February and March were hellish months for most webmasters, as Google unleashed the Panda update and many, many webmasters were charged with unnatural links penalty, sending the rankings of their websites for a toss. The Webmaster forum was abuzz with webmasters finding out a possible way out to get their rankings and income back on par with pre-penalty levels. I too was hit with this unnatural links penalty, but managed to get out of this penalty. How? Here is my story.
Unnatural Links Penalty-How to Know If Its Manual Penalty or Algorithm Penalty
For starters, Webmasters need to know there were 2 types of penalties-Manual and Algorithmic. Manual spam action or the unnatural links penalty was for websites which had some of their links in the shady area. As far as algorithmic changes/penalties are concerned, they were not imposed, but rather the site took a hit because Google does not prefer crappy stuff in the search or maybe the websites did not match up on the parameters of the tweaked algorithm. There is absolutely nothing that can be done for the algorithmic changes, webmasters will just have to wait it out till the next major algorithm tweak occurs.
As far as the manual penalty goes, it is much worse, though you can do something about it. The following are the symptoms of a manual spam penalty/unnatural links penalty:
1. You see a sudden decrease in traffic. My traffic fell 98%
2. You type your website name (without the .com/.in/.whatever your site ends with) in Google and you cant find your website in the first place. I found my site on page 5, a -40 ranking penalty.
3. You get a mail in your “contact us” e-mail ID that you have been caught and screwed, though its a rarity.
4. If you have an account in Webmaster Tools (and I recommend that you do have), you will get a message like this which will send shivers down your spine.
An unnatural links notice spells doom for your website. Oh and btw, this was my site that got penalised.
How I Got My Unnatural Links Penalty Removed
If it did scare the daylights out of me, you’re probably right. Adsense was a good source of income for me, helping a student like me earn more than a computer professional did. But freaking out is something that I dont recommend, so lets get down to business. Here is what you should do to get your unnatural links penalty removed.
1. Reduce the number of ads in your site.
Reducing the number of sites can help when you file your reconsideration request. As such after the page layout algorithm, ranking has been affected for sites who display very little content above the fold. As pointed out to me by a fellow webmaster, lesser number of ads aids in a better user experience. Reduce the number of adsense units in your site, remove Kontera,Infolinks,Adbrite and any pop-up ads you may have, as your site will be judged by real people.
2. Empty your blogroll
I had done a few triangular linkings with 2 other sites (where they link to me and I link to them) That amounted to link schemes, intended to pass on PR juice, and that was the first thing to go. I also removed the link of my site from the other 2 sites.
3. Check your Inbound Links
You can check your inbound links with a few services like Majestic SEO, but the most effective one is through Webmaster Tools, as it gives each and every link within domains, which I believe Majestic cannot, providing only the top domain from where your link comes. Here is how you can check and download all links to your site through webmaster tools.
Though you can use many other tools for checking links to your site, Google Webmaster Tools is the most exhaustive
After step 2, do this:
Clicking this option lets you download an Excel file containing ALL links to your site. Click to Enlarge
Once you have downloaded the Excel file, start checking for unnatural links and make a separate file to note down those unnatural links. It is time consuming, but you will come to know if you screwed up on your SEO or someone else took the trouble for doing that, like the SEO company you hired.
After going through your links, you can also request for sample unnatural links in your reconsideration requests. It is plain luck if you get them. I did, and turns out they were the only 2 unnatural links. But its all up-to HOW you file your appeal that decides if you keep on suffering or Google puts you out of your misery, in a good way.
How To Appeal For Reconsideration Read On
How many days after the reconsideration appeal did it take for them to revoke the penalty?
Also, what if the spam links are on blog networks that I have no control over? Should I tell them that?
Hi John
) but its all about waiting. Check your wmt and e-mail for reply.
It took usually 4-5 days after the appeal to get a reply.A reply usually arrived on tuesday (India being 12 hours ahead of USA
As far as the links on blogs are concerned, you can request the webmaster to remove them. You can mail them from “about us” page or check the mail id from whois information
I submitted the reconsideration appeal. I was completely honest with them. I told them I used a SEO company on Warrior Forum and WickedFire, and I gave them links to the specific threads which details the link services.
“I asked the company to remove the links and they said they could not. I cancelled the subscription and will not use them again.”
I told them that I made a mistake and take full responsibility of what I did.
Unfortunately for me, I am not sure where my links were spammed on. I have a small subset of it when I looked in WMT but they are not all of them. And most of them have private registration on the domains and no contact form on the site, making it impossible to request that the webmaster removes them.
Is there anything else I can do at this point?
You can tell Google about the small subset of sites that you have. But are you sure they spammed only? I too thought about this, but got in trouble with the owners of the tool I used, but turns out they were not the culprits, but some idiot in a forum was. You can just wait for the reply, and build links in the meanwhile.
Oh, and do check out the aftershocks…another update, the Penguin update. Will be up in around 30 minutes.
