The lesson draws from interesting stories about Google penalties and dirty SEO

I participated in the conversation of John Mueller - Google's Webmaster Trend Analyst on how to overcome a penalty. When asked if anyone, himself or his client had been affected by a penalty, almost all the participants in the auditorium raised their hands - including me.

And here is my story:

Start the story

I am the SEO team leader at yellowHEAD - an online marketing organization.Ginger Software is one of our customers. The company has a set of contextual and grammar checker tools that can be integrated with email, browsers, Microsoft Office . When we started working with Ginger , their website was ranked Alexa about 7,000.

Ginger has attracted a lot of visitors from thousands of different keywords. They have links from news portals, review sites, forums . They all contribute to a really great backlink profile. This company can absolutely be a concrete demonstration of the benefits of a content strategy. They have spent many months working, researching online tools, parts of spelling mistakes, grammar rules . These are the things that helped them attract large traffic and links. from all over the world.

The situation becomes more complicated and thrilling

As mentioned above, you can imagine how surprised we were when suddenly a day in my dialog box appeared a " deadly " notice from Google that gingersoftware.com suffered from site-wide manual penalties. (entire site) because there are unusual links to this site. We quickly called our customers and experienced a hardship when explaining to them why their brand did not rank. Natural traffic has fallen terribly 94% because this is a site that receives 66% of traffic from Google's natural search engine.

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I didn't mark the show . They were punished because I thought you could recognize!

Reveal the truth and story happenings

Having spent many years working in SEO, it was a shame that I used to buy multiple links, post bad comments on forums, blogs and run programs that build thousands of automated spam links. I have purchased expired domain names, created blog networks and ranked affiliate sites by all means of a blackhat technique (black hat SEO) . These things only happened before.

And now, deep within my heart with a clear conscience, we have not done the above things for Ginger. While everyone at yellowHEAD has experience with SEO tips, when we work with big brands we definitely don't want to take risks. Ginger is a practical example of a well-ranked website because of its extensive content strategy; The strategy is based on the purpose of creating valuable content for users. When analyzing Ginger's backlinks, we were surprised to see the types of links created because of this strategy.

Attractive circumstances . more thrilling

As we further examined Ginger's backlinks, we quickly began to find the problem. Recently Ginger has accumulated an enormous amount of spam links and needs to explain them. GingerSoftware.com is being linked from random pages on dozens of different websites that have jumbled posts about pornography, drugs, drugs, gambling, betting . These sites have randomly linked to The sideline article on Ginger's website is like this page, and always uses the same keywords as " occurred ", " subsequently " and some other similar words. And notably here is Ginger has been ranked in the top 3 by Google for these keywords.

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I have to obscure most of the text content of the page

Let's see how interesting it really is.

Further investigation of these sites helps us detect many identical articles on a variety of other sites, all of which link to different websites but use the same keywords. Examples are as follows:

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Link to Wiktionary.org

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Link to TheFreeDictionary.com

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Link to Thesaurus.com

In essence, what links are $ # @!%! # $ ^?

As revealed above, I am not new in the spam link field, so I know what these links are. First of all, those posts were not created by us or by any of Ginger's employees. They are also not uploaded by Ginger Software or by a website that makes a intentional connection. They are just posts posted by spammers using automated link building programs (I guess GSA Search Engine Ranker - the software that automatically creates backlinks) to upgrade their sites. Each article has links to some nonsense websites and links to Ginger.

These programs are everywhere on the Internet and they can automatically post linked articles. This is a way of 'fooling' Google that links are natural. They even link to other reputable websites like Wikipedia, BBC, CNN .

Ginger is not a victim of dirty SEO, it simply gets caught up in the game of some spammers trying to push their website up.

Our doubts

When we found these links, we worked hard to find them all. We organized all links to Ginger using the text links used for anchor text and noticed all links with the above mentioned keywords. We have removed such links as much as possible and do not accept such types of links.

