What You Should First Know About Manual Penalties
You learn of manual penalties through Google Webmaster Tools- Manual penalties may be targeted at portions of your site or portions of your backlink profile (a targeted action)
- Manual penalties may also be site-wide
- Manual penalties can also lead to your site being removed from the Google index
- When you “recover” from a manual penalty traffic is almost always below where it was before the penalty
- Recovery typically comes after fixing the identified problems and submitting a reconsideration request
How Stone Temple Helps Remove Manual Penalties
- We analyze the Google Webmaster Tools Manual Penalty notice
- If the problem is with on-site content, we analyze identified and similar on-site content
- If the problem is with bad links to your site, we analyze your backlinks using our proprietary BackLink Profiler™ tool
- We develop a remediation plan to address the identified issue(s)
- We submit on your behalf or help you to submit a reconsideration request
- We repeat if the reconsideration request is rejected taking into account any further information provided in the rejection notice
In the case of manual penalties targeting backlinks, Stone Temple Consulting (STC) can do portions or all of the work necessary to get a the penalty removed, including:
- Manually reviewing and categorizing all links
- Conducting outreach to get the bad links removed
- Creating and submitting the disavow file
- Creating and submitting a reconsideration request
- Repeating, if necessary
It is important to understand that recovery from a manual penalty typically requires removal or disavowal of backlinks, or significant changes to site content which may include deleting or no indexing content. For this reason, traffic recovery is almost never complete and there are situations where the Manual Action is removed and there is no corresponding traffic recovery.
Manual Penalty Removal Case Study
Traffic Recovery
A B-to-C educational services company came to us with a penalty problem. Their web site had been hit by Penguin penalty that resulted in a drop in traffic. Four months later they were hit with a manual penalty for bad back links that led to their website being de-indexed.
Using our own BackLink Profiler™ tool we organized, individually reviewed, and categorized each linking domain pointing to the client’s site as either “keep” or”remove”. We did outreach to get links removed as well as building and submitting a disavow file. The result was that two months after engaging STC a reconsideration request was accepted and the client’s web site was reinstated in the Google index.
Read the full case study here: Penguin and Manual Penalty Case Study #1
Let Us Help You Recover from a Manual Penalty
Have you received a message in Google Webmaster Tools indicating a manual action against your web site? Use the form below to contact us so that we can help you remove the manual penalty.
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