Yes, I am sure they spammed only. The other ones in my link profile are from high authority sites, sites with 60+ authority score on Open Site Explorer.
I don’t know if my reconsideration submission was enough. I didn’t include examples of spam links in my report but maybe I should have. Only time will tell if they will reconsider my sites or just make me wait out the 90 days.
They might have submitted on low quality sites, as they bring your rankings down despite other quality links. Cant say they spammed or not, but will go with what you say. Best of luck with the request, I hope I have a success message when the reply comes
Jasjot, I received a reply to one of my websites and they said this site had no manual actions.
“We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site’s ranking. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms.”
If it’s been affected by the algorithm, I’m not really sure what I did wrong and what I got slapped for. I admit that I used a spammy link service but if it’s the algorithm, what am I supposed to do? Could it still be related to the spammy links algorithmically? Should I be removing any on-page content that includes my keyword?
Hi John
Well there is actually very little you can do about the algorithm, since there is no exact idea of what it is. You can check on your competitors and what they are doing. Removing those spammy links will surely help though..
John
If it is an algorithmic change then it would only go away with time, i believe on the next crawling and caching after you have done the changes, i would do the following:
#Change the title, keywords and description of the site
#Change the backlink profile, if you have too many keyword/anchor oriented backlinks, then build more high PR (natural looking) links to direct/hard url
#Ensure that you bring down the keyword based backlinks (make it lesser than 50% of your backlink profile)
I am also fighting a penalty, though i am not quite sure whether it is manual or algorithmic penalty, i am going through a full change of the site including the template, internal linking structure, ad displays, fresh content and lastly the backlink profile. I believe there is nothing more than what i have brought out and once these changes are applied then submit a reconsideration request and if it is manual they give you the thumbs up and if it is an algorithmic change then you get the benefit in the future crawls.
Roshan
Problem is that I think the algorithm is slapping my websites for spammy backlinks. It’s not an on-page issue. Of course, i cannot be 100% sure but I know the link service I used is pretty spammy and they refuse to remove my links.
So the question on my mind is this: Will the algorithm keep slapping my websites because those bad links aren’t removed OR will my sites recover ranking after they realize that I stopped the link service and more spam links aren’t found?
Certain sites got the unnatural links message on WMT but I’m still waiting for them to reply. I’ll post here when I hear back from them.
Well if you have multiple websites with the problems, then you have the time to get a method by finding out which is working and which is not by testing different methods on different sites, that is of course if the livelihood is not based on these sites earnings.
Jasjot
That was a very detailed post about the whole issue plaguing the internet marketing arena now.
What do you think will be the best option for me. When i tried searching my site using the sitename (without .com) i could not see my site on first page, but on second page i could see one of my site page (not homepage) and that was the sitemap xml page and i could see another page on the 10th page (that was a content page). And yes, i got the dreaded ‘unnatural links penalty’ message in my WMT. What in your opinion is this scenario, is it a ‘manual review penalty’ or an ‘algorithmic review penalty’ ?
It is great relief knowing that it took only 4-5 days for your penalty to be revoked, are you able to see the results in the SERPs now, if so, after how many days from filing reconsideration.
I had a sitewide link from an article site to my penalised site and there were more than 86000 pages in that site and my WMT shows more than 90000 links, thankfully that article site went out of business and those links are not on, though WMT still shows this, do you think this is the spam link that they have caught on, if so, do i require to file a reconsideration as it can also get crawled in future and penalty might get revoked automatically (since that sitewide link is no more online) without manual intervention, what you think?
Thanks in advance for you time.
Hi Roshan
First of all when you checked out for your site, the external links (like your Facebook page/ Google plus page) should have come up on the first page. your homepage not coming up= manual penalty. As such since you got the message in your WMT, its a manual action.
It took 4-5 days to GET A REPLY, the revoking took about a month from the start date (Mar 8-April 2). My home page came up on rank 1 BEFORE I got the message, though it was on the same date. SERP did take a hit, due to links to images getting broken. But building new links SLOW AND STEADY will get me back there I hope.
As far as the site being out of business goes, if the site shows a Godaddy/Adsense for parked domains and similar stuff, dont worry, as those 90000 links are all cached links, and if that site went out of business just a few days ago, it will take some time for those links to be de-cached and removed from WMT. But keep in mind, your SERP will take a massive hit with 90000 links gone, so till the time your penalty is revoked, keep on with the link building process.
In your reconsideration request, you can mention that some links to my site returned “URL not found” errors, and I also do ask for sample links which are “spammy” according to Google. A detailed request is always preferred. Stick to the point, and hope everything goes perfect
No problem, I am always here to help. Share this post with anyone who has been penalised, and i will be happy to help them
Thanks Jasjot for the quick response.
Well, i got the message almost a month back, but i realised the penalty only around 20 days back and i am going through the motions of a complete revamp starting with the template of the site itself as it was an old frontpage template which is no more supported anywhere on internet and as such throws a lot of errors. Then there are some resource pages in the site which was used to do lot of automated and manual link exchanges, which needs to be cleaned and also less spammy internal links needs to be placed as i have lot of internal linking which sometimes look spammy to me itself.