With confidence, we have good questions. We know how important it is for Ginger's business to overcome this penalty as quickly as possible and not wanting to make any mistakes. We couldn't find any "bad links" other than spam links that made us think: " There's no way Google has completely blocked a site just because of spam links to these random pages. ". What more needs to be done, but cannot stand by.

It was Ginger who also solved the unexpected situation. Instead of screaming and angry, they only said one sentence: " Ok - let's solve this case. How can we support? " With Ginger's help, we mobilized dozens of people in their company, training them on how to find bad links, manually checking more than 40,000 links, contacting all the domains with spam links on it, rejecting everything we don't Acceptable and on December 17, 2013, we sent a reconsideration request only 5 days after the site received the penalty notice. The situation is extremely urgent because of the importance of natural traffic for Ginger Software, plus the Noon and New Year holidays are coming close. We know Google's reconsideration will be prolonged if it falls on the holiday season, so the pressure will be greater. You can see how long and detailed the report of Ginger's 'cleaning up' process is here.

After nearly 1 month we have received feedback from Google. On January 15, 2014, we received a message from Google's webmaster tools that the penalty was removed. We and Ginger's staff were happy and spent a few days connecting and monitoring the ranking tracker and Google Analytics to see what happened. The rankings and traffic quickly increased again and by the time I wrote this article, the traffic was 82% of the pre-penalty level.

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Look at the ratings, look weird!

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Unofficial feedback from Google

Passing the manual punishment is also surprising and surprising as it was. The truth is that all we have done is remove and disapprove of dirty SEO links and the penalty has been removed to prove that these links themselves are the cause of the penalty.

At the end of John Mueller 's talk at SMX Israe, I crept in front of the auditorium as soon as John Mueller finished, I told him in front of everyone else, I explained briefly to he returned to the situation that Ginger encountered and asked if they could see the problem at Google and plan how to resolve it.

John answered: "What do you mean when someone creates spam links that also link to Wikipedia .? We have encountered this before. Sometimes we can say it but sometimes it gets a little harder . but if you get a penalty for this reason, you will understand it and so you can only refuse those links ".

I was quite surprised by that answer. It is not exactly a sentence that accepts errors and does not deny. Basically he says ' yes ', it can happen but if it happens you will get a penalty, and you will know about this situation!

So what does all this mean?

Wondering whether Google understands the impact of a penalty on business and whether they really accept the responsibility to have their hands on these types of penalties. Ginger is a company based on search traffic because their main method is to attract users and they are not the only company. And here are some lessons learned from this situation:

1. Check your backlinks

No matter who you are, individuals or organizations, large or small businesses, this is essential. Looks like this situation will happen to anyone. Every week we check back on Ginger Software by reviewing all their new links from the Webmaste r, AHREFS and SEO Majestic Tools ( backlink analysis system ). If we detect any spam links, we try to remove them and put them in the unacceptable list. It is time consuming - but it is decisive.

2. Dirty SEO still exists and is real

For a long time, I have always thought that links may not harm your site. First of all, a link should be removed if it is considered a bad link. The system is now dangerous and easy for adventurous intrigues. With Ginger, it's too obvious (at least for us), these links are at the lowest quality sites and link to unimportant and low-profit pages on our website. Ginger. If this is a really dirty SEO intent, imagine how easy it is to achieve that idea and how difficult the company will be.

3. Google is really turning itself into a bad one

The action that Google does in this case is too strong and aggressive. The site did not receive a penalty but a sitewide punishment (the whole) . According to keyword planners, keywords with 'brand' in top 4 of Ginger have 23,300 searches per month. In this case, it means 23,300 searches that are people who can't find exactly what they need.

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Google has a huge amount of work in its hands in front of the spammers around the world, but they also become the foundation for the business models of companies around the globe. " Great power comes with high responsibility " - We can only hope that Google will pay attention to these words; meanwhile we will be happy with the fact that Ginger has returned and is still active.