Cutts himself on a thread from more than a year and a half ago. Of course, reconsideration requests remain an option for manual webspam action, but only after you’ve first tried to take it down yourself. The disavow tool, however, leaves nothing for manual processing, which is probably why it’s always subject to extreme caution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Someone Could Use the Disavow Tool to Harm Your Site.

 

 

 

 

 

The answer to the question of whether somebody could use the disavow tool to harm your site is as short and straightforward as it can be: NO.

 

Why? Because one would need access to your Google Webmaster Tool account in order to submit a disavow on your behalf.

 

1. Google Disavow Does Not Work on Penguin Penalties

 

 

 

 

The Disavow Tool is not a link cure-all that will propel your site into new heights of ranking and traffic. Yet, its purpose is pretty clear: to help you solve unnatural links issues by asking Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. As Google itself states, if you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. This fact is confirmed by expert Chuck Price which mentions that the disavow file, combined with a

 

 

detailed reconsideration request, is a core component in successfully getting a manual penalty revoked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, the Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties.

 

 

 

  

1. Disavowed Links Disappear from GWT

 

 

 

 

 

Just like when you unsubscribe from unsolicited mail, once you disavow a link you should stop seeing or hearing about it altogether, right? Sort of. At any rate, Google will pretend not to see it from that moment on (by basically sticking an invisible nofollow tag to the link). The link, however, will not just disappear into thin air and you will still be able to see it in the Google Web Toolkit (remember that it’s the Disavow, not the Delete tool). So at a very basic level, there might not be any discernable difference, but that is no reason to panic. Just because you’re not seeing any visible change, it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any.

 

1. You Can Disavow an Unlimited Number of Links

 

 

 

 

Of course, not all myths doubt the power of the Disavow tool. A few are somewhat exaggerating it. Like the myth about being able to disavow an unlimited number of links. Admittedly, this is a more subtle point. While there is no specific limit to the number of links you can disavow, there is a 2 megabyte size limit on the disavow file. Which, in fairness, is pretty much all you should need given that the tool should be used sparingly and only as a last resort. After all, a 2 megabyte limit is still the equivalent of about 1000 full pages of text. If you need to disavow that many links, maybe your problems are more serious than can be tackled by this tool.

 

1. The Webspam Team Reads All the Comments in Your Disavow File

 

 

 

 

This would sort of make sense. If there was a team who read the comments. Meaning there would be some manual part of the process. But this, as we saw earlier, is not what happens. The process is fully

 

 

automatic, so even if you might see examples of disavow files containing comments, be aware that those comments are not meant for Google to read and act upon. Rather, they are useful for yourself, should you want to make sense of the file later on, or even edit the file. Why edit? Well, basically because our next myth is false as well.

 

1. Disavowed Links Cannot be Reavowed

 

 

 

 

There are a number of reasons why you might want to “re-avow” a link: maybe you disavowed it by mistake in the first place, maybe you changed your mind about a particular link, or maybe you simply have something else in mind and need the link to be crawled again. Regardless of reasons, re-avowing is fairly easy to do: simply remove the link from the file and re-upload the file. Next time Google visits the link, it will count towards your PageRank again. But before you remove a link from the disavow list, you might want to make sure that you really mean it. Because if the link still looks unnatural to Google, you might just get penalized again. And a second penalty round from Google is much like a second penalty round by the criminal system in real life: it usually takes longer to reclaim the lost trust. The best example of a scenario in which it would be advisable to take advantage of this feat would be if you had disavowed an entire domain but not all of it was bad. Your best course of action would be, if you know exactly which links are bad, to remove the domain name from the disavow list and only add back in the specific links you know are harming your site. Why throw away the whole crop just because of a few bad apples?

 

1. You Can’t Recover from a Penalty and then Delete Your Disavow

 

File

 

 

 

 

If you are sure that your site has been hit with a manual penalty and you’re sure that penalty is link-based and you haven’t been able to get those links removed, you can certainly use the Disavow tool to recover.

 

 

 

It may take up to a few months for Google to process your request of no follow, but if you prove Google that you have taken unsuccessful action in order to remove the bad links, recovery is on the horizon. One thing you may be tempted to do is to erase the disavow file once you recovered from a penalty. Bear in mind that as long as the links in the disavow still exist online, the removal of the disavow file makes you liable for a new penalty, once Google re-crawls the web and finds the same old links.

 

Basically, you can’t recover from a penalty and then delete your disavow file as Google keeps track of everything and will find out.

 

1. Google Disavow is Not Using the Uploads to Train the Algorithms

 

 

 

 

Frequently, our efforts are directed towards understanding algorithms. Yet, isn’t it possible that Google might do just the same? Meaning that it could “learn” from all the disavow lists and keep itself up to date with the newest “types” of unnatural links and link building schemes.

 

 

 

1. Google Disavow Tool Will Not Hurt Your Rankings

 

 

 

 

The jury is still out on this one. There is not a lot of evidence, but what exists is an interesting experiment. Cyrus Shepard at Moz disavowed all links to his personal website in the beginning of April 2013. Nothing happened in the following 2 months, but then in late May the rankings started to drop. Was this the effect of the Disavow tool? Hard to tell, since in the case of this particular experiment, late May of 2013 was also the time Google released Penguin 2.0, one of a handful of major updates made by Google for its ranking algorithms.

 

 

 

Shepard’s intuitive conclusion is that unless you file a reconsideration request right after using the disavow tool, you will not see any effects up until the first major algorithm update. Based strictly on his example, it might very well be true. It’s also true that he disavowed all the links to his website. What if he had disavowed only a few? Chances are that, taking all things into consideration, his rankings would not have dropped significantly. Shepard’s blog only dropped 8 positions for “seo blog” (not exactly an obscure phrase) after the disavow list entered into effect for all the links (assuming he was not liable for any Penguin 2.0 penalties). So if disavow really worked after Penguin 2.0, shouldn’t the drop have been a lot bigger? One theory that might still support this myth is that Google, in its own words, regards the disavow

 

 

 

 

file as a “strong suggestion rather than a directive—Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment”.

 

Disavow expert Marie Haynes takes this to potentially mean that if Google can actually distinguish between natural and unnatural links, then maybe it treats disavow files with caution and doesn’t disavow natural links. That would be a pretty big responsibility though, and not one that they might necessarily want to take upon themselves. Bottom line? Unless you’re disavowing all the links to your website, it is difficult to know what might happen (in the absence of Penguin or Panda update).

 

 

  

 

 

1. A Google Disavow Will Always Recover Your Rankings

 

 

 

 

If you have been hit by a manual action from Google, you are not necessarily going to return to were you were after the links are disavowed. If your site had an unnatural boost from those links, you are going to work a little bit harder to get natural links to recover. While Page Rank might not be the sole indicator of relevancy for Google, it is still a very important one. And you need to bear in mind that Page Rank is basically about the number and importance of links pointing to your site. Hey, they may not be links from The New York Times or

 

Financial Times, but they still count, don’t they? Not if you disavow them. So, your rankings will be hurt, sure, but some traffic is better than no traffic at all.

 

 

  

Yet, it is actually very difficult to verify whether a Google Disavow will recover your rankings or not because there is so much more at play than just the links. Cyrus’ case , for instance, is difficult to assess because the disavow timeline is intertwined with that of the Penguin releases. Would the results have been different, had the disavow file been submitted after the Penguin release and only for some links (in Cyrus’ experiment)? That would have probably been a better scenario for testing this myth, but that is not what happened. Either way, if you dropped 4 positions in the ranking and you discover you have some unnatural links, you probably shouldn’t expect that putting those links on a disavow list will act like a magical Undo button to bring you back where you were in the beginning.

 

Yet, a successful disavow will bring you some boost in terms of rankings. If you were to be penalized and didn’t submit a disavow file, you would probably rank on Google’s pages that have more than two digits. A successful submitted disavow file will bring you back on the track and even if it won’t place you on the same position that you used to be, it will still give your site the possibility to grow and accede on higher positions.

 

1. A Reconsideration Request Is Required for the Google Disavow File to Be Processed

 

 

 

 

There is a theory amongst many people who have an extensive experience with disavowing links that the disavow will take effect only when a major change happens, such as the filing of a reconsideration request or a Penguin algorithm update.

 

This myth has been consistently denied right by Google and employees, even when directly confronted with the question. The disavow tool documentation is pretty clear: “…this information will be incorporated into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see”. Other instances of Q&As with Google employee John Mueller include him stating time and time again that “as soon as

 

 

 

you submit” the disavow, Google uses it when recrawling pages and that “it’s not something that is only run periodically”. But Shepard’s experiment seems to be replicated by other sites that disavowed links a few weeks before Penguin 2.0 but only saw significant effects after the update. These cases might shake Google’s statements initially, but at a closer look they are still inconclusive. For one thing, it is very likely that the sites really were affected by Penguin 2.0. For another, it is difficult to say what the effect should have been after the disavow – maybe it wasn’t as big as the site owners expected?

 

1. Disavow Preemptively All Links

 

 

 

 

Since Penguins, negative SEO has been the webmasters′ worst nightmare. Unethical webmasters started building unnatural linkbacks for their competition and Google has been accused of unfair penalties. This is where the Disavow tool came into play.

 

If you want to disavow links that can potentially harm your site, even though you haven′t seen any decline in traffic or rankings from Google, it is pretty understandable. Suspicious links should always be treated with caution and they must be taken care of immediately, before they actually have an effect on your rankings. As a general rule though, you don’t need to deal with unnatural links if you haven’t been involved in link building. If you notice a drop in rankings, don’t jump to conclusions. Give it a little time. Wait a day or two, they might recover. Bad linkbacks might not even be involved and you will have to dig deeper to discover the true reason behind the drop. But if you’re aware of things done in the past by you or someone on your behalf, it might be a good idea to clean it up.

 

Cyrus Shepard made an interesting experiment, in order to find out how much damage can one do to his/her own site using the Google Disavow tool. He disavowed every link pointing to his website (over 35,000 of them), with no reconsideration request being filed. After 2 months, nothing happened. No drop in traffic. It has been suggested

 

that the tool has built-in safeguards that protect you from disavowing good links.

 

Where do you draw the line is really up to you. Still, it would not be a very good idea to preemptively disavow natural links that generate traffic and improve your rankings. Take a little time to check them all manually. It will be worthwhile on long term.

 

1. I Need to Disavow All TLDs for blogspot.com Unnatural Links

 

 

 

 

Actually, you don’t. What you should focus on and what you should disavow is the .com version of a blogspot page, as it is the canonical one. So, no need to worry about the .ca, .co.uk, etc. version.

 

And as every affirmation should be backed up with a strong argument, you can watch John Muller, Google’s representative talking about this in a hangout last spring. He is stressing on blogger specifically. He mentions that there are all this TLDs for bloggers and depending on your location you will be redirected to your local version and all of these local versions have a rel canonical. If you find something problematic on your site or blog that you need to disavow and don’t want to be counted, you’d just need to submit the .com version instead of the local version because the local versions are set up to be the canonical versions.

 

So, long story short, such is the case, submit for disavow only the .com version of blogger.

 

 

 

 

 

1. I Don’t Need to Disavow Unnatural Links Coming From

 

Deindexed Sites.