Also i am preparing two excel sheets breaking down the excel sheet given by WMT, i am placing links which are not to be found in one excel sheet (rather you can call excel sheet where i have the external links removed) and another where i am unable to remove (rather where the webmaster has not responded).
This is my action plan:
#After the new template is ready, switch the site to new template
#Clean the site of link exchange pages and make the internal linking less spammy
#Meanwhile contact the webmasters to remove the links (prepare the two excel sheets)
#Once everything is completed and ready, get few high PR links on related sites to get the site crawled
#Resubmit the site for reconsideration.
What do you think about the above steps, have i missed something.
Also what do you suggest me to write to the webmasters to get the links removed.
Thanks for all the help.
Link exchange needs to go as an urgent priority. It caused my penalty in the first place. You can also remove pages with very little content. That should be enough I guess
Oh forgot to add, i dont think the SERP will have much difference by removing the links as those 86000 links were built just 3 months back and it had negligible change to SERPs after it was placed, so i assume it is going to make no difference.
One more question, what kind of links have you removed, all those links which are on general category blogposts, as i have a large number of links from blogposts and some of them are in related blogs while some are in totally unrelated blogs. I assume i need to remove those links which are from unrelated blogs, right.
The only link that I changed was I had put 3 links to my site in the signature in a forum. I removed 2 of these links. Thats it
Jasjot
How did you pinpoint those 3 links from the huge list that google provides, my WMT excel sheet has provided more than 7400 links in them and i have sifted through and already extracted 400+ links which have been removed. I assume you got the links from google itself when you contacted them, right, so is it a wise idea to submit the reconsideration after revamping the site and listing the maximum number of links that i have removed and ask them for sample links, what you think ?
Thanks once again, you have been a great help.
Yes I got the links from google, though one of the links was pointed by someone in the wmt forum. My list was 19800, and I gave up at the 9000 mark. Revamp your sure, give a few links you removed, and tell them you have a list of links that you have removed, and would share it if necessary.
I will accept the thanks when your penalty is removed
Thanks for this positive blog in a sea of otherwise misery on the Google forum.
I received the dreaded “unnatural” link message on 3/25. I noticed a decrease in traffic, but didn’t actually discover this message until 4/21. I quickly review my link profile and discovered that some 49,000 of my 56,000 links were coming from a search cloud setup for our site by Nextopia. The link were coming from “commerce-search.net”. Being fairly certain this was the problem I submitted the reconsideration request on 4/22 mentioning this and also that I had employed an SEO firm but was unaware of any unnatural links as they do not provide link reports or anything like that.
I followed up with Nextopia and had the search application reconfigured and those links removed. It has been 11 days now with no reply from Google on my reconsideration request. Since then I have been on a witch hunt documenting all links via the WMT and sending messages to any webmaster that looks “spammy” and requesting them to remove the links to our site. I’ve documented this and received a couple positive replies however most are impossible to contact.
Having said that, my question is do I wait for them to reply or should I submit another reconsideration request with the additional documentation on how I’ve attempted to remove other inbound “spammy” links. I’m not sure how these got there? I did have a link exchange program which has now been deleted. This was the way we were supposed to do things before or so I thought? I just don’t know what my next step should be. Do I wait and if so how long?
I sincerely appreciate your advice. Thanks in advance!
Hi Christian
How many times did you file for reconsideration? When you file a reconsideration request, make it as detailed as possible. You can file for a request, but you will have to wait till next week. They usually reply on monday/tuesday. Make sure you include links which you removed (only a handful, not all) and those which you could not, give explanation as to WHY you could not remove them, and how they got there in the first place
I filed twice on the same day 4/22. One was a knee jerk reaction after watching a video on how to file. The second one came shortly after I looked at my link profile that same day. So both were on 4/22. I’ve got a handful of links I can present now as having removed including the 46,000 from Nextopia. I’ve got a list thus far of 20 plus websites I’ve analyzed in depth. Some of these were actually OK. I sent notices to probably 12 to ask them remove links even if I thought they might be OK. This top 20+ comprises 54,267 of my 58,241 links or 93%. There are another 980 domains with linked pages to my site. How do you suggest I proceed at this point? Did you have a look at my site? Thanks so much for your input.
Hi christian
Yes I did go through your site. Are the 3 banners on top ads or just links to internal pages? A pr4 site, well built. As far as removing links are concerned, remove the ones which violate wm guidelines. When you have enough bad links removed, file for reconsideration. The message/reply comes in wmt though.
Hi Jasjot, thanks again for the reply. Those banners are just linked to the internal website, not ads.
My big question is do I resubmit again given that I have not received a response from my 4/22 request or do I wait to get a reply from that one. I don’t want to be seen as spamming them with requests when they have yet to respond to the first one.
