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How To Regain Trust In Google After A Manual Penalty

Nov 15, 2014 | Uncategorized

We came across a Google Webmaster Help thread that has a story of a webmaster who is trying to disavow and remove all the bad links pointing to his site.

The webmaster simply has to remove the manual action, but Google’s John Mueller tells him, the site also has algorithmic trust issues. John mentioned –

“Looking at your site’s history, it looks like you’ve done quite a bit for quite some time, and it looks like our algorithms have picked up on that too. So, while resolving the manual action is a good way to start, you need to keep in mind that it can possibly take quite some time for our algorithms to regain trust in your site even after that.”

We have typically seen this happening a lot – We notice a drop in rankings, we review the backlinks and come up with a list that needs to be manually contacted. After this we come up with a list that needs to be disavowed and finally disavow the links / domains. However, even after months, we do not see an improvement in rankings. The only reason could be the algorithmic actions taken on the site. According to Google –

The algorithms seem to have lost trust over time. The manual action is a “good way to start”, but the algorithms need to “regain trust” in the site for there to be an improvement – which may take some time.

How we are helping your site regain trust after we disavow the links?

  • We build good quality links – There is no denying the fact that links are here to stay. We build links from highly relevant sources that include guest blogs, videos, info-graphics, local business directories, coupons, etc. making it a diversified backlink profile. We also make sure to diversify the anchor text by lowering the percentage of exact match anchor texts and getting more links for naked URLs, branded terms, and variations.
  • We improve your On-site SEO – With the rebalancing of some off page SEO factors, the importance of on page SEO has to be respected. We continue to focus on more on-site optimization techniques which include correcting all possible 404 errors, fix duplicate (thin) content on the site, implementing rich snippets, etc.
  • We write good quality content for your site – We understand that having relevant content on the site is vital for its success. The content is written by professional content writers who write with search engine standards in mind. Apart from this, we feature informative content on blog posts (added on the website blog) to benefit the Hummingbird update as well.
  • We recommend implementing Google Authorship – Since Google has given clear indication that Authorship will be used as a ranking factor in near future, it’s better to implement it right away and take advantage. It also helps to improve click through rates as well as protects your content.
  • We improve social signals – Instead of doing social bookmarking of the article URLs, we get social signals to those articles, which will include things such as Facebook likes, Tweets or Google+ Votes. Client participation is encouraged. We have also included Social Profiles creation as part of our strategy.
  • We recommend getting reviews on your Google+ local page – This has been mentioned many times earlier, but customer reviews are of the utmost importance to rank a local website higher. We always recommend getting genuine reviews from your customers.