Every web developer has heard this story before: someone hires a bad SEO manager, that manager builds up a bunch of spammy/poor content links and then takes the money and runs. Before they know it their site has been penalized by search engines and you are scraping the bottom of the barrel for traffic. It doesn’t matter how it happened but recovering from this kind of situation can be hard. In this article I will discuss six steps you can take to help you clean up your site’s ranking and play-nice with Google.
Step 1: Wait It Out
Depending on the circumstances, you could just wait the “blacklisted” period out. This will only work in a handful of cases that are based on how the bad SEO was implemented. Was this created by SQL injection attack on 1000s of sites that are now pointing spammy links at you? If so, the links will be removed by webmasters and Google will correct the problem.
If the links are of your making, the value of the links will degrade over time. Since this penalty is based on the percentage of good links versus bad links pointed to your site, some of the bad links could fall off and move the scale back to your favor. These low-value links will begin to fall off as these spammy sites are removed from the index through Google’s archive process.
Step 2: Remove the Links
If you can’t afford to wait, the next step would be to try to remove the links. However, there are some problems associated with this tactic. In many instances, you will not have control over the sites that are posting the links. If you have a lot of time to kill, you can try contacting these sites and requesting that the links be removed.
Determining which links to cut can be a problem as well. Sometime it is not possible to make the determination on which links are helping and which are hurting. Your choice could be to cut all links that you find and start over from scratch. This isn’t a bad option but it also means that you will lose all references back to your site and will need to work extra-hard to rebuild once the cleanup is done.
Step 3: Disappear
If the links are not pointed at your homepage but are directed to a deeper page of lower value, you can just cut the page out. In most instances you will need to remove the page and direct your web server to return a 404 response. This will cut off the links at the target and cause Google to remove the page from the index, thus removing the penalty. If you are blacklisted and only penalized, you may be able to remove the page and return a 301 “redirected” response instead and send the user to the home page. This will have the same effect.
However, in most cases of shoddy SEO, the links are pointing directly to the site’s home page and this option isn’t possible.
Step 4: Counteract Bad Links
In this step you can begin to counteract the bad links pointing to you by building good links. Remember that Google’s penalization system works on a percentage of bad links to good links, so instead of waiting for them to drop off, we can build good links to bring this percentage back into the good.
Good links should be relevant to your topic and from high-quality sites. I know it is tempting to want hundreds of new “good” links but focus on quality over quantity right now. It can take time for this situation to work itself out and for Google to reevaluate your site based on the new, incoming link profile. Do your homework on link valuation if you are unsure how to judge a link’s quality.
Step 5: Appeal to Google
If you have gone through the above steps, waited an appropriate amount of time and not seen any improvement in your site’s ranking, you may have a severe penalty or manual blacklist. You will need to appeal to Google directly to get this situation cleared up. This entails filling out a reconsideration request through the Google Webmaster Tools. You can find several sites (Google’s and others) that can give you more information on the reconsideration request process. However, some key tips:
- Be honest. Relate all of the facts (no matter how embarrassing).
- Be detailed and thorough. Show Google that you have made an effort to fix the problem.
- Be sincere.
Google will review your request and determine if your situation is valid for a reconsideration. Reconsiderations that are approved are handled by a Google employee. Since this person gets thousands of these requests it is in your best interest to relate as much information as possible in a clear, professional manner. Incoherent rants and three sentence requests will most likely be thrown out.
Step 6: Move
If the outcome of your appeal to Google was unsuccessful and your site is now as good as dead, the best thing to do now is move to a new location. This can mean buying a new domain, moving the site and starting over from the ground up. I know this sounds like a harsh and painful thing to do but once the house has burned down there is sometimes nothing left to do but rebuild.
Depending on the state of your bad links you may be able to do a 301 “redirect” to a new domain if the bad links are old. This is often what happens when sites used poor SEO tactics in the past but have moved on and have created some new good links. This can sometimes lift the penalty. If you paid to have your site listed in an active link-farm this option will not work and the penalty will only return for the new domain.
While the point of this article is how to recover from bad SEO, it should also serve as a warning to site masters that are thinking of using poor SEO tactics to increase their page rank. Sometimes the penalty for these tactics is too high to consider if the end result means you have run your site into the ground. Only hiring qualified and vetted SEO managers can save you and