Just don’t know how long I should wait on the first one?
Since you haven’t got any reply in you webmaster tools account,I would say you can submit again. Mention that this is my nth follow up to my reconsideration request. Hope this helps…
Hello Jasjot,
I really liked your posts on google algorithm and this company.
I’m looking forward to start my own website online to generate some income.
It would be kind of you if you can provide me some SEO tips.
Thank You!
Subscribe to my feed, as I’ll be updating my site by the end of this month (exam time
) You can also follow me on Facebook ate facebook.com/jasjotbains.seo
You can also mail me on my email.
Hi Sam
Please follow my Facebook page to keep yourself updated with what all I share here. You can connect with me at facebook.com/jasjotbains.SEO
We received “The Letter” and cleaned up a ton of links. According to your article above, this letter was a clear sign that we got a manual penalty. However our website comes up 1st when searching for Medical Supply Group. Going by this, are points 2 and 4 of your article contradicting each other?
Did your “Letter” have the same wording as given in the pic? When you search for “Medical Supply Group”, its quite possible your website can rank well, infact in place 1. I did not search for “fitness and defense”, rather I searched for “fitnessanddefense” (as mentioned in point 2) Possible that the space between the keywords can cause this. Moreover, since another Panda rolled out a week before Penguin did, quite possible that after removing a ton of links, Google did believe your website had done away with the bad links, and has removed the penalty. As such manual penalties are removed after some time, but “the time” depends from case to case. Hope this helps
I just received meassages in WMT tool & no manual spam found.
Now I just checked my rankings & not in 500. I am not understanding why my rank down. I checked here my content is unique & high qualities. How can i improve rankings in Google now.
Check if your content has been copied, from Copyscape. Copied material is outranking the unique content now-a-days in my opinion. As far as ranking is concerned, sign up for webmaster tools to add your site to Google. If that has been done, file a reconsideration request. Since this is no manual spam, I believe you were hit by the Penguin/Panda/Algorithm update
Thanks for reply. I want to know where is I am wrong why my keywords 5th position to 450 position. If I am affected Penguin whats the cause. I checked analytics my traffic going on 100% negative. The reason my rank is down I think. I checked WMT I found some unnatural link. But I haven’t access to remove. What will be possibilities to remove this link.
Hmmm..you can do the following:
1. Tell the keyword here
2. Go through the penguin update post in my site and try and make out what the problem is.
3. Remove the unnatural links. This is a must, else forget the rankings. However make sure that the links violate wmt guidelines before removing them.
4. After doing all this, file a reconsideration plea from the link given in the penguin post in my site
I had already work to another guys I think he had created some spamming link & I haven’t access here. I was trying to contact this guys but he didn’t response me.
Whats the strategies to remove all unnatural link. How to write Google to reconsideration request.
Please help me short our my problem.
Either you remove the links, or in your reconsideration appeal, tell Google :
1. How the links got there.
2. Why you could not remove them.
3. What did you do to remove them.
thanks Jasjot. I’ll be ask to Google in reconsideration request.
Welcome Swapan
Do let me know what they say in the reply 
hey
can you suggest me what kind of websites i should build to create passive income in adsense?
do you only create websites which deal in articles?
You can build a website on a topic OF YOUR CHOICE. How much income it will generate depends on how good has it been optimized. I have 2 more except this: fitnessanddefense.com and wedetectives.com
Jasjot
I am finding something peculiar in the SERPs.
I am yet to file a reconsideration request as i am in the process of changing the complete look of the site (keeping the same template theme but completely new html code). Earlier my sites were never found in the SERPs (up to 1000 spots), yesterday when i did a cursory search using one of the tools that i was using since years to find SERP rankings i found my penalised site at spot 485 and to my surprise when i checked the other two keywords that i used to rank at No.1 spot since years, i found one of the keywords at 18th position and another at 186. Again i did an SERP check today (exactly after 24 hours) and i find that the positions have increased, from 485 to 465 and some improvement in other keywords as well.
What do you think this is, have you experienced anything like this. Of course, i did remove some sitewide links that was pointing to my sites, there was one site that was pointing 85k links to my site by linking from all of its pages, which i have successfully removed, do you think this removal is the reason for sites getting back to SERPs ?
You answered your own question
since you had removed those links, which google thought were spammy, it will start reindexing your site. Perform site name search to confirm. If its true, your rankings might be improving, though not upto previous level because now you have lesser back links. I could not check as my penalty was removed before the algorithm was tweaked.
You have explained it in a very brilliant manner !!!
BUT, my site’s traffic has been so low from a month.. 
Previously you have said that your site name is not showing on 1st page.
Now, I can see improvement when I just searched – “fitness and defense”. It is coming on the top
I don’t face such problem..
It was usually touching 2,000 page views per day. Now, it is not even crossing 200
I just corrected my whole site following the new Google Policies.. I am still getting only 400 to 500 page views per day (this was because, I dugg my all posts on Digg.com). How much time it will take so that my site traffic will be back to that one.. ??