 

 

Although a simply Google search with the query “disavow deindexed site” will lead you to dozens of sites implying that this action would be simply worthless, we really recommend you disavowing unnatural links even if they are coming from deindexed sites. Why, you might ask. Well, first of all, even if a site gets removed from the search results completely, there is no certainty that that site won’t come back in rankings. And secondly, sometimes links from non-indexed pages can still be passing PageRank.

 

Therefore, disavowing unnatural links coming from deindexed site is a necessity, fact confirmed by Google representatives.

 

 

1. DMOZ is a Veridic Source! I Do Not Need to Disavow the Scraper DMOZ Sites.

 

 

DMOZ is indeed a veridic source. Yet, whether to disavow or not the

 

DMOZ scraper sites, that’s another story. And quite an interesting one as the one creating a bit of confusion here are Google’s representatives themselves.

 

John Muller said initially that Dmoz scrapers don’t need to be disavowed unless the original Dmoz link was an unnatural one. Yet, less than one year later from that statement, on Google’s Product Forums, topics such as Manual action because of DMOZ scrapers appeared which made us think more on this matter.

 

Yet, in March last year, when asked if do we need to disavow Dmoz scraper sites, Google’s representatives said a firmly “Yes”. John then stated that for the most part, the algorithm tries to recognize these scraper sites and ignore them. His answer is quite vague on this matter

 

 

 

as he continues by saying that if “you see these as a problem, and you want to be sure that Google handles them right…then by all means just put them in a disavow file.”

 

Obviously there are a lot of things to be debated here, starting with Google’s conflicting and inconsistent answers. Yet, as it is better to be safe than sorry, if it is the case, DMOZ scraper sites should be included on the Disavow list.

1. GWT Links are enough for a Google Disavow

 

 

 

 

 

From our experience, we are inclined to say that this is a myth and links coming from GWT are not enough. It is true that it depends on the size of the site also but Google is known for not reporting all links. We had a lot of stories from our customers saying that Google turned down the initial reconsideration request due to missing link. The interesting thing was that those links were not found in the GWT data.

 

Google says (or at least some of its representatives) that one should mainly concentrate on the links coming from Google Webmaster Tool and that’s about it. Yet, Google’s spokesman John Muller is a bit more cautious on this matter and states that you can pretty much pull out the information you need from GWT but depending on the type of site you have and the size of your site and how you process your site’s links, maybe one of the third party tools makes it a little bit easier for you to get that information or to process that information.

 

When asked whether one should worry about links that cannot be found in the GWT, the same J. Muller responds that if you’re aware of a general pattern that you see visible in GWT [...] then that’s something you’ll see a sample of in GWT and it still makes sense to clean up the bigger problem which you might not directly see in GWT. [...] Using third party tools sometimes makes it easier.

 

 

 

It wouldn’t be the first time when Google is not acting according to its official position. We do recommend not relying on links coming from GWT as experience showed us different.

1. I Should Disavow 50% of My Unnatural Links and See What Happens.

 

 

 

Making a disavow file can really be a burden and a time consuming process. Yet, you have to correctly identify ALL the links that caused the penalty and you have to visit ALL of them to see what this is abot in order for the disavowing process to be successful. The question should not be whether you should go from 60% unnatural links to 40% but rather cleaning up all unnatural links, as John Muller stated.

 

To make things a bit easier for you, in the case of a manual penalty, in the message you receive from Google you may be given some examples of problematic links. Don’t take those few examples as the source of your problem. They are only indicative and only disavowing them won’t solve your problem. These are just examples meant to give you a

 

“flavour” of the types of links considered unacceptable by Google. As stated, the disavowing process is a time consuming one. Therefore, you can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you can use tools to quickly outline the links that caused the penalty.

 

 

1. You Need to Remove Links to Escape Penguin.

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of controversy hovers over this issue. Yet, instead of arising even more controversy, making all sort of assumptions and beating around the bush without any tangible results, let’s go straight to the source and see what Google has to say on this matter.

 

 

It′s always a good idea to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Matt Cutts reiterated this whenever he got the opportunity. In an interview from October 2012, he takes it a step further and states that, in order to benefit from this tool, link removal is mandatory and you cannot recover from a penalty with just a disavow file, because the system simply doesn′t let you:

″Google can look at the snapshot of links we saw when we took manual action. If we don’t see any links actually taken down off the web, then we can see that sites have been disavowing without trying to get the links taken down″, said Matt Cutts.

 

 

Yet, on a hangout from February 2015 John Mueller from Google was asked whether it was better to remove or disavow when doing a

 

Penguin cleanup. He answered that “Penguin is an algorithm, so it’s not really going to try to read your emails and figure out if you’re doing the right thing in trying to get that cleaned up. So, with regards to algorithms that look at these links, obviously not having those links on the website is a great thing because then we don’t have them to take a look at. If they’re in the disavow file and we’ve recrawled them like that, then obviously they also won’t be used for that algorithm. But, past that, it’s not going to try to make any judgment calls as to whether or not you tried to clean it up or not.”

 

Therefore, from this point of view, link removal looks more like a recommendation and not a must to.

 

This thing was reconfirmed in a hangout from October 2013. When Penguin Algorithm was brought into discussion, the same John Muller says that “with regards to deleting them (links) or disavowing them, generally speaking if you have the ability to delete those links or add a nofollow I’d personally recommend that, because then you’d essentially be helping to clean up this issue overall. But, if you don’t have the ability to have those links removed or you can’t contact the webmaster…the site has been stale for years now…those kind of issues…using a disavow file is fine.”

 

 

1. If I Disavow Links to My Site Google Will Automatically Label Me as a Webspammer

 

 

This statement is as false as it can be. The purpose of this tool is to help you solve a problem that is unnatural link related. This, indeed, should be used with caution and only if you are sure of what you are doing. Yet, using it will not put you on Google’s spammers list. It just allows you to tell Google to nofollow a list of links that you cannot control.

 

1. You Should Always Disavow at Domain Level

 

 

 

 

A lot of fuss has been made on this theme and weather disavowing at a domain level is the right way to do things or not hasn’t been cleared out. Yet, in a previous post, we had some great experts sharing with us their experience in disavowing and one of the topic they tackled was the disavowing process at a domain level.

 

Mark Porter, SEO Manager at ScreamingFrog.co.uk, in an interview that he gave for an article on our blog, came with an interesting point of view on this. He says that while this may be true 95% of the time, there are some exceptions where it doesn’t make sense to disavow a link at domain level. For example, perhaps you have a client who used to send out press releases with multiple anchor text links in them, which got picked up or syndicated on a decent high value site. It’s usually best to disavow these at URL level in case they receive natural pickup from these sites further down the line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the other hand, Krystian Szastok , Digital Marketing Manager @RocketMill, on the same interview, states that the disavow should always be done at a domain level as most websites – especially the spammy ones – will give you many links from the same domain. Directories are a good example, you get a link from your listing and from any type of a category page.

 

 

 

 

Therefore, there is still room for much discussion regarding the disavow at a domain level. What is sure is that disavowing at a level domain is not an unshakable rule and one should always adapt the disavowing process to each situation in particular.

 

1. You Have to Make an Effort to Remove Links

 

 

 

 

What is not a myth is the fact that you can successfully use the Disavow

 

Tool, not remove links, and experience a restoration of what’s been lost, as David Cohen states in an interview regarding experts’ opinion on the disavowing process. The removing links process might be one of the most common, and at the same time, harmful myth of all. Removing some or all links in order to restore the organic search visibility and traffic that’s been lost is a bit a paradoxical situation.

 

Using the Disavow Tool and blindly removing links on a wholesale scale isn’t a smart or a strategic approach to solving the problem, it’s sloppy.

 

 

 

Yet, then again, like in any other situation, it depends on whether the site has a manual action or algorithmic one. Yet, the most shared expert opinion on this is that using just the disavow tool is sufficient and that no efforts need to be made repeatedly trying to get links removed from sites.

 

1. The Disavow Tool Does Not Work

 

 

 

 

We cannot say with certainty whether this statement is more of a myth or a fear of the webmasters. What is sure is that forums and blogs are full with discussions around this topic, with lots of people saying that they’ve used the disavow tool and their rankings did not improve, therefore it doesn’t work! Yet, so many factors may need to be taken into consideration.

 

Well known Marie Haynes from hiswebmarketing.com brings some light on this matter, listing some factors that can be at play and can be found “guilty” for the changeless ranks. For example, perhaps the site had very few good links and was only ranking well previously because of the power of links that are now being considered unnatural. Or maybe it was disavowed the wrong links. Or perhaps the site is also dealing with other issues such as suppression by the Panda algorithm.

 

I have seen many sites who have escaped Penguin, or have had a manual link penalty removed, which would not have been able to

 

 

 

succeed without using the disavow tool. As Mary stated, the Disavow Tool is a vitally important one that needs to be used by any site that is suffering because of the presence of unnatural links.

1. I Can Not Reavow Links That I Already Disavowed.

 

 

 

 

There is this myth that once you disavow links there is no going back. Yet, if you have added a link to your disavow file in error, or if you change your mind about disavowing a particular link, you can remove the link from your file and reupload it. Theoretically, the next time that Google visits that particular link, it will see that it is no longer in your disavow file and will start counting that link toward your PageRank again. However, as Russell Jarvis mentioned in an interview on our blog, reavow requests take much longer to be recognized as Google takes even stricter precautionary measures in this process to aid combating spammers who are trying to find loopholes. They usually crawl a domain a couple of times before revoking the disavow request.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Don’t Need to Include Nofollow Links in the Disavow File.

 

 

 

 

 

A simple search with the query “disavow nofollow links” generates thousands of results that we could use to write a whole PhD thesis on this matter.

 

The truth is, that there is not a 100% correct answer to the question of whether one should disavow nofollow links or not. We wrote more about this on a previous post that you might find really useful in this context.

 

As mentioned before, there are 2 major- contradicting opinions on this:

 

• You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them

 

• You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

 

As mentioned in a previous chapter, the safe bet would be to follow

 

Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links.

 

 

1. It Takes Google Up to 3 Months to Process a Disavow file!

 

 

 

 

 

Google does not give a fixed or a maximum limit on how much someone should wait for one of the three replies (on manual penalties only):

 

• Yes, we think you are in good shape

 

• No, you still have some work to do

 

• We have processed your consideration request – meaning that they might have found multiple issues, maybe one issue is solved but there are other issues that still need to be checked.

 

 

 

 

It may take a couple of weeks, a month or more.

 

 

As Google representatives say, “this is something where depending on the URL sometimes we crawl them daily, sometimes we crawl them every couple of months. So if you submit a large disavow file or a disavow file that includes a lot of domain entries or just generally includes a lot of different URLs, then that is something that’s going to take quite a bit of time to kind of recrawl all of those URLs naturally and reprocess all of that information.”

 

Very fast recoveries are usually myths and in those cases something else might have caused the problem. Also, you must know that there is no way through which you can influence the Google Penalty Recovery process externally. Yet, if you feel that it takes too long, you can always ask for more information on the webmaster forum, just to be sure that you’re on the right track.

