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Google Manual Penalties - What to Check

Author: Matt Bass
by Matt Bass
Posted: Jan 17, 2018

Nothing is worse than being hit with a Google Manual Penalty. If you have noticed a manual penalty warning in your Google Search Console, the following tips can assist in removing them and restoring your search engine rankings.

The first step involves analysing the backlink profile by examining inbound links and cross-referencing data from Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic and arefs. After acquiring all incoming backlink data, we obtain each link’s PageRank, domain authority, incoming links and index in Google.

Using some of our SEO tools, we filter out all links that weren’t indexed in Google; these are always the worst of the worst. From here, we manually visit every linking website and go through the process of attempting to contact any websites that have a contact form or email address available.

Using the Google Disavow Tool

After manually checking all the low-quality links, we keep a log of all the domains that have replied saying that links were removed or anchor texts changed (after checking them of course!), and remove them from the list. Unfortunately, there are always a large amount of links left in the list after the filtration is complete as spammy links or links acquired through link farms do not usually have a contact form, email address, or owner for that matter.

All the remaining domains that haven’t replied to us are placed in the disavow tool.

NOTE: the disavow tool is described as a tool that should be used with caution as it may result in a decrease in PageRank or loss of positions in the SERPs. This is because while the domains may be toxic, some may still carry authority, and by disavowing them, you are indicating to Google that their link value should not count towards yours. As mentioned before, we manually go through each link and only remove low-quality links and try to salvage what we can. If you’ve just imported a list from a tool and put them all in the disavow file, you’re most likely missing out on some good quality links.

One issue our SEO Brisbane team ran into a lot with link farms is the domains will continually build links over time. We identify these domains and disavow them at a domain-level, ensuring that you are safeguarded against any future links that are built from this domain.

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Author: Matt Bass

Matt Bass

Member since: Jan 16, 2018
Published articles: 1

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