I am so worried about this all.
Please tell something !!!!!!
Yes that happened when I was PANDAlised. SOPA and PIPA were rumored to start, but if you go through my post, you will understand why they were not implemented. As far as your traffic dropping is concerned:
You were hit by the penguin update. In short: Penguin-alised.
I went through your site. Your home page has quite interesting topics, and I was “forced” to open 8 of your top 10 posts. Inside, your Infolinks ads match with your link colour, not a good user experience. Remove it. I will be coming up with the article on why using Infolinks/Kontera/Chitika is not good for blogging. Try updating your blog or previous posts, and use Thesis theme if possible. Check your page speed by Google, and use w3 total cache. Moreover, follow my page on FB for more updates
I am finding a peculiar nature of SERP results since last 5 days or so, i was keeping a watch of the SERPs in my niche. What i find is my sites are back in SERPs at spot 500 and in an around that rank for all the keywords, they keep dancing around a lot, to the tune of 100′s of ranks increase in a day and then decrease in a day. Once for two days i was at 13th spot for one of my major keywords, then it dropped down to 200th rank and now keep dancing around. Have anyone else faced this, i am yet to file reconsideration, will be doing so on Monday once i am complete with site revamp and backlinks verification. I have deleted a host of links from various sources including those from unrelated articles / blogposts, quite a few blogroll links, some sitewide links etc so expecting to get a positive reply from the reconsideration request, but to me it looks like it is an algo penalty as the site is jumping around in SERPs, and it is just 50 days since i received the penalty notice in WMT.
NO, i am yet to see my site for the ‘brand name’ search, on this search i see the site in 9th page and that too not homepage but some other page on the site. So i assume the penalty is still on, as you said it might be because of the changes i made to the backlink structure, which also means it is quite sure that this is an algo penalty and not manual, i believe manual penalties will only go over after a certain period of time or after manual review while algo penalties would keep going away as and when the violations are corrected and the algo reviews in the next crawl, right.
You got “The Letter” in your WMT right? It was manual. The SERP’s these days are really weird, and I believe Google is tweaking the algo because many people are not happy with the results Penguin is throwing up. I believe you will get a clearer picture once your request is replied to. Ask for sample links, and do inform them of all changes you made, plus provide a detail of links you removed.
Just to report in. Google denied my first request for reconsideration. I have since combed through and addressed in detail 98% of all backlinks. I also hired a consultant to review the links, attest to the actions I’ve taken and resubmit on my behalf. We plan to resubmit again next week. Keep your fingers crossed for us. The hired consultants seem to think it could be due to a single trial we did with a link building company. If this is the case, then one could simply hire this same company to produce back links to my competitors. For Google to reportedly have so many brilliant minds, this is just plain stupid! I’ll let you know when I hear back probably in a couple weeks.
Yes, I got “the letter”. We’re submitting a spreadsheet detailing all the links, actions taken, result, pending replies, no way to contact, etc. In the meantime I’ve just been addressing potential algo things so we can hopefully get our rankings back once the penalty is lifted. Writing unique product descriptions for over 500 products has been my nightly work!
In the meantime I’ve started using Bing for my personal searches. Google results are garbage. If the rest of the population starts to catch on, Google could and should be taken down a peg or three. I’ll check in when I hear back.
Hello
I do hope this time the people at G do listen to you and remove your penalty. Best of luck, and keep us posted 
As much as I hate to admit it, I agree on the fact that G is throwing garbage in the SERP’s, even though Matt Cutts says its a success. I guess G rubbed him the wrong way, and he wants to take it down
Building links for your competitors is called negative SEO. Its possible. Just go through the post on negative seo that I wrote a few days ago here. Its more easy than you think.
Yes I am keeping my fingers crossed for you
I still have not received a reply from my reconsideration request. I’m getting worried.
I talked with the blackhat article directory spam service that I bought from. At first he said he couldn’t remove the links but I offered money and he’s starting to cooperate with me.
I’m honestly not sure if this is the right method to clean my link profile but what other choice do I have?
Well the reply should have come, its strange though. AFA paying them to remove the links is concerned, this is unethical. Had a talk with your lawyer? Well the good thing about manual penalties is that they get lifted after a period of 1-2 months, so dont worry
I’m still confused about the algorithmic and manual penalties. I received the unnatural links message in WMT for only two websites, I guess because something tipped G over the edge on those sites.
But either way, I feel like the problem roots from the article link service for all my sites. They submitted thousands of articles that were not related to my keyword, and they had keyword anchor texts on all my links.
I’m getting desperate and the spam service said removing all the links would take too long to do. I feel like they should remove them no matter what.
Manual penalties get lifted in 1-2 months, where did you hear this? Does that mean I don’t actually have to remove the spam links and my rankings will return to what it was before Penguin??
I’m working my butt off, emailing article directories, and I got about 2% of my spam removed. Most of them don’t respond at all or they hid their contact information. This is driving me crazy.