 

1. Google Always Provides Correct Examples of Unnatural Links from Your Sites Link Profile.

 

 

It’s important to know that any automatic classification done by any algorithms, as advanced as they might be, has a false positive ratio. And even if Google might have a low false positive ratio, errors can still occur. This is why a manual auditing of your site is highly important. We live in an era of fast solving problems through automated processes. Yet, it is hard to believe that it’s possible for a tool to be 100% accurate. However, Google does require a lot of accuracy when it comes to submitting the disavow file. And this is where the human intervention appears and where manual audits should be done. And even if these ones are not perfect either, they might take you closer to a correct link classification. Therefore, do not rely completely on automatic processes, even if it Google is running that process, as errors in the system can occur any time.

 

 

 

 

1. The Disavow Tool Does not Work on Negative SEO!

 

 

 

 

 

Negative SEO attacks can come in many shapes and ways. Black hatters had to up their game, resorting to all kind of elaborated SEO attacks towards small or large sites. Negative SEO can get companies penalized or entirely banned from Google. It can affect share price. It can even put companies out of business.

 

Yet, even in this case, the Disavow tool is highly useful. And we are not the only one saying that but our clients who were victims of negative SEO attacks. The big digital marketing agency, Jellyfish, experienced an aggressive form of a negative SEO attack and have a great recovery story all exposed on a previous post. Nevertheless, their recovery story implies the use of the Disavow Tool. As Jonathan Verrall, Senior SEO Manager at Jellyfish mentions, contacting individual webmasters, as you can probably imagine, is very time consuming when there are thousands of links, hence the usefulness of the Disavow tool.

 

Therefore, the Disavow Tool works even on the undesirable case of a negative SEO attack.

 

 

 

 

1. Link Networks

 

 

 

 

 

Private blog networks (in general) are sites that use different IP addresses which are owned by the same person, who controls them and posts articles with do-follow links at his own discretion. This type of black hat SEO tactic was created in order to simulate a natural appearance of links, and it’s against Google’s quality guidelines.

 

1. Press Releases

 

An abused strategy which gives webmasters the opportunity to use sites like Prweb to publish press releases (with the same content) on hundreds of sites in order to create do-follow links back to them. By doing so, you not only create a lot of links with targeted commercial anchor texts in a short amount of time, but you also create duplicate content.

Not all press releases are bad. Just those where you use do-follow links and/or commercial anchor text in order to influence the Google Ranking.

 

 

 

1. Bookmark Sites

 

These types of sites allow users to place personal bookmarks. If you have an abundance of links coming from this area, it means you’re using these sites as a link building strategy and you want to influence your site’s rankings in the search engines.

 

1. Resource Pages

An ancient form of link building strategy, which refers to certain pages from the site that look like “/links.html”, filled with links to

 

• variety of non-related pages.

 

 

1. Sites that Sell Links

 

On this type of websites, if you stop paying your link will be removed from the site, and replaced by another one. Google looks at sites that are constantly creating and deleting links from their site, and may figure out if someone sells links. After it figured this out, if you are linked from such a site you risk being penalized.

 

1. Social Profile Links

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you create 100 accounts on different social networks and they all link to your website, it may be sign of an unnatural link tactic. From what

 

Google declares, these links are used only for indexing, so they won’t have a direct influence over the results order in the search engine.

 

 

 

1. Any Link

 

That’s right! And it shouldn’t come as a surprise, because if you read Google’s guidelines regarding link schemes, you’re going to see the following quote:

 

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in

 

Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

 

 

 

If you emphasize “any links” and “may be considered” and you’re looking at the examples above, you’re going to see there’s a big gray area enveloping this whole unnatural link idea. Basically, any link building technique may be considered an intent to manipulate if you abuse it.

 

 

 

1.5. How to Find Unnatural Links

 

 

You can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you could use a specialized tool that outlines the links that may or may have caused the penalty. A tool that simplifies the “unnatural links” complexity and helps you remove the unwanted “guests”.

 

 

 

Who Should Use a SpecializedT?

 

Everyone really and here are some reasons why:

 

 

1. Penalized Sites Owners

 

This is the ideal tool if you’ve received an unnatural link warning or have been penalized by the “Google Penguin Updates”.

 

You can easily check the links using the already generated screenshots. If we were wrong on the classification you can easily re-classify the link.

 

After the manual review of the entire list of links is completed, just hit the Google Disavow Export and you have the file ready for the Google Import. You can even send it directly to Google as you have this function, too.

 

1. Non-Penalized Sites Owners

 

For sites that haven’t been penalized by any unnatural link warning or update, the tool helps to manage the link risk by monitoring your site and your competitors’ on a weekly basis.

 

You will stay ahead of the game by being able to:

 

 

• Make informed Link Building Decisions.

 

• Know your risk to be penalized and monitor it weekly.

 

• Monitor your competitors’ link toxicity and risk.

 

• Monitor your site for Negative-SEO campaigns.

 

 

Some of the most important features of the tool are:

 

 

• Automatic unnatural link classification.

 

• Transparency & detail on each classified link. (why it is unnatural)

 

• Google Disavow Export.

 

• Fast Double-Check using the Link Snapshots.

 

• Flag & Tag Links. (bulk actions available also)

 

 

• Advanced Link profile segmentation using unnatural filters.

 

• Can be used both on your site and the competitors’.

 

• Ignore Links that are already disavowed or unimportant for the analysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Google Penguin Evolution

 

 

 

2.1. A brief history of Penguin Algorithm

 

 

Google Penguin is a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. It’s main purpose was to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a different sites. According to Google's John Mueller, Google has announced all updates to the public.

 

The confirmed Penguin updates, as they rolled out, are:

 

 

• Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries)

 

• Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)

 

• Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries)

 

• Penguin 4 (AKA Penguin 2.0) on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)

 

• Penguin 5 (AKA Penguin 2.1) on October 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)

 

• Penguin 6 (AKA Penguin 3.0) on October 17, 2014 (impacting less than 1% English queries).

 

• Penguin Real Time (announced by Google representative Gary Illyes)

 

 

The launch of Penguin Algorithm changed the SEO industry and made a drastic shift to link building practices in particular. In fairness, Google has always pushed forward their guidelines and made a strong warning against spammy tactics in their guidelines.

 

However, Penguin forced the SEO professionals to up their game and find creative link building techniques rather than simply build links that manipulate Google’s search rankings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although Penguin has prompted mostly positive changes in the way webmasters and SEO Professional create their link building techniques nowadays, Penguin brought some negative consequences also:

 

 

• Negative SEO attacks have muliplied within the industry.

 

• Many controversies have apeared around ”unfairly” penalized sites.

 

• Google has been claimed to be slow to update and refresh Penguin.

 

 

2.2. What Does the Real Time Penguin Bring New to the Table?

 

 

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter in reply to a tweet that the new Penguin iteration “will be real-time which is a huge change”. It will basically mean that as soon as Google discovers that a link is removed or disavowed, it will process it in real time, and you would be able to recover from a penalty incredibly quickly. If, however, you’re trying to get away with some tactics that are not to Google’s liking, the Penguin will catch up to you really fast and you will not be able to use those tactics for any significant amount of time.

 

Moreover, future updates might not make the headlines like the previous versions did (particularly Penguin 2.0 and 3.0), because updates will become a real-time part of the algorithm. This means, quite simply, that the algorithm will be, in a certain sense, evolving seamlessly, as it will become smarter and at a quicker pace than before, as the search engine will be able to roll out changes as needed as opposed to scheduling one massive update.

What is clear is that this update is not meant to indiscriminately hurt sites left and right, but rather to refine Google’s ability to discern between the genuine and the artificial, between the

natural and unnatural.

http://cognitiveseo.c

COGNITIVESEO .com/                                                                                                                                                        25

om/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Penguin going real-time, the algorithm will now likely get a lot closer to fulfilling its ultimate goal: catch spam link profiles as quickly as possible and keep low-quality sites from ranking well in the search results. For the moment, let’s take a look at what Penguin 3.0 impacted in the digital marketing world.

 

2.3. Penguin 3.0 Penalties Examples

 

 

We’ve searched far and wide to see the “ravages” that Penguin 3.0 has made in the world of SEO. We will list for you some examples of sites that lost their ranks as a consequence of the algorithm update but we will focus on a website whose activity we found particularly interesting.

 

1. WeddingDressTrend.com Penalty

 

 

Wedding Dress Trend deals in exactly with what its name indicates: discount wedding dresses and wedding accessories from China. A short look at the linking profile quickly establishes the reason for the penalty. The percentage of unnatural links out of the total number of links is quite staggering: more than two thirds.

 

This site did not even exist before October 2013 and within less than a year it got to a pretty hefty SEO Visibility. Quite the success story, right? Indeed if you don’t care about lasting success.

With three quarters of the links being either unnatural or at the very least suspect, this looks like a linking strategy that was created only for the purpose of quick ascension in the ranking.

 

November 2013 shows an extremely disproportionate relation between the number of links and the number of referring domains, suggesting old-school SEO tricks rather than organic growth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They cover almost every basis of “unnaturalness”: suspect anchor text, low authority links, thin content, link networks etc. What is even more astounding is that until Penguin 3.0 this site enjoyed a growth in the rankings using this strategy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just how shady were the links? They include examples such as anchor texts in blog/forum posts, blog comments with commercial anchor text, anchor text in large link lists and so on. None of these are indicative of an actual SEO strategy, but rather of marketing based on shady techniques and quantity over quality.

 

Penguin 3.0 caught up on that and the results are showing: over a very short period of time in October the site has dropped by 3 000 visibility points in the rankings. Is this something from which it will be able to recover? Potentially, yes, as we are going to see in the following Penguin Recovery examples. But this largely depends on how much

 

 

 

Wedding Dress Trend is willing to invest in organic growth rather than fast-paced winnings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. More Penguin Losers

 

 

For a better understanding on what the Google Penguin 3.0 Updates doesn’t really like, we used the SEO visibility chart to find out some other sites that aren’t doing very well for the moment in terms of rankings.

 

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a site that claims to have one of the most comprehensive reference work cataloging of all the world’s known living languages. It seems that Penguin 3.0 didn’t really believe this piece of information, or at least, this is what we conclude giving the fact that it penalized this quite hard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The much translated site Giftsngames (we thought it’s worth mentioning the fact that it is translated in 12 languages; this says a lot about the wide audience they have) got hit really hard by Google’s latest update.

 

Enjoying a high popularity in the past year, the site in question has dramatically lost its rankings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We don’t know for sure whether the site below entered in a cleanup process or not but definitely it is facing some serious problems. Judging by their visibility before the drop, it seems like short-haircuts.com had a huge popularity. Unfortunately for them, their drop is equally huge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Penguin 3.0 Penalty Recovery Winners

 

 

What is interesting to mention here is that we find a quite impressive number of sites (we are going to list just some of them here) that follows the same pattern: penalized on the 6th of October 2013 and recovered one year later. There is no need to think at some paranormal activity or anything like that. All the analyzed sites were pulled out of rankings by Penguin 2.1 and looks like Penguin 3.0 was the knight in shiny armor for them. Let’s take a look at some examples!

 

1. First Penguin Recovery – CostumeWorks.com

 

 

Costume Works is a very typical example of a winning site. It gathers Halloween costume ideas from users all around, hosting a gallery which serves as inspiration to others, as well as organizing an annual costume contest.

More than a year ago, in May 2013, Costume Works suffered a rather severe penalty, most likely at the hands of one of Penguin’s “younger siblings”.

