There’s nothing quite as soul destroying as waking up to find an email from Google saying that they have detected ‘Unnatural Links’ pointing to your website and that your site is now under a penalty.
We have seen this on many occasions and it is shocking; so what can you do about it?
For a start, don’t panic. Things may not be as bad as they seem.
The first thing to do is to look at the notice supplied by Google as this should give you a clue as to what they don’t like. If you don’t recognise the links and haven’t been actively buying or building links then you may be able to overcome this quite quickly. If on the other hand you do recognise the links and have been buying or building them then there is a lot of work ahead to clean up the mess.
Our process for this is quite simple;
- Compile a list of all the backlinks that point to your site. Good tools to help you do this include Opensite Explorer, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and of course Google Webmaster Tools. Some of these may require subscription to get all the links but it will be worth it.
- Sort and de duplicate these links
- Isolate the clearly good links and take them off the file leaving only the bad, questionable or unknown links.
- Contact each webmaster individually and then chase and follow up this communication until the link is removed
- Document everything as you go
- Create a disavow links file ready for Google
Once you have had all the replies you can get back from Webmasters and removed every link that you can then upload the file to Google Docs and send the link to it along with a reconsideration request to Google.
Put like this it seems quite simple but the devil with this is in the detail. How do you know what is a good or bad link? What if you can’t find contact details for a webmaster? What if more links keep appearing?
At Aqueous we have many years’ experience with backlinks and can spot a good from a bad link quite quickly but if you’ve never had to do this yourself then it can be quite a daunting task.
If in doubt, call in a professional firm. If you need help from an SEO penalty removal company, whether you’re in London, Liverpool or Lossiemouth, we can help.
To speak to someone please call 0800 285 1424 or visit our Links Removal site and take the first step to putting your website back in the search results.