Well Matt Cutts said it in one of the videos. You can find they video in the Penguin update post in my site. But even if they get removed, your site might get hit by Penguin, as it keeps a special check on anchor text used in the links
I read your post on the Penguin update but I can’t find the video. Which one are you referring to?
I changed all my anchor text in my blogrolls to domain.com, hoping it helps with any Penguin issues.
I am continuing to email webmasters to remove my spam links but some of them question why I want so many of them removed. o.o
I guess I will have to see it again. Else I will post a link to the video here. In case they ask why you want to remove the links, you can tell them that your link was spammed here by someone else. Truth or no, it will get your work done IMHO
Jasjot, it’s not my experience that the manual penalties get removed after 1-2 months. I’m at the 2 month mark since they imposed the manual penalty and they still are not removing it. They denied my first request and we just made our 2nd request on Monday. I wouldn’t give people false hope. You need to get the manual penalty removed or you will always be penalized is my experience.
Christian, these are not my words, but of Matt Cutts, by whose blessings we are facing this problem in the first place. I will try to post the link to the video tomorrow.
Agreed that even if they lift this penalty this time, the bad links will return to haunt the webmasters in the future, so its better that webmasters removed the penalty themselves.
My Domain san-antonio-texas-homes-for-sale (dot) com was hit hard. I tried what you said and tried to search it without the www. and the .com and it was no where to be found. For about a week i have been removing alot of spammy links that it appears that someone tried to negative SEO my site. I had 8000 links from upsidedowner.com and then it appeared to be links from some directory network. From that directory network each site had at least 300 links pointed at my site. I was able to get all these removed and several forum profiles that someone sent also. But my main question is was this manual or automatic penalty?
Hi Mike
Did you get any message in your webmaster tools account?
Mike
Though i am yet to file a reconsideration request due to varied reasons including re-designing my site which is taking its own time, i started removing links as soon as i got the WMT message of “unnatural links”. I can say for sure that i started seeing my site back in SERP within couple of weeks i started removing links, though the rankings are at 500 or so and not where it used to be earlier, that is 3rd spot, but i am still feeling better because it gives a feeling that you can be back if you play within the rules, i am quite sure even if it is algorithmic there is a ray of hope and if it is manual it is a much better situation as there is someone you can talk to and you dont need to depend on a bot. So, any which way if you are removing the spam links then you should be good in couple of weeks.
I got a reply from my reconsideration appeal. Apparently if you don’t provide any effort of removing spam they will just ignore your request. I submitted my appeal detailing about 12 links I removed and they responded the next day.
“Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.”
I am continuing to contact webmasters and trying to get them to remove my links. Unfortunately many of them have private registration on their domains making it impossible to contact.
Did you ask them for sample links? Its true that they will reply only when they see that you are making an effort to work with them.
I actually didn’t ask them for sample links because I have a way to track all the spam links. The link service gave me a unique author / pen name to track my links.
But maybe I should still ask them. I’m not sure.
I strongly believe you should. I had to track links too, but in the end, it came down to just two links, that too which G provided
Ok, I asked them to give me sample links.
Something tells me that the message I got was sent out to everybody though. I wish I got a more personal message telling me I’m going in the right direction.
700000 webmasters to be exact. They wont give you a personalised message in WMT. They mail it
I gave them a list of 50 spammy links that I took down. Are they even going to look at this list?
The message said to tell them if the unnatural links could not be controlled or removed but that’s basically for all of them. I am simply waiting for webmasters to remove them and leaning on luck.
Even I sent them a list of links, and I believe they do look at them, or atleast they get to know that you are actually trying
Can you show me a screenshot of how they show the sample links to you?
I still received no sample links.
Sure. Should I mail it to you on the e-mail address provided by you here?
Yes, use the hotmail address I provided here. Appreciate it!
Jasjot, how many greyhat/blackhat links did you have. You only had to remove the sample links they showed you?
I am doing a complete scan of my link profile in the Excel spreadsheet WMT lets me download. I have about 2000 links and about 1000 are spam. I removed about 100 so there’s still 900 bad links left. I’m trying my best to contact these webmasters. It’s hard to get em to remove them though because there’s a lot to delete.
Google’s automated message told me list the links that I cannot control but there’s 900 of them and there’s no way to attach a file if I recall. What do you think I should do?
Took 3 to get the penalty revoked, but I guess now I face the dilemma of low quality links, which are ruining my revenue and page impressions. With this site, hopefully, I will make sure about the quality of links I make
Low quality links affects Adsense revenue?
If the link service would have at least remembered their login or used a valid email address, we could have removed these links but they didn’t write it down.
I’m starting to get really upset because some people are asking for money to remove the links. They know I need them removed badly and taking advantage.
One thing that’s worrying me is this. The link service I used spun articles for submission. Article directories have very similar articles and Google indexes only 10 out of 50. I contacted these 10 webmasters and they remove my 10 unnatural links. Does this mean the other 40 articles are going to start popping up in the Google index?