 

A site that had had a visibility score of close to 1 500 at one point suddenly dropped to below 200. It dropped even more after August and for most of the fall and winter of 2013 and spring of 2014 it was almost invisible on the search engine’s radar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking at the linking analysis back then, it was probably well deserved: almost a quarter of the anchor text was commercial. However they became aware of that in the meantime, it worked: they dropped a lot of their links (a lot), but they have a much better outlook now: less than 10% of their links are commercial anchor text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty much everything about Costume Works looks better now. Their link profile naturalness is excellent, with just 6% of their links looking suspect and none looking unnatural.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not simply chance, or luck, but surely the result of intense link building strategy, as evidenced by the link positioning and webpage type analysis. The large majority of their links show up inside blog posts or on forum threads or in the form of short paragraphs of text.

Blog comments, which are usually a flag for shady or unnatural links, do not even add up to making 1%, indicating accidents rather than website-endorsed initiatives. Blogs, forums and personal sites represent 90% of the webpage type makeup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Second Penguin 3.0 Recovery – XtremeDiesel.com

 

 

Penguin 3.0 brought good news for XDP (Extreme Diesel Power) a site that commercializes car accessories and gadgets. The same fateful day of October pulled out Xtreme Diesel from Google’s golden list, leaving them to struggle for some rankings for not less than one year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As sweet as the victory might be, it doesn’t mean much if the reasons of the triumph remains unknown. Tormented by the investigator’s curiosity, we did what we know best and run the analysis to check out their website’s profile. Let’s take a look on what we found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before beginning to analyze the links’ profile, the system automatically gives us a helpful hand in understanding how things are standing, generating a message that speaks for itself: this site has a suspect link profile and should be investigated carefully. There is a high chance that this site might be penalized in the future for unnatural links (if it hasn’t been already).

We don’t know how this site’s link profile looked like before being penalized but judging by the fact that they recovered and still have some (not many, indeed) shady links, leads us to believe that there was a lot of unnatural activity in the house.

 

 

 

 

The “fishy” links they still have around are low authority with thin content, coming mainly from link network and forums. However, as judging outward appearances is not really our thing, we checked out some of their shady links in order to understand what we are talking about.

 

 

 

 

 

All you Star Wars fans, don’t get over excited and let’s figure out why the xtremediesel link on this forum is considered to be unnatural. It looks clearly to us that the profile created on this forum has no other purpose than creating links. It doesn’t seem like bringing added value to the forum nor generating high quality content but just some random thrown links. And Xtreme Diesel seems to have still lots of active links from forum profiles like this one. Yet, they are probably still in the

 

“cleaning session” and whatever they did to make things right, they should be proud as their work paid off.

 

1. More Penguin 3.0 Recoveries

 

 

Penguin 3.0 brought good news for some other sites previously hit by its younger brother, the Penguin 2.1 Update. Let’s take a look on what we’ve found!

 

ItsHot is an e-commerce site specialized in jewelry, watches and all sort of accessories. Dropped on the same 6th of October, this site encounters a modest yet notable recovery thanks to the newest Penguin update.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roundgames (it’s not hard to guess what is their field of activity is) also got hit by Penguin 2.1 but was powered up by Penguin 3.0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are to bring more utilities into your kitchen, shopworldkitchen.com is one of the places to browse. With a spectacular rise this month, it looks like this site is definitely Google’s cup of tea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://cognitiveseo.c

COGNITIVESEO .com/ 37 om/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voguewigs, a site specialized in synthetic and human hair wigs had the same faith as its predecessors. Penalized on October 2013, modestly but still going up recovery on October 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is possible that watchcartoononline.com might not have been on

 

Penguin 2.1′s taste due to some copywriting issues. The good news for them is that they are back on the track and it seems like they are on an ascending trend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Detecting the Penalty

 

 

 

3.1. Auditing the situation

 

 

Firstly, you need to make sure that it’s a penalty you’re talking about and not just a simple drop, for instance. A penalty must not be confused with other situations where Google’s volatility plays a major role. If a site dropped just a few positions in the search results, it is very likely that it is not about a penalty.

 

Before putting the finger on a penalty, make sure that you take into consideration one or a combination of the following factors:

 

 

• Google Algorithm Update – Google makes systematical and periodical changes to its algorithms, leading to ranking fluctuations.

 

• Website Changes – Changes in the site architecture can lead to important modifications in the traffic index.

 

• Lost Backlinks – It is possible backlinks are causing some specific keywords to become lost and, thereby, ranking fluctuations can occur.

 

• Competition Outrank – Sites that were below might surpass your

 

Google Penalty Risk Analysis

 

 

With constant changes in the online world, the Google Penalty Risk analysis should be on the mind of every web master. Whether you are trying to avoid a penalty or are striving to recover from one, a back link analysis is absolutely necessary. A continuous monitoring of your link profile will help you stay in control.

 

 

 

First, analyze how natural your link profile looks like. You need to permanently supervise the ratio between natural and unnatural links!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is unlikely that a site’s profile will be 100% natural but, from our in-house case studies at cognitiveSEO, sites with over 20 percent unnatural and suspect links are at a high risk of being flagged by Google for bad linking practices.

Constantly monitoring your link profile provides you with vital information about your risk of being penalized by Google. Having an unnatural link profile doesn’t necessarily mean you use shady tactics to manipulate the ranking. Negative SEO attacks could also influence the way a link profile looks like.

 

 

If you want to rank on the long-term in Google, it is highly recommended to closely follow Google’s Guidelines. Even so it is important to keep an eye on a potential penalty risk.

 

Monitoring the Unnatural Links Distribution allows you to avoid Google Penalties and also increases the changes of Google Recovery for penalized sites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.2. Manual Action Warnings vs. Automatic Google Algorithm Penalties

 

There is a lot of confusion regarding unnatural link warnings. There are two types of penalties Google uses: manual and algorithmic. This misunderstanding began with the first Penguin update was made and it’s still something lots of webmasters and website owners have trouble determining. To shed some light over this unsettling matter I am going to go over some differences between manual actions and Penguin penalties:

 

Manual actions, as the name suggests, refer to actions manually taken by Google employees who personally review your website and your link profile. If Google thinks you may have deployed some devious techniques in order to rank better in their search results, then you might receive a warning. Manual link warnings have nothing to do with penalties caused by Google’s algorithm updates like Penguin or Panda.

These types of warnings are deployed only when you’re in violation of Google’s guidelines. You will receive unnatural link warnings in the “Manual Actions” section of Google Webmaster Tools.

 

 

On the other side, penalties resulted from Penguin and Panda updates (called algorithmic penalties) are made when Google releases these algorithmic updates and automatically evaluates not only your links but your entire site. Google is putting a lot of effort in improving the algorithm in order to minimize the involvement of human reviewers. These penalties are automated, based on their algorithm, and evaluated on the spot.

The biggest difference between these two penalties is that if your site is affected by the Penguin or Panda update, you won’t receive any written warning from Google. You will just experience a sudden drop in rankings.

 

 

 

 

3.3. Unnatural Link Warnings and How to Deal With Them

 

 

Warning 1: Unnatural Links from Your Site

 

 

The first type of unnatural link warning is received by the webmaster when Google finds your link profile contains unnatural outbound links. This is what that warning will look like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

This means you are ranking using techniques that are against Google’s guidelines. The warning “Unnatural links from your site” is associated with a manual action that affects only the concerning part of your site.

 

This type of actions are classified as “Partial matches”. The other type of actions are called “Site-wide matches”, which affect the whole site.

 

 

 

 

 

  

After you’ve acknowledged the violation, you need to attend to the problem and solve it. To do so, you need to identify which links are unnatural (Google won’t specify which links are violating their guidelines). Then, you should work to remove them or apply a rel=”nofollow” tag. Another way to fix the situation would be to use a 301 Redirect attribute through a page that’s blocked by robots.txt.

 

After you’ve identified and dealt with all the unnatural links, you should create a reconsideration request for your site. This request lets Google know that you’re on the correct path and you want the manual action to be revoked.

 

 

 

Warning 2: Unnatural Links to Your Site

 

 

The second type of warning comes when you get a message in Google Webmasters Tools announcing that Google exposed some unnatural links pointing to your site. Moreover, with this kind of warnings, Google provides a few links as an example of bad links pointing to your website. The main difference between this message and the warning above is that in this case Google detected a pattern of unnatural links that are pointing to your site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is also a violation of Google’s guidelines and will be penalized.

 

Because this may not be a devious scheme on your part in order to influence the search results, there will only be a penalty on the areas of the site which have many unnatural links pointing to them. As in the case of unnatural links from your site, this is also classified as “Partial matches”.

 

In order to get rid of your penalty, you need to get rid of the unnatural links. It’s a little bit more difficult than in the case of links from your site because you don’t know which domains have unnatural links pointing to your site.

 

 

You need to undergo a couple of steps:

 

 

1. Download a list of all your links to your site using Webmaster Tools

 

1. Check every link to see whether it’s unnatural or not. To make your job easier you should start checking the domains that have the most links to you. You can ease this job by using third-party tools which specialize in identifying types of unnatural links, such as cognitiveSEO (disclaimer: this is my company). There are a lot of types of unnatural links and you need to identify them all in order to get rid of your penalty

 

1. After you’ve identified the rotten links that are harming your ranking, you could contact the webmasters of those domains and request that they remove the link or add a rel=”nofollow” tag

 

1. Google recommends only after you’ve done a serious work contacting webmasters to remove the links should you use the Disavow links tool. Google created this tool to help you get rid of the links you were unable to get removed. Only after you’ve made an effort to remove the unnatural links that were violating

 

Google’s guidelines you might have the manual action removed.

 

 

1. In some cases, Google will remove all the bad links, and your penalty will be lifted. But usually, it takes more than a couple of reconsideration attempts to make Google lift your penalty and begin the recovery process.

 

Google wants to see you make a real effort to contact webmasters for link removal before you use the disavow tool. It is likely that Google won’t accept your reconsideration request in the first try.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warning 3: Unnatural Links to Your Site (Impacts Links)

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a little bit more nuance when it comes to unnatural links that are pointing to your site. The difference between this warning and the one above is pretty much contextual. Google figured out that your site was involved in some unnatural link building schemes that point back to your site; if this is still unclear, Matt Cutts (former head of webmaster team at Google) did explain the impact links here.

 

As he states, this may be a result of your own doings or may appear without any involvement on your part. Google takes that into account when they’re considering a manual action. They will only penalize the affected part of your site.

Be aware! Google will want proof of your efforts dealing with unnatural links and removing them.

 

 

To clear the confusion out, even if you don’t have any control over these type of links, you should try to identify them and do your best to remove them. If you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking.

 

If you want your penalty to be revoked you should include any proof of the process with your reconsideration request. You can show emails sent to webmasters that have unnatural links pointing to your site, requesting a link removal.

 

Every step that shows your intentions of cleansing the site should go with the reconsideration request. It shows Google that you are committed and willing to do anything to go on the right path.

 

 

 

  

1. Recover from Google Penalty

 

 

 

4.1. When to use and not to Use the Google Disavow Tool

 

 

The Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process is simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard. The changes made to the algorithm, “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

 

 

 

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though, overall, the objective of the Disavow Links tool was to be used as a resort to resolve link problems, this tool is not as simple as it seems.

 

You may want to use this tool if you stumble upon a couple of problems:

 

• Your site was the target of a negative SEO campaign.

