Google penalizing me for unnatural links - Should I disavow?

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1.4K followers

I got this email from google a while ago for one of my sites. Apparently there are "unnatural links" pointing to my site.

This is a site I created a few years ago and I'll admit I did use one of the link building services.

Here is a part of the e-mail.

Unnatural inbound links

Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site.Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to (URL of my site). There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.

I'm wondering if I should just abandon the site and move the articles to another site which has no manual link building. Any ideas?

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I'm going to evaluate the existing traffic to the site. then considet taking the site down and moving it to another site.


According to Trialynn it will take a month before the old site is no longer indexed. I have about 40 articles that I can move.

I'll rewrite these articles too so even if the articles themselves do not get indexed I will have some solid helpful articles for my visitors.


Thanks to everyone that responded!!

Wow! There is a ton of information below. What did you decide to do?

I have not made a decision yet. I'm not going to use the disavow tool. It sounds like it won't help me as much as I think it will. My current options:
- focus on getting traffic from non-google sources
- Move the articles eslewhere
- Wait and see what happens. (the main page is penalized but other pages/posts are still ranking)

great question, great comments, great WA community, in awe..

You should go to your Webmaster Tools Account, then go to
>Search Traffic >Manual Actions.

That's where you will see exactly what the manual spam action is really about for each backlink.

I found an article that walks you through your options for dealing with these.

http://www.e2msolutions.com/blog/how-to-identify-a-manual-spam-action-and-recover/

What you do depends on the nature of the action Google has placed on the various parts or the whole of your site.

If you have spam comments approved on your site, I recommend that you delete them or at the very least remove all links within them.

You should only use the disavow tool after you have tried every other way to remove the links:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2309486/Matt-Cutts-Use-the-Link-Disavow-Tool-Even-if-Your-Site-Hasnt-Been-Penalized

After you have removed or corrected the issues for each type of issue identified, you can ask Google to review your site and remove the manual spam action.



~Jude

There are over 21,000 links pointing to the site. That is ALOT of manual review and I may not get any benefit out of it.

I would pm leoemery and ask him or labman… they know how to take care of those kinds of issues… I would not duplicate the content yet… there is a process to that which is why I would message the 2 above… I am not technical to explain it in an intelligible way… Good luck...

Thanks for the tip!

If you put the content on a new site you can do a 301 redirect to indicate that the content has moved to a different URL. I think there is a plugin that will do this.

Alternatively, you could try to use the disavow tool and see how that works for you. However, before you use the disavow tool I think you have to try to get as many of the bad links that are pointing to your site taken down yourself by contacting the webmaster and asking them to remove them.

The last time I checked the links going to the site I think it was over 10,000!! That's a lot of e-mails!

Do you need the site up? if you do not leave the copied stuff down for a month and you should be okay. You just need a good crawl to get rid of it or you can go into webmaster tools and delete the site.

Thanks Trialynn, good to know

Yes, I'd just move whats good, you can't change their mind so you might as well.

If I take down the content from that site and move it to a new site. I wonder how long it takes before I no longer get penalized for having duplicate content. Any thoughts on that?


BTW thanks for the reply

You will have to delete it from the old site and put it behind you, at least your content won't be wasted, don't forget to lose those links, maybe you could alter the titles slightly, This is just what I would do.

If you use the redirect plug in, you will not have a duplicate content issue. :)

I have heard of the redirect but that seems complicated to me right now

It is not too hard to do. if you need help PM me and I can help you through it. :)

Thanks for the replies guys and gals!

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