How to remove a Google Manual PenaltyAn 8 step guide

About the author• Freelance marketer

• Worked with brands such as Barclays, Northcliffe Media and Welsh Government

• Worked on penalty removal with many clients

• Nearly a decade in digital

You’re probably reading this because you’ve had a Google Manual Penalty

You’re not alone though…

Google sends hundreds of thousands of manual penalties every month

…and receives tens of thousands of reconsideration requests each month

Webmaster guidelines didn’t really change – but Google got good (and harsh) at policing them

Good SEO people knew it was coming

Bad SEO people kept doing things the naughty short-term way

How do we solve this mess?

As a freelancer I’ve helped many companies remove penalties, and I’m going to show you how to remove yours

Step One: Painting a Picture

Get your links together.

All of them.

You need to make sure you capture everything, and that means not relying on just one tool. My favourite tools are Google Webmaster Tools and Majestic SEO, and I use a combination of others to find any stray links – it’s all about the detail here

Learn to love Excel. Learn vlookup, and create one “master list” by merging your links from several sources

(Make sure you get a list of actual urls, not just a list of domains)

Step Two: Analysis

Some SEO people will tell you there are tools for this but I favour the manual approach – I recommend visiting every link

•Pro tip #1: if many domains are on the same ip address, and one is spammy, you can probably assume they are all spammy

•Pro tip #2: if it has the word SEO or links in the domain, it’s probably a bad link…

Make two lists:

Step three: Clean up

Here’s a painful part of the process. You need to individually look up the webmaster of each site. You can use whois.net and other sites.

Then email them.

One at a time.

TIP: You may be mad that you paid for/worked for these links in the past, but you need these webmasters on your side!

What to say

We added links in the past on your site (point at the url and domain)

Now we think they are not helping and we had a penalty

Please kindly remove them

We know you are very busy

We appreciate your help

Thanks!

Make a note of people who removed lists (it’s worth checking as some people say they did and then don’t remove!)

Create a list of domains that have removed links for future reference

And thank people who remove!

Repeat the process with anyone who didn’t reply

Step four: Get organising

By now you should be an Excel wizard…

And you should have:

A spreadsheet of good linksA spreadsheet of removed bad linksA spreadsheet of remaining bad links

Step five: Disavow

Now you need to take your list of bad links, and in notepad, you need to explain how you have tried to remove the link, and what happened using this format, for every domain and url:

# example.com removed most links, but missed these http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html # Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to # ask for link removal but got no response domain:shadyseo.com

And upload the file to the disavow section of webmaster tools

And now you wait…

(2-3 weeks)

Step six: Reconsideration

You need to write a letter to Google, outlining the following:

How sorry you are

What you’ve done to fix it

Your new understanding of SEO

How you will ensure you never build bad links again

Detail EVERYTHING – the more work Google sees you’ve done, and the more sorry you are, the more likely they are to remove the penalty

Submit it here:

Step seven: Go back to the start

It may be that you are not successful first time. It’s rare to be successful, and Google wants you to go through the “humiliation process”

So go back, and remove those links you thought might be OK, because they probably aren’t

Repeat steps 1-6

Step eight:Success starts here

•Success! Your penalty is removed! Clearly my favourite part of the process.

•But what now? Instant traffic?

•Not quite…

You are now still on the naughty list

Keep on top of new links and keep removing bad ones

Do white-hat SEO

Do content marketing

Your rankings will recover gradually

Imagine Google are watching your every step – because they kind of are

Removing penalties is hard work, but the rewards are awesome,so good luck!

If you’ve decided that it seems like a lot of work and you want help, you can visit my site http://arekestall.co.uk to find out more about me or email me on hello@arekestall.co.uk to talk numbers

Focus less on removal of penalty as a cost, more as an investment for the future

Can you afford not to grow your website enquiries?