Un Natural Links Notice Google - 6+ months later

eliquid

eliquid

Serpwoo.com
May 10, 2007
7,207
205
63
A/B Testing
Remember the mass un natural link notice in Webmaster Tools that tons of people got?

Well I thought I would share some info that I am sure some of you already know.

I personally seen 3 sites get this notice. At first months ago, I was a bit pissed and terrified. I thought for sure it was a witch hunt since so many went out so I tried to not worry about it. Here is how 3 sites went down:

1. Large ecom site, trusted and white hat links ( we just did a lot of them ). This site went "dark" within 1 month of getting the notice. All terms we built links for vanished in April. I randomly check those terms last week and notice they have been ranking for a few weeks now. It's just like the penalty never existed.. all ranks restored. No link building or content updates have been made since the site went dark.

2. Large classifieds site, somewhat authority but very old and has lots of duplicate content and was hit by panda lots of times. Link building got this site ranked up in SERPs in top 3 though several times over many terms. Got the notice and within 1 month, site goes dark as well and terms we link built for ( somewhat gray links ) vanish. This was also April. No link building has been done and new content was added ( since its a classifieds site ) and I check last week and all rankings restored.

3. Large ecom eBay wholesaler. Pretty much same story as #2, same time frame too. All rankings are back with no new links and some new thin content added.


Its almost like the nothing happened other then the fact these sites spent months off the SERPs pretty much with no new links and no new content ( or very thin content ) and now they are ranking same spots they were in pre notice.

Funny enough, the sites I did not get this notice for.. never came back still even with new links and new content ( great shit ).

Any of you guys see the same?
 


Sounds like you played it perfectly. By not over reacting and throwing a ton of new links at it, you signaled that you, in fact, had NOT been spamming, and thereby your site should be allowed to gain its trust and good graces back after a 6 month penalty. Thanks for the share. I do have one site from this era that I kept live as a test. It's been over 6 months, and I super de-optimized the main term that got smacked. It's been over 6 months and it never came back. Likely because I started doing exactly what they'd expect a spammer to do. You did the right thing.
 
I have experienced this as well, some penalty expires after certain months. But when i send reconsideration request for some of the panda hit sites, i got a generic reply as no manual actions found on the site. still they are recovering slowly. Mostly manual penalty is easy to recover than algorithmic penalty.
 
Had a client's ecomm site get absolutely bitch slapped by Penguin. We submit 2 reconsideration requests, removed shoddy links, found a bunch of REALLY bad links that obviously a competitor built against the site, managed to get them removed etc. The primary keywords are still languishing somewhere in the 100-300 spots, 2nd tier keywords are "held" in the 50+ spots, and only the long tails rank on the first page.

Now we are preparing for the 3rd reconsideration request because the client is stubborn and won't switch to a new domain...

Anyway, I agree with thehobbster - if we hadn't done all of that, it's likely we'd be celebrating like eliquid.
 
I had a similar case happen...but have never used WMT.
Just got hit by Penguin...kept building and doing everything as normal and last month it came back to where it was and then some.
Didn't remove any links.
 
SEO is back! I recommend everyone who's even considering bidding on Adwords to buy link building packages instead!
 
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