You yourself say that G indexes only 10/50 links, so other links showing up is not something I see in the near future. Good news is, something that was shared by Roshan too,and what I read yesterday is Matt Cutts declared that G is creating a tool that you can use to tell G that “Hey ! I dont need that link. Disavow it” When is it out? No idea. But I wish its out soon
One thing which is heartening right now is after all the negative seo campaigns and worries of webmasters google seems to have finally given in, they are in the process of developing something within the webmaster tools account where you can decline a link shown and that will not be counted to your backlinks, that is a great improvement as to who links to you and whether or not you consider that link to be worthy or being counted against your website, hope this comes up sooner.
I managed to remove about 300 bad links out of 1000. Do you think they would consider that a significant decrease?
Over the past three weeks, I really tried. I did the best I could. I contacted the ones I could. A few of them blackmailed me, demanding $XXX and I had to just ignore them.
In the Google Webmasters Help forum, I saw a screenshot of a partially revoked penalty letter but he said his rankings never changed after that.
I guess they should, since you ARE WORKING to remove the links. You can tell them about the ones charging $$$ and stuff, when you have to tell why you were not able to remove links. AFA rankings are concerned, I still haven’t regained them, hanging around 10% of my original traffic. Working, lets see if I can go back there.
Today i have completed 15 days since i filed the reconsideration appeal and i am yet to receive any positive or negative feedback on the whole issue, is someone else also facing similar delay or is it only me.
Sit tight and be prepared to wait. The first time took me a little over 2 weeks to get a negative response. I then hired an outside consulting firm to handle my 2nd request. This was submitted 5/21 and we’re still waiting. I’ve heard it’s taking over a month now. If you hear back quickly it’s usually negative.
That is quite reassuring, this is just a wait and watch game now, which firm do you hire for consulting and how much did they charge, did they actually remove the links of yours or just did the reconsideration request filing.
I’ll tell you the firm I hired if I actually get a positive reply. Still have not heard back in 30 days now. They usually reply on Monday or Tuesdays, so I won’t bother looking again until Monday afternoon. The consulting company helped me to identify “spammy links”. I did an in depth analysis on my own and also took their list. I then tried to contact every webmaster and in some cases actually had links removed. Everything was documented in a spreadsheet although this was not part of the re-submission. The consulting company did the re-submission letter, but I did the heavy lifting to keep the cost down. I will let you know if I get a positive or negative reply. In the meantime I’m creating new websites and focusing on other channels. I’m hoping for the best but preparing for the worst!
As another week is about to go by, still no reply from Google and my rankings haven’t improved at all. I’m starting to get impatient.
For one site, I killed 400 bad links, 200 bad links are still alive.
The SEO guy doesn’t know the exact emails they’ve used to submit the articles. I asked them to setup a CatchAll email and give me access so that I can use the Forgot Password form to recover the passwords.
Now, I’m starting to delete and more links but some of these article sites has no ‘Delete’ button, and it’s driving me crazy.
Do people go through this level of effort to remove their bad links? People are telling me that I’m wasting my time but I don’t see any other way.
I actually received another negative reply on 6/25. So this took over a month to get the same canned response as before. I will re-submit again requesting samples since neither myself nor the so called experts have any idea what “unnatural” links google is referring to. I’ve removed or attempted to remove every single link brought to my attention as being possible “unnatural”. In answer to your question, YES people are going to any lengths to save their lives and financial well-being. My best recommendation is start building a contingency plan in case you never get the links removed. Google thinks they own the world right now and can do anything without recourse. It will catch up to them, but we don’t have the luxury of waiting. best of luck to you!
The best option seems to move on, build more sites, play by their rules and once again the waiting game begins for rankings…….
I paid four figures for EMDs. I need to get my sites to be reconsidered.
But I’ve been reading that even after getting the manual action revoked, rankings have not improved significantly.
Honestly, I’ve used a link service for a few sites that were already #1 for its main keyword and they got slapped. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Our site was hammered by the Panda update in August 2011 and again (even worse) by Penguin earlier this year.
We didnt receive any messages in webmaster tools about an unatural back link profile but we suspect that is the problem as we have had some SEO done on the site over the last year. We also have site wide links coming in to us from web sites within our own group of companies, one site has 109,000 back links to my own site. I have been told by some this is a big problem and by other people it doens’t reaaly matter as google will just ignore them…help!
I guess you might be better off in the WMT help forum, but just a few guesses of my own:
craigonthe (dot) net- provides no value at all IMHO, looks like a doorway page
Hmmm…just found this via Google.
I’m the owner of craigonthe (dot) net, what do you mean by this?
Hi Craig.
Mean by what? If you are referring to the post, this post describes how I was able to get my unnatural links penalty (referred to as Panda update in webmaster terms) removed.
If I’m honest, I never read the post. I simply Google’d my website and found the comment above, and I was just wondering what you meant.