 

• Your search engine rankings are dropping fast because you have been penalized by a link penalty.

 

• You received  a  “manual  link  penalty”  message  from  Google

 

Webmaster Tools.

 

• For all the above you can easily solve your problem with a tool that will guide you through the process.

 

 

When consider using it, you should take into consideration a couple of things.

First of all, you need to make a quick audit on your link profile and see which links are harming your site the most. You need to carefully determine the bad and the good and see which links could influence your site’s ranking drop.

 

 

If you’re not careful you might end up losing some valid links that would otherwise pour some of that precious “link juice”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another detail you have to take into account is the fact that, before appealing to the disavow tool you could try to remove the bad links manually by contacting the owners of the websites that point to you. Before panicking and running straight for the disavow solution, you should carefully try to clean up your mess the old fashion way. It may sound like a laborious task but you can make use of third-party tools that can help you fasten with the unnatural link detection and outreach.

 

The whole concept of disavowing unnatural links must be taken very seriously as it may also harm your ranking.

This process should not be done on haste. You should take your time weeding out the bad and you should only submit a list to be disavowed only if you’re 100% sure of the links that you send.

 

 

You should also remember to try to manually remove the harmful links not only to show Google your good intentions but also because you don’t know how long the disavow process could take. While, these are cases when Google Disavow would have its best usage, there are also scenarios when you should not disavow the links:

 

  

 

1. No Drastic Ranking Drop.

 

 

The reasons for which you may experience a drastic Google ranking drop may vary from website to website and in generally there is a serious guideline violation. But if you don’t experience that you shouldn’t be panicking. You may just be outranked by a competitor. As a consequence, there is no need to rush and get the disavow tool from your link survival kit. You should try to analyze and track your competitor and see what is his SEO and content strategy. Also, you should maybe step up and improve your own approaches.

 

1. Not Sure if it is an Algorithmic Penalty.

 

 

When you receive a manual penalty the situation is pretty clear. Especially if you make use of Google Webmaster Tools (which we strongly recommend). You will receive a message in which they warn you about the actions taken against you. While this is easy and

 

straightforward, an algorithmic penalty is not that obvious. You’ll have to make a personal assessment to see if it’s a penalty or it’s just the fact that the links are low quality. And if it is indeed an algorithmic penalty, what is harming your site’s ranking?

 

 

 

 

 

1. Small Drop in Rankings.

 

 

It may just be a quick road bump in the road. You may always experience a flux in ranking that is unpredictable. As a golden rule, if you don’t have an explicit message from Google that you’ve been penalized or if you know you have an unnatural link profile, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Your ranking could just recover on its own after a day or two. Also, a small drop in search engine ranking may just be influenced by the fact that you have many low quality links pointing to your site.

 

1. For Testing Purposes.

 

Just don’t toy around with this tool, you may get fried!

 

 

 

The final advice on when not to use the Google disavow tool would be to not just use it so you can see how it works. Cyrus Shepard made such an experiment and here are his “sad” findings. The saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is very much true in this case. This is one of those tools that you just don’t want to learn at your own cost. It’s too powerful and the damage it may do if misused may be irreversible.

 

 

4.2. Should You Disavow No-follow Links?

 

 

The short answer is that there is no exact answer on this. There are 2 major, contradictory, opinions on this:

 

1. No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [GOOGLE APPROVED]

 

1. Yes. You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

 

 

 

 

• Why shouldn’t I disavow No-follow links?

 

 

First of all there is an official Google representative that confirmed this. His name is John Muller and he is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. “No-follow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

 

• Why should I consider disavowing No-follow links?

 

 

Nothing confirmed here, only some rants:

 

 

1. No-follow links are possibly transferring ranking juice in certain cases and there are also, some studies that prove that.

 

Google doesn’t always say the “correct” things. Negative SEO has been working for years, but the Google Guidelines denied it vehemently.

 

 

 

1. Google changed their wording, a while ago, in order to reflect the possibility of someone else ability to affect your rankings.

 

1. What about “link building” campaigns that dilute the signals of naturalness using no-follow link acquisition?

 

I bet you are confused now. The question still remains:

 

 

Should I disavow No-follow Links?

The safest bet would be to follow Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links. If a domain is sending both do-follow and no-follow unnatural links, just ask for a full domain disavow there.

 

 

 

 

 

  

People have reported successful recovery stories on both the cases so I think you aren’t risking anything.

 

 

4.3. How to use the Disavow Tool - step by step usage guide

 

 

Even if you are 100% sure that your site has been penalized, there are still some steps that we suggest you go through before before Uploading the Google Disavow File:

 

 

• Audit: try to get as much information as you can about what Identifying bad links takes time. These can be links that use overly optimized anchor text (including phrases you haven’t targeted on your own), links from bad neighborhood sites, links from foreign language websites, links from sites created exclusively for SEO purposes, sidebar links etc.

A backlink audit is a complex procedure that must be done constantly; still, if you are in bit of a hurry and you put a sustained effort into it, you might get the job done in one day.

 

 

 

 

• Data analysis & interpretation: Analyzing those links might take up as much time as identifying them. Some you might be able to get rid of without the need for disavow. Some may not be as harmful as you assumed at first. And some may actually be more useful than they appear. It’s also likely that not all bad links hurt you in the same way (or as much). Prioritizing is also important.

 

Assuming you have a pretty clear image of your site’s overall activity, 1/2 day should be enough to solve this matter.

 

 

• Build solid documentation: Get up to date on Google policies and updates, but also on the history of the external websites that have caused you grief, and maybe even on your own history.

 

 

 

 

You need a compelling story, one that Google will believe, and those are usually the stories that make sense and account for everyone. Gathering the data all together should be another 1/2 day.

 

 

 

• Contact Webmasters: If Google sent you a message to say they’ve seen unnatural links to your site, the first move should be to actually remove those links from the web. And in some cases, you may be able to clean up on your own. Write to the site’s webmasters and ask them to have your links taken down. Sometimes it is not possible to get in contact with everybody and sometimes you may have thousands of links on hundreds or even thousands of websites you have to deal with. You have to monitor this permanently and only after you’ve tried to manually fix the situation again and again should you use the Google Disavow Tool.

 

This could be one of the most time-consuming activities, depending of course of the number of webmasters you need to contact. Counting the hours it takes to send e-mails, waiting for answers, reply and so on…I would say at least seven days.

 

 

 

Uploading the Google Disavow File

 

 

After you ensure you actually do need to use the Google Disavow Tool, here are the options you have:

• You can disavow all the links that you think are unnatural

 

• You can remove just the links that you think are unnatural ( and then do a disavow)

 

 

 

 

In order to do that, first you need to find out which links should be disavowed. You can also spend some time on learning more about unnatural links.

 

Making a disavow file can really be a burden. Imagine that you have to correctly identify ALL the links that caused the penalty and you have to visit ALL of them to see what this is about. Doing this manually can take up to seven days or more of really hard work, depending on the size of the website.

A specialized tool like cognitiveSEO can make a huge difference on your working (and sleeping) hours, by significantly reducing the investment in time to one day.

 

 

To make things a bit easier for you, in the case of a manual penalty, in the message you receive from Google, you may be given some examples of problematic links. Don’t take those few examples as the source of your problem. They are only indicative and only disavowing them won’t solve your problem. These are just examples meant to give you a “flavor” of the types of links considered unacceptable by Google.

 

How do you actually use the disavow tool?

 

 

The Google Disavow File is actually a text file that contains all the links that you’d like to be ignored by Google. Let’s say your site is www.frypans.com and you want to ignore some links that you consider not to respect Google’s guidelines. You just need to make a text file and write the exact URLs you want to get rid of, one per line. For instance, if you want to ignore all the links coming from a specific domain that looks spammy to you, let’s say www.thebestfries.com, you need to write “domain:thebestfries.com” and all the backlinks coming from there will be ignored. After completing the text file, you have to upload it.

 

 

What if you want to un-disavow a link?

 

“To modify which links you would like to ignore, download the current file of disavowed links, change it to include only links you would like to ignore, and then re-upload the file. Please allow time for the new file to propagate through our crawling/indexing system, which can take several weeks.”

 

 

 

On the official Google Central Blog, you may find more about this issue.

 

 

Common mistakes

 

 

If the file looks bad, it will not be taken into consideration and the whole process will take even longer than you expected. So make sure you help Google help you:

 

• The file that you have to upload has to be just a regular text file (no doc, excel, spreadsheets, etc.)

 

• If you have a lot of spammy links coming from one domain, instead of putting each bad link per line is better to call out the whole domain.

 

• Don’t give details about the context or extra details in the disavow link text file. You should tell the whole story about your link problems in the reconsideration request, not in the link text file.

 

• Uploading the disavow tool (meaning taking care of every aspect, avoiding mistakes, completely fulfilling the requirements) could take up to a few hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.4. Critical Myths That You Need to Know Before Doing a Google Disavow

 

Like any other list of this kind, we cannot say that this is exhaustive.

 

It’s true that it’s difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth, especially when you have knowledge of some cases when the situation might strengthen the myth rather than busting it. Yet, what is important is to analyze each situation in particular and react according to each.

A lot of things can be learned and applied from all the myths listed above. We recommend you to read them carefully, to come back to them any time when in doubt and dig deeper into each situation that occurs and not just take things as they are “urbanely” spread.

 

 

We did a lot of research in order to be sure that the information that we deliver is highly accurate and strongly backed up but we also asked some experts’ opinion on this matter. There were more than happy to share their knowledge with us: Mark Porter, Krystian Szastok, Marie

 

Haynes, Chuck Price, Gabriella Sannino, Rusell Jarvis, Emory Rowland, Davin, Cohen.

 

Without any other introduction, let’s meet the biggest myths of all:

 

1. The Disavow Process is Not Automatic. A Manual Inspection Is Done.

 

 

There has been some speculation that the disavow tool is not really the result of automated processes, but rather that every time it is used, a manual inspection is performed. Aside from the fact that this would actually mean a lot more work for Google, it has actually been confirmed that the disavow process is fully automatic and there is no need to follow-up with a reconsideration request. The disavow tool is

 

“automatic for any

 

 

 

 

algorithmic rankings (such as Penguin and Panda)”, supposedly said Matt Cutts himself on a thread from more than a year and a half ago. Of course, reconsideration requests remain an option for manual webspam action, but only after you’ve first tried to take it down yourself. The disavow tool, however, leaves nothing for manual processing, which is probably why it’s always subject to extreme caution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Someone Could Use the Disavow Tool to Harm Your Site.

 

 

 

 

 

The answer to the question of whether somebody could use the disavow tool to harm your site is as short and straightforward as it can be: NO.

 

Why? Because one would need access to your Google Webmaster Tool account in order to submit a disavow on your behalf.

 

1. Google Disavow Does Not Work on Penguin Penalties

 

 

 

 

The Disavow Tool is not a link cure-all that will propel your site into new heights of ranking and traffic. Yet, its purpose is pretty clear: to help you solve unnatural links issues by asking Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. As Google itself states, if you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. This fact is confirmed by expert Chuck Price which mentions that the disavow file, combined with a

 

  

detailed reconsideration request, is a core component in successfully getting a manual penalty revoked.

