Bad Link Removal, Monitoring, and Penguin Recovery Services

One of the first things we do is to look specifically at organic search traffic using Google Analytics. Do you have a steep decline in traffic like this example below?

If you look way back to 2012, is it aligned with a fall Penguin release date?

A sharp drop off indicates some level of problem that needs to be assessed by an expert.

If you think you may have a manual penalty, then you need to log in to Google Webmaster tools and look for a notification of a penalty.

If Google has told you that they’re manually penalizing you, then we will need to use the Google disavow tool to tell them what links we’ve tried to get removed, but we will have to submit a reconsideration request. This is where we make our case of why we should be freed of the penalty.

The disavow – back link removal tool from Google’s page

1. Assess the situation using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.
2. Look at your back links using Open Site Explorer, AHREFS, and Majestic for low-quality websites pointing at you. Use various tools to figure out which links are good or bad, because you can’t always tell just by looking at the websites.
3. Send emails to all of the low-quality websites that are linking to you. Try three times and document your efforts just in case you get manually penalized and need to plead your case to Google. It’s also better to get links removed than to just disavow them. Most of the time, however, you don’t get responses from low-quality websites and/or pathetically they ask you for money to have them removed.
4. Upload a disavow document to Google with the links you don’t want to be associated with.
5. Ping the pages that link to you to speed up the process (pinging notifies Google to re-crawl the offending pages that they would not crawl often otherwise). If you skip this step, it will take a lot longer.
6. Get new high-quality back links or you will never get back to even where you were before Penguin started hurting your traffic. Removing the bad links will never solve all of your problems. It simply removes things that are blocking you from succeeding. Now that those links that used to help you are no longer helping or hurting, you may only get back to 50% or so of your previous standings, depending on how bad your situation was.
7. Add regular fresh content that gets shared socially, which will help continue showing Google that you’re a trusted site.
8. Look regularly at your analytics to see if your traffic is coming back, but instead of watching water boil, do everything in your power to create content that people will link to.