I’m a first time visitor to your website, and after a quick look through some of your posts, I’ve signed up for your email updates and bookmarked.
Good work.
Thanks Craig
Is it fine to look at just the links shown in Webmasters Tools?
Using other tools such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic, I see some indexed links that weren’t found in WMT.
I just went after the ones in WMT…
Update: I got a message in Webmaster’s Tools today. They revoked the penalty on one of my sites.
I am still working hard cleaning up my links for my other site but at least I know I am doing something right.
Thanks so much Jasjot for your help.
Congratulations John !! You’re welcome
Nice to know what worked for me worked for someone else too 
Feels nice that I could be of any help to you 
Congrats, it is heartening to know that your efforts paid off. I also got a mail today from them asking me to still remove links, to be honest I never put the efforts that you had made, can you provide some details as to how u went about it, how u started, how you contacted the webmasters, what is the mail that u wrote etc, this can help people like us to be more confident in what we are doing, thanks in advance.
Roshan,
I downloaded the CSV file in Webmaster Tools as Jasjot outlined above and I identified the bad links. In my case, they were spun articles that had nothing to do with my niche. Very off topic articles.
I contacted everyone through the site’s contact form. If there was no contact on the site, I used WHOIS database to find their contact.
This is the email I wrote to the webmasters.
———————–
Hi, my name is [name], I am the owner of [site name].
We believe someone has spammed our links on your article directory without our permission. We’re willing to pay a small fee to get them removed.
[list of links]
We would like this removed as soon as possible. If you have any questions regarding this, feel free to contact me any time.
Thank you for your cooperation.
———————–
It took a while for many of them to respond to my email.
I also talked with the SEO company that submitted the articles and after several weeks, they started to help me. They provided me with their logins to the article sites.
Hope this helps!
Did you actually have to pay them John ?
Yes, unfortunately I had to pay a few of them about $10-20 for them to listen.
Some of these websites required the admin to do the removal.
John, can you please copy the letter you received from Google? Some people are in disbelief this is possible. Just remove your URL of course.
Thanks!
Christian,
Check the screenshot Jasjot posted. The letter I received is identical to that one.
My other website got the same canned response as you did.
I just looked and received yet another negative response today. I’m at a complete loss now. I’ve gone through every link and removed everything I can. I gave them a google docs spreadsheet shared so they could see everything. I asked them for sample links and still go the same canned response! Where do I go from here?
Anyone else notice how Google de-indexed many article directories in the recent weeks?
The article links disappeared from WMT so I checked the Google index and the entire site is deindexed. It’s saving me a lot of time trying to remove the links and I am happy about this.
And I hope they stay deindexed…
Hi John
I saw many directory submission sites de-indexed (Anchor text not appearing now) My anchor text distribution has changed to quite an extent. Good thing Google is not counting those links rather than penalizing webmasters
here’s an update for you. I just received another e-mail on a completely different site. I’ve done absolutely nothing on this site for months out of fear of being targeted. I also just went to GWMT to check my link profile and try to continue identifying these reported “unnatural links”, only to find that someone is spamming my site with negative inbound links. There was a new site linking to us that was never there before. This site has 364 inbound links all to one page. The pages are clearly inflammatory and website is complete crap. These links are coming from pitchedmassacre.com I don’t see any point in trying to remove links and get a manual penalty removed while Google allows this type of activity to bring us down. I’m afraid my next action will have to be legal.
You can report spam (IMHO, the only possible thing left)
I am sort of wondering about something.
If I ping Googlebot to the links/pages I’ve removed from various article sites, do you think they’ll crawl and see the removal more quickly?
It’s been several weeks and WMT still shows some of these dead pages and I am guessing because they haven’t seen them yet.
Pinging surely helps Google index stuff quickly…
so you think pinging will get G to deindex the article pages quicker?
There is no harm in trying
I just saw my site go from 7th page to 2nd page one week after getting the manual action/penalty revoked.
The strange thing is that the sites that were hit by the algorithm, they still haven’t recovered at all.
It’s like once they revoke the manual action, there is more immediate change.
I guess I should be happy about it.
Tell me about it :’( But the good thing is, I am witnessing “Links To your site” dwindling in WMT and traffic staying constant, maybe going up 200-300 the odd day. I have stopped adding content or creating links to the site and still am gettin around 13-1400 visitors a day.
Based on what I’ve noticed, it seems like in order to have your site reconsidered, the link count must significantly decrease.
Last week, I received the same automated message saying that my site still has unnatural links pointing to it. But this isn’t true. I removed them.
Analyzing my own network of sites linking each other, there was a couple of them that had a link placed sitewide and the count is 1,200 links just from these domains. So I removed these links too and will have to submit another reconsideration request.
Hi guys,
Just wanted to write back, letting you know that the manual spam action on the rest of my sites has been finally revoked.
I am not sure if it was because of the disavow tool or something else but I did it.
Happy holidays!
Congrats John !! Happy holidays !!