 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, the Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Disavowed Links Disappear from GWT

 

 

 

 

 

Just like when you unsubscribe from unsolicited mail, once you disavow a link you should stop seeing or hearing about it altogether, right? Sort of. At any rate, Google will pretend not to see it from that moment on (by basically sticking an invisible nofollow tag to the link). The link, however, will not just disappear into thin air and you will still be able to see it in the Google Web Toolkit (remember that it’s the Disavow, not the Delete tool). So at a very basic level, there might not be any discernable difference, but that is no reason to panic. Just because you’re not seeing any visible change, it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any.

 

1. You Can Disavow an Unlimited Number of Links

 

 

 

 

Of course, not all myths doubt the power of the Disavow tool. A few are somewhat exaggerating it. Like the myth about being able to disavow an unlimited number of links. Admittedly, this is a more subtle point. While there is no specific limit to the number of links you can disavow, there is a 2 megabyte size limit on the disavow file. Which, in fairness, is pretty much all you should need given that the tool should be used sparingly and only as a last resort. After all, a 2 megabyte limit is still the equivalent of about 1000 full pages of text. If you need to disavow that many links, maybe your problems are more serious than can be tackled by this tool.

 

1. The Webspam Team Reads All the Comments in Your Disavow File

 

 

 

 

This would sort of make sense. If there was a team who read the comments. Meaning there would be some manual part of the process. But this, as we saw earlier, is not what happens. The process is fully

 

 

 

automatic, so even if you might see examples of disavow files containing comments, be aware that those comments are not meant for Google to read and act upon. Rather, they are useful for yourself, should you want to make sense of the file later on, or even edit the file. Why edit? Well, basically because our next myth is false as well.

 

1. Disavowed Links Cannot be Reavowed

 

 

 

 

There are a number of reasons why you might want to “re-avow” a link: maybe you disavowed it by mistake in the first place, maybe you changed your mind about a particular link, or maybe you simply have something else in mind and need the link to be crawled again. Regardless of reasons, re-avowing is fairly easy to do: simply remove the link from the file and re-upload the file. Next time Google visits the link, it will count towards your PageRank again. But before you remove a link from the disavow list, you might want to make sure that you really mean it. Because if the link still looks unnatural to Google, you might just get penalized again. And a second penalty round from Google is much like a second penalty round by the criminal system in real life: it usually takes longer to reclaim the lost trust. The best example of a scenario in which it would be advisable to take advantage of this feat would be if you had disavowed an entire domain but not all of it was bad. Your best course of action would be, if you know exactly which links are bad, to remove the domain name from the disavow list and only add back in the specific links you know are harming your site. Why throw away the whole crop just because of a few bad apples?

 

1. You Can’t Recover from a Penalty and then Delete Your Disavow

 

File

 

 

 

 

If you are sure that your site has been hit with a manual penalty and you’re sure that penalty is link-based and you haven’t been able to get those links removed, you can certainly use the Disavow tool to recover.

 

 

It may take up to a few months for Google to process your request of no follow, but if you prove Google that you have taken unsuccessful action in order to remove the bad links, recovery is on the horizon. One thing you may be tempted to do is to erase the disavow file once you recovered from a penalty. Bear in mind that as long as the links in the disavow still exist online, the removal of the disavow file makes you liable for a new penalty, once Google re-crawls the web and finds the same old links.

 

Basically, you can’t recover from a penalty and then delete your disavow file as Google keeps track of everything and will find out.

 

1. Google Disavow is Not Using the Uploads to Train the Algorithms

 

 

 

 

Frequently, our efforts are directed towards understanding algorithms. Yet, isn’t it possible that Google might do just the same? Meaning that it could “learn” from all the disavow lists and keep itself up to date with the newest “types” of unnatural links and link building schemes.

 

 

 

1. Google Disavow Tool Will Not Hurt Your Rankings

 

 

 

 

The jury is still out on this one. There is not a lot of evidence, but what exists is an interesting experiment. Cyrus Shepard at Moz disavowed all links to his personal website in the beginning of April 2013. Nothing happened in the following 2 months, but then in late May the rankings started to drop. Was this the effect of the Disavow tool? Hard to tell, since in the case of this particular experiment, late May of 2013 was also the time Google released Penguin 2.0, one of a handful of major updates made by Google for its ranking algorithms.

 

 

  

 

 

Shepard’s intuitive conclusion is that unless you file a reconsideration request right after using the disavow tool, you will not see any effects up until the first major algorithm update. Based strictly on his example, it might very well be true. It’s also true that he disavowed all the links to his website. What if he had disavowed only a few? Chances are that, taking all things into consideration, his rankings would not have dropped significantly. Shepard’s blog only dropped 8 positions for “seo blog” (not exactly an obscure phrase) after the disavow list entered into effect for all the links (assuming he was not liable for any Penguin 2.0 penalties). So if disavow really worked after Penguin 2.0, shouldn’t the drop have been a lot bigger? One theory that might still support this myth is that Google, in its own words, regards the disavow

 

 

 

file as a “strong suggestion rather than a directive—Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment”.

 

Disavow expert Marie Haynes takes this to potentially mean that if Google can actually distinguish between natural and unnatural links, then maybe it treats disavow files with caution and doesn’t disavow natural links. That would be a pretty big responsibility though, and not one that they might necessarily want to take upon themselves. Bottom line? Unless you’re disavowing all the links to your website, it is difficult to know what might happen (in the absence of Penguin or Panda update).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A Google Disavow Will Always Recover Your Rankings

 

 

 

 

If you have been hit by a manual action from Google, you are not necessarily going to return to were you were after the links are disavowed. If your site had an unnatural boost from those links, you are going to work a little bit harder to get natural links to recover. While Page Rank might not be the sole indicator of relevancy for Google, it is still a very important one. And you need to bear in mind that Page Rank is basically about the number and importance of links pointing to your site. Hey, they may not be links from The New York Times or

 

Financial Times, but they still count, don’t they? Not if you disavow them. So, your rankings will be hurt, sure, but some traffic is better than no traffic at all.

 

  

 

Yet, it is actually very difficult to verify whether a Google Disavow will recover your rankings or not because there is so much more at play than just the links. Cyrus’ case , for instance, is difficult to assess because the disavow timeline is intertwined with that of the Penguin releases. Would the results have been different, had the disavow file been submitted after the Penguin release and only for some links (in Cyrus’ experiment)? That would have probably been a better scenario for testing this myth, but that is not what happened. Either way, if you dropped 4 positions in the ranking and you discover you have some unnatural links, you probably shouldn’t expect that putting those links on a disavow list will act like a magical Undo button to bring you back where you were in the beginning.

 

Yet, a successful disavow will bring you some boost in terms of rankings. If you were to be penalized and didn’t submit a disavow file, you would probably rank on Google’s pages that have more than two digits. A successful submitted disavow file will bring you back on the track and even if it won’t place you on the same position that you used to be, it will still give your site the possibility to grow and accede on higher positions.

 

1. A Reconsideration Request Is Required for the Google Disavow File to Be Processed

 

 

 

 

There is a theory amongst many people who have an extensive experience with disavowing links that the disavow will take effect only when a major change happens, such as the filing of a reconsideration request or a Penguin algorithm update.

 

This myth has been consistently denied right by Google and employees, even when directly confronted with the question. The disavow tool documentation is pretty clear: “…this information will be incorporated into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see”. Other instances of Q&As with Google employee John Mueller include him stating time and time again that “as soon as

 

 

you submit” the disavow, Google uses it when recrawling pages and that “it’s not something that is only run periodically”. But Shepard’s experiment seems to be replicated by other sites that disavowed links a few weeks before Penguin 2.0 but only saw significant effects after the update. These cases might shake Google’s statements initially, but at a closer look they are still inconclusive. For one thing, it is very likely that the sites really were affected by Penguin 2.0. For another, it is difficult to say what the effect should have been after the disavow – maybe it wasn’t as big as the site owners expected?

 

1. Disavow Preemptively All Links

 

 

 

 

Since Penguins, negative SEO has been the webmasters′ worst nightmare. Unethical webmasters started building unnatural linkbacks for their competition and Google has been accused of unfair penalties. This is where the Disavow tool came into play.

 

If you want to disavow links that can potentially harm your site, even though you haven′t seen any decline in traffic or rankings from Google, it is pretty understandable. Suspicious links should always be treated with caution and they must be taken care of immediately, before they actually have an effect on your rankings. As a general rule though, you don’t need to deal with unnatural links if you haven’t been involved in link building. If you notice a drop in rankings, don’t jump to conclusions. Give it a little time. Wait a day or two, they might recover. Bad linkbacks might not even be involved and you will have to dig deeper to discover the true reason behind the drop. But if you’re aware of things done in the past by you or someone on your behalf, it might be a good idea to clean it up.

 

Cyrus Shepard made an interesting experiment, in order to find out how much damage can one do to his/her own site using the Google Disavow tool. He disavowed every link pointing to his website (over 35,000 of them), with no reconsideration request being filed. After 2 months, nothing happened. No drop in traffic. It has been suggested that the tool has built-in safeguards that protect you from disavowing good links.

 

Where do you draw the line is really up to you. Still, it would not be a very good idea to preemptively disavow natural links that generate traffic and improve your rankings. Take a little time to check them all manually. It will be worthwhile on long term.

 

1. I Need to Disavow All TLDs for blogspot.com Unnatural Links

 

 

 

 

Actually, you don’t. What you should focus on and what you should disavow is the .com version of a blogspot page, as it is the canonical one. So, no need to worry about the .ca, .co.uk, etc. version.

 

And as every affirmation should be backed up with a strong argument, you can watch John Muller, Google’s representative talking about this in a hangout last spring. He is stressing on blogger specifically. He mentions that there are all this TLDs for bloggers and depending on your location you will be redirected to your local version and all of these local versions have a rel canonical. If you find something problematic on your site or blog that you need to disavow and don’t want to be counted, you’d just need to submit the .com version instead of the local version because the local versions are set up to be the canonical versions.

 

So, long story short, such is the case, submit for disavow only the .com version of blogger.

 

 

 

 

  

1. I Don’t Need to Disavow Unnatural Links Coming From

 

Deindexed Sites.

 

 

Although a simply Google search with the query “disavow deindexed site” will lead you to dozens of sites implying that this action would be simply worthless, we really recommend you disavowing unnatural links even if they are coming from deindexed sites. Why, you might ask. Well, first of all, even if a site gets removed from the search results completely, there is no certainty that that site won’t come back in rankings. And secondly, sometimes links from non-indexed pages can still be passing PageRank.

 

Therefore, disavowing unnatural links coming from deindexed site is a necessity, fact confirmed by Google representatives.

 

 

1. DMOZ is a Veridic Source! I Do Not Need to Disavow the Scraper DMOZ Sites.

 

 

DMOZ is indeed a veridic source. Yet, whether to disavow or not the

 

DMOZ scraper sites, that’s another story. And quite an interesting one as the one creating a bit of confusion here are Google’s representatives themselves.

 

John Muller said initially that Dmoz scrapers don’t need to be disavowed unless the original Dmoz link was an unnatural one. Yet, less than one year later from that statement, on Google’s Product Forums, topics such as Manual action because of DMOZ scrapers appeared which made us think more on this matter.

 

Yet, in March last year, when asked if do we need to disavow Dmoz scraper sites, Google’s representatives said a firmly “Yes”. John then stated that for the most part, the algorithm tries to recognize these scraper sites and ignore them. His answer is quite vague on this matter

 

 

 

as he continues by saying that if “you see these as a problem, and you want to be sure that Google handles them right…then by all means just put them in a disavow file.”

 

Obviously there are a lot of things to be debated here, starting with Google’s conflicting and inconsistent answers. Yet, as it is better to be safe than sorry, if it is the case, DMOZ scraper sites should be included on the Disavow list.

1. GWT Links are enough for a Google Disavow

 

 

 

 

 

From our experience, we are inclined to say that this is a myth and links coming from GWT are not enough. It is true that it depends on the size of the site also but Google is known for not reporting all links. We had a lot of stories from our customers saying that Google turned down the initial reconsideration request due to missing link. The interesting thing was that those links were not found in the GWT data.

 

Google says (or at least some of its representatives) that one should mainly concentrate on the links coming from Google Webmaster Tool and that’s about it. Yet, Google’s spokesman John Muller is a bit more cautious on this matter and states that you can pretty much pull out the information you need from GWT but depending on the type of site you have and the size of your site and how you process your site’s links, maybe one of the third party tools makes it a little bit easier for you to get that information or to process that information.

 

When asked whether one should worry about links that cannot be found in the GWT, the same J. Muller responds that if you’re aware of a general pattern that you see visible in GWT [...] then that’s something you’ll see a sample of in GWT and it still makes sense to clean up the bigger problem which you might not directly see in GWT. [...] Using third party tools sometimes makes it easier.

 

 

 

It wouldn’t be the first time when Google is not acting according to its official position. We do recommend not relying on links coming from GWT as experience showed us different.

1. I Should Disavow 50% of My Unnatural Links and See What Happens.

 

 

 

Making a disavow file can really be a burden and a time consuming process. Yet, you have to correctly identify ALL the links that caused the penalty and you have to visit ALL of them to see what this is about in order for the disavowing process to be successful. The question should not be whether you should go from 60% unnatural links to 40% but rather cleaning up all unnatural links, as John Muller stated.

 

To make things a bit easier for you, in the case of a manual penalty, in the message you receive from Google you may be given some examples of problematic links. Don’t take those few examples as the source of your problem. They are only indicative and only disavowing them won’t solve your problem. These are just examples meant to give you a

 

“flavour” of the types of links considered unacceptable by Google. As stated, the disavowing process is a time consuming one. Therefore, you can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you can use tools to quickly outline the links that caused the penalty.

 

 

1. You Need to Remove Links to Escape Penguin.

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of controversy hovers over this issue. Yet, instead of arising even more controversy, making all sort of assumptions and beating around the bush without any tangible results, let’s go straight to the source and see what Google has to say on this matter.

 

  

It′s always a good idea to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Matt Cutts reiterated this whenever he got the opportunity. In an interview from October 2012, he takes it a step further and states that, in order to benefit from this tool, link removal is mandatory and you cannot recover from a penalty with just a disavow file, because the system simply doesn′t let you:

″Google can look at the snapshot of links we saw when we took manual action. If we don’t see any links actually taken down off the web, then we can see that sites have been disavowing without trying to get the links taken down″, said Matt Cutts.

 

 

Yet, on a hangout from February 2015 John Mueller from Google was asked whether it was better to remove or disavow when doing a

 

Penguin cleanup. He answered that “Penguin is an algorithm, so it’s not really going to try to read your emails and figure out if you’re doing the right thing in trying to get that cleaned up. So, with regards to algorithms that look at these links, obviously not having those links on the website is a great thing because then we don’t have them to take a look at. If they’re in the disavow file and we’ve recrawled them like that, then obviously they also won’t be used for that algorithm. But, past that, it’s not going to try to make any judgment calls as to whether or not you tried to clean it up or not.”

 

Therefore, from this point of view, link removal looks more like a recommendation and not a must to.

 

This thing was reconfirmed in a hangout from October 2013. When Penguin Algorithm was brought into discussion, the same John Muller says that “with regards to deleting them (links) or disavowing them, generally speaking if you have the ability to delete those links or add a nofollow I’d personally recommend that, because then you’d essentially be helping to clean up this issue overall. But, if you don’t have the ability to have those links removed or you can’t contact the webmaster…the site has been stale for years now…those kind of issues…using a disavow file is fine.”

 

 

 

 

1. If I Disavow Links to My Site Google Will Automatically Label Me as a Webspammer

 

 

This statement is as false as it can be. The purpose of this tool is to help you solve a problem that is unnatural link related. This, indeed, should be used with caution and only if you are sure of what you are doing. Yet, using it will not put you on Google’s spammers list. It just allows you to tell Google to nofollow a list of links that you cannot control.

 

1. You Should Always Disavow at Domain Level

 

 

 

 

A lot of fuss has been made on this theme and weather disavowing at a domain level is the right way to do things or not hasn’t been cleared out. Yet, in a previous post, we had some great experts sharing with us their experience in disavowing and one of the topic they tackled was the disavowing process at a domain level.

 

Mark Porter, SEO Manager at ScreamingFrog.co.uk, in an interview that he gave for an article on our blog, came with an interesting point of view on this. He says that while this may be true 95% of the time, there are some exceptions where it doesn’t make sense to disavow a link at domain level. For example, perhaps you have a client who used to send out press releases with multiple anchor text links in them, which got picked up or syndicated on a decent high value site. It’s usually best to disavow these at URL level in case they receive natural pickup from these sites further down the line.

 

 

 

On the other hand, Krystian Szastok , Digital Marketing Manager @RocketMill, on the same interview, states that the disavow should always be done at a domain level as most websites – especially the spammy ones – will give you many links from the same domain. Directories are a good example, you get a link from your listing and from any type of a category page.

 

 

 

 

Therefore, there is still room for much discussion regarding the disavow at a domain level. What is sure is that disavowing at a level domain is not an unshakable rule and one should always adapt the disavowing process to each situation in particular.

 

1. You Have to Make an Effort to Remove Links

 

 

 

 

What is not a myth is the fact that you can successfully use the Disavow

 

Tool, not remove links, and experience a restoration of what’s been lost, as David Cohen states in an interview regarding experts’ opinion on the disavowing process. The removing links process might be one of the most common, and at the same time, harmful myth of all. Removing some or all links in order to restore the organic search visibility and traffic that’s been lost is a bit a paradoxical situation.

 

Using the Disavow Tool and blindly removing links on a wholesale scale isn’t a smart or a strategic approach to solving the problem, it’s sloppy.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet, then again, like in any other situation, it depends on whether the site has a manual action or algorithmic one. Yet, the most shared expert opinion on this is that using just the disavow tool is sufficient and that no efforts need to be made repeatedly trying to get links removed from sites.

 

1. The Disavow Tool Does Not Work

 

 

 

 

We cannot say with certainty whether this statement is more of a myth or a fear of the webmasters. What is sure is that forums and blogs are full with discussions around this topic, with lots of people saying that they’ve used the disavow tool and their rankings did not improve, therefore it doesn’t work! Yet, so many factors may need to be taken into consideration.

 

Well known Marie Haynes from hiswebmarketing.com brings some light on this matter, listing some factors that can be at play and can be found “guilty” for the changeless ranks. For example, perhaps the site had very few good links and was only ranking well previously because of the power of links that are now being considered unnatural. Or maybe it was disavowed the wrong links. Or perhaps the site is also dealing with other issues such as suppression by the Panda algorithm.

 

I have seen many sites who have escaped Penguin, or have had a manual link penalty removed, which would not have been able to

 

 

 

succeed without using the disavow tool. As Mary stated, the Disavow Tool is a vitally important one that needs to be used by any site that is suffering because of the presence of unnatural links.

1. I Can Not Reavow Links That I Already Disavowed.

 

 

 

 

There is this myth that once you disavow links there is no going back. Yet, if you have added a link to your disavow file in error, or if you change your mind about disavowing a particular link, you can remove the link from your file and reupload it. Theoretically, the next time that Google visits that particular link, it will see that it is no longer in your disavow file and will start counting that link toward your PageRank again. However, as Russell Jarvis mentioned in an interview on our blog, reavow requests take much longer to be recognized as Google takes even stricter precautionary measures in this process to aid combating spammers who are trying to find loopholes. They usually crawl a domain a couple of times before revoking the disavow request.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

1. I Don’t Need to Include Nofollow Links in the Disavow File.

 

 

 

 

 

A simple search with the query “disavow nofollow links” generates thousands of results that we could use to write a whole PhD thesis on this matter.

 

The truth is, that there is not a 100% correct answer to the question of whether one should disavow nofollow links or not. We wrote more about this on a previous post that you might find really useful in this context.

 

As mentioned before, there are 2 major- contradicting opinions on this:

 

• You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them

 

• You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

 

As mentioned in a previous chapter, the safe bet would be to follow

 

Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links.

 

 

1. It Takes Google Up to 3 Months to Process a Disavow file!

 

 

 

 

 

Google does not give a fixed or a maximum limit on how much someone should wait for one of the three replies (on manual penalties only):

 

• Yes, we think you are in good shape

 

• No, you still have some work to do

 

• We have processed your consideration request – meaning that they might have found multiple issues, maybe one issue is solved but there are other issues that still need to be checked.

 

 

 

It may take a couple of weeks, a month or more.

 

 

As Google representatives say, “this is something where depending on the URL sometimes we crawl them daily, sometimes we crawl them every couple of months. So if you submit a large disavow file or a disavow file that includes a lot of domain entries or just generally includes a lot of different URLs, then that is something that’s going to take quite a bit of time to kind of recrawl all of those URLs naturally and reprocess all of that information.”

 

Very fast recoveries are usually myths and in those cases something else might have caused the problem. Also, you must know that there is no way through which you can influence the Google Penalty Recovery process externally. Yet, if you feel that it takes too long, you can always ask for more information on the webmaster forum, just to be sure that you’re on the right track.

 

1. Google Always Provides Correct Examples of Unnatural Links from Your Sites Link Profile.

 

 

It’s important to know that any automatic classification done by any algorithms, as advanced as they might be, has a false positive ratio. And even if Google might have a low false positive ratio, errors can still occur. This is why a manual auditing of your site is highly important. We live in an era of fast solving problems through automated processes. Yet, it is hard to believe that it’s possible for a tool to be 100% accurate. However, Google does require a lot of accuracy when it comes to submitting the disavow file. And this is where the human intervention appears and where manual audits should be done. And even if these ones are not perfect either, they might take you closer to a correct link classification. Therefore, do not rely completely on automatic processes, even if it Google is running that process, as errors in the system can occur any time.

 

 

1. The Disavow Tool Does not Work on Negative SEO!

 

 

 

 

 

Negative SEO attacks can come in many shapes and ways. Black hatters had to up their game, resorting to all kind of elaborated SEO attacks towards small or large sites. Negative SEO can get companies penalized or entirely banned from Google. It can affect share price. It can even put companies out of business.

 

Yet, even in this case, the Disavow tool is highly useful. And we are not the only one saying that but our clients who were victims of negative SEO attacks. The big digital marketing agency, Jellyfish, experienced an aggressive form of a negative SEO attack and have a great recovery story all exposed on a previous post. Nevertheless, their recovery story implies the use of the Disavow Tool. As Jonathan Verrall, Senior SEO Manager at Jellyfish mentions, contacting individual webmasters, as you can probably imagine, is very time consuming when there are thousands of links, hence the usefulness of the Disavow tool.

 

Therefore, the Disavow Tool works even on the undesirable case of a negative SEO attack.

 

 

 

4.5. The Reconsideration Request

 

 

Step in Google’s shoes and think on what’s the best you can do to convince them you turned the corner, you fixed the problems and

 

“promised” it won’t happen again. Clear, compelling evidence is needed and here is where the documentation comes in place.

When checking the situation, what the big G wants to see is that the issue is fixed and that this violation won’t be happening again.

 

 

So, how can you convince the search engine that this is the situation, indeed? After removing the unnatural links you should do a well-documented reconsideration request. Ever heard the saying “A sin confessed is half forgiven”? Surely Google has. In the request you are sending you don’t have to speak only about the improved current situation and about how you are going do things from now on. You have to give details about the “dirty job” that you’ve done and how you got rid of it. When filing your request, here are some key points to consider Be very specific and give details on:

 

• The current SEO state of your site.

 

• What happened?

 

• Who created those links?

 

• What actions did you take to recover?

 

• Confess everything you’ve been doing.

 

• Accept responsibility.

 

• Explain why it won’t happen again.

 

 

Include as much concrete and actionable information as possible. It’s great that you’ve stopped the violation of the guidelines, but what’s really needed is a clear and compelling case that you’ve actually stopped and it won’t happen again. As hard as it might be on the moment, the “mea culpa” attitude needs to be included in the reconsideration. It will pay off on the long-term.

 

 

5.Successful Penalty Recovery Stories

 

 

All the case studies presented below are TRUE, SUCCESSFUL & UNREQUESTED stories from our customers. They are not paid posts and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the authors.

 

They are the successful recovery stories from our clients, written and documented by themselves.

 

 

 

We were approached by a company in 2014 whose website had been issued with a Partial Google Penalty for unnatural inbound links. This post details the precise steps we took to resolve the penalty and everything we learnt along the way. The client wishes to remain anonymous so all references to them have been removed.

 

The Unnatural InBound Link Warning from Google Webmaster Tools

 

 

The chances are that you’re already familiar with the following message in Google Webmaster Tools. It means your SEO and Marketing efforts are going to be sidetracked for a while:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First thing was to establish if this penalty was genuine or as a result of a Negative SEO attack. This didn’t take long as it was clear that the company had already been hit by a Penguin Algorithmic Penalty in 2012 which decimated their Organic traffic.

 

 

 

They never recovered from the algorithmic penalty, and had moved away from SEO into Social, Affiliate and Paid Advertising. They had started to re-invest in SEO a couple of months earlier, and after their ex-digital agency built a handful of poor backlinks, they’d been given this partial manual penalty.

 

First Step – Mining the Links

 

 

As the penalty was justified based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, the next step was to either remove or disavow any toxic, followed, inbound links before filing a reconsideration request.

 

We collected as many links as we could from Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, cognitiveSEO and other link data providers.

 

These link lists refresh quite regularly, so it’s important to continually revisit these sources to get the latest list.

 

At the start, we thought we could automate it all ourselves. We tried to crawl all links to check if the pages were either still active, and still had followed inbound links pointing to the client website. This gave us our ever-growing list of every single active, followed link.

 

Next was to separate out the unnatural links. But it was slow and painful to manage this ever changing list of links.

 

 

We could exclude our obviously best links using a number of basic tactics – e.g. public sector domains, PageRank or looking at the number of inbound links a site has.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s dig a bit and see what we can find about the site. Checking the link velocity of the site we can easily see that the site existed for quite some time and its monthly link velocity is somewhat natural. There were a few spikes in the past but the site’s overall link history looks ok.

 

 

 

 

 

Yet we are not dealing only with an “old” site, but also with a site that has a stable ranking in terms of SEO visibility. As it can be seen on the screenshot below, taken from 2 SEO Visibility providers we see that both of them report the approximate same trend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

At first sight we see no dramatic ups and downs, no signs of previous penalties or obvious linking schemes. On the contrary, we observed a healthy link profile that contains a lot of links from Topically Relevant sites pointing back to the analyzed site. This means that sites in the same topical category, “Health”, are linking back to the site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet, are these elements enough for Pharmacy2u to rank first for such controversial and highly spammed queries? Let’s do a more in-depth analysis to see what we are really dealing with. We should start with an Unnatural Link Analysis and see how the site stands up.

 

 

 

At a closer look, we see that the first appearance deceives many and things are not always what they seem. The unnatural – natural link ratio is not quite Google friendly. From our internal research, sites that have over 25% unnatural + suspect links are likely to be already penalized (or will be if they weren’t already). Yet, this is a very competitive niche and the rules might apply differently here.

 

As we can see in the screenshots, it is not very hard to identify the strategy Pharmacy2U has been using in the pursuit of higher ranks. We are dealing with an alarming number of links coming from Webdirectories, link networks or forums.

Google explicitly mentions that these kind of strategies may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s

 

Webmaster Guidelines.

 

 

 

For all that, the same Google gave Pharmacy2U a helping hand and helped it climb to position no.1. Most unnatural linked pages are directed to the main page, sign that in the past they may have tried some heavy linking campaigns.

 

Yet, if we take a look at the most common unnatural anchor text, we see that the number 1 on “buy viagra” doesn’t have a commercial anchor text heavy linking strategy. Mostly, they are using brand anchor text and this might be one of the reasons they’ve entered into Google’s good graces. Because of this fact, they probably did not trigger a red flag on the Google screen.

 

There are lots of forum links, blog links, Webdirectory links and also some blog comments and guest posts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet, let’s see some examples of one of their highly used (or abused) strategy, link dropping. Below, there are some screenshots taken from two random Pharmacy2U links, one is a blog comment and the other is an author signature. What do the two of them have in common? They are both sprinkled with overflowing unnatural flavor. It’s true that this strategy may be just a thing of the past and the blog comments and guest posting might not be in a huge number but still, it’s hard to believe that the omniscient Google might have missed this issue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, how can a site with such a “going-to-be-penalized” profile can possibly rank at no.1?

 

 

 

We are doing reverse engineering here so we cannot certainly put our finger on anything, but we assume that this may have happened for two reasons:

 

1. First, Google might be applying the “of all the evils we choose the least bad” principle. Meaning that this particular niche is a highly spammed one and you can hardly find any site that would closely respect the guidelines.

 

As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, https://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/ was the only site from Google’s first page results that wasn’t a parasite host or a redirect, 2 months ago. Not much to choose from. In this case, the big G may have chosen to boost not the site with a flawless profile (as it didn’t find any), but the one which is somewhat close to its guidelines.

 

1. Second, this niche is a special one from so many points of view and therefore Google might not have detected this website as having an unnatural link profile, although in other niches, similar ratios of unnatural links would penalize a site.

 

1. Third, this site might be affected by a negative SEO attack. It is possible but not that probable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIII. Final Thoughts

 

 

It goes without saying that Google is trying to win a long term battle against those who seek to manipulate the search results for their own ends. However, with so many controversies and with so many sites that claim to have followed closely Google's guidelines and still got penalized, we tend to raise our eyebrows and wonder what is really going on.

 

Google's algorithm takes into consideration over 200 signals in order to

 

“arrange” the sites on the results list. The ranking factors are not, maybe justly, provided to the webmasters so a page owner can only deduce which signals influence its site rankings. However, it is well known that links are really a big deal for Google. If they hadn’t been, Google’s web spam team wouldn't have spent so much time in developing algorithms like Panda or Penguin, whose purpose is to identify shady link building strategies. Aside links, Google also puts a big focus on mentions. And that is understandable as websites aren't just static storefronts but dynamic spaces of interaction with the audience. A mention is like a vote of confidence that gives authority and trustworthiness.

 

It seems that Google is dead set on providing visitors with pages that have the most relevant content for their search and the trend of creating quality content in order to be more relevant to your target audience seems to become more of a need than a game played only by the cool kids. More and more SEO professionals are boarding this train and it’s no longer to be believed hype and a way to reinvent the so-called “dead SEO”.

 

If, in the past, our traditional ways of building links meant to meaninglessly spread out all over the internet, without thinking of relevance and essence, through the help of web directories, blogrolls, keyword stuffing and others, now we need to think of our target audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like in any business in the world, in the SEO world there has always been a competition for visibility. The archaic order of things was to aim for the number one spot on a certain keyword and try to feed the PageRank monster as best as you can.

 

 

 

Suddenly, we need to have a purpose for our place on the SERP and certainly we need to create quality content for our pages in order to rank. And most certainly we need to have natural links, without which we cannot rank.

 

That’s how a lot of content marketing techniques got to circle around, like blog posts, videos, infographics, eBooks and so on. These help webmasters spread the "roots" of their sites across the web in a natural and meaningful way.

 

We’ve seen common outreach methods of content marketing, like guest blogging, being abused in the past, because people misunderstood the idea behind it. Generating "solid" links through content marketing is not about trying to beg for them, it’s about creating relationships with other businesses and people from the online medium.

 

 

 

You can no longer strive for the number one spot in Google’s eyes if you can’t create new pals who are willing to talk about you and share your content or vice versa.

 

“Link begging” your way out of a situation will do you more harm than good so we don’t recommend it.

 

 

 

 

There’s one way out of it and that’s creating content that others might find interesting enough to share it with their audience. Organic Links are a "hard to get" commodity these days and you’ll be happy to find

 

 

 

 

 

and keep connections with influencers who like and distribute the content you create.

 

In order to help yourself, you need to attend to the needs and interests of others first! The internet has become so fed up with marketing strategies that people became immune to content in its mediocre form. Influencers in certain domains are no longer impressed so easily and, in order to put your brand "in the spotlight"; you need to do some wheel greasing.

 

It’s a harsh reality but generating links through content marketing will surely become harder and harder. To get ahead of the competition, sometimes you have to find methods of creating some financial incentives while staying within Google’s guidelines.

 

When you can’t create engaging content on your side of the street, try going to the place where the discussion is currently happening. It may sound like a cheesy tactic but I assure you it’s not a laughing matter.

 

You may include comments in your content marketing strategy as you can generate links and help the community at the same time, in real time.

 

Comments are a great way to:

 

 

• create meaningful content

 

• connect and engage with your target audience

 

• create links pointing to your site in a natural manner.

 

 

Comments can prove to be a blade with two edges and you need to treat it with care. Try and find the most important forums in your niche and where the discussions are taking place. Look at what people are asking and what questions they have. As long as you stay on topic and your comments are not only meant for link building, then you won’t have anything to worry about.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s important to see things through the visitor’s lens and figure out what information he wants to consume and how he wants to consume it.

 

You no longer need to ask yourself if it’s really worth the effort you need to put into creating unique and compelling content. In the end, a solid piece of content can generate a lot of buzz and a lot of solid links. If you hadn't considered this strategy as a link generator, maybe you should think seriously about putting more energy into this solution.

 

Only time will tell how SEO will be changing and what other methods of generating links will appear but for now we can conclude that content marketing seems to be a very viable method of creating a link profile.

 

 

 

Thank you

Thank you for reading my book and giving love to me, which will help me to write more
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Upendra Singh Rana
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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 24.08.2016

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GOOGLE PENALTIES- The creation of links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page can be considered a violation of the Google Guidelines and can lead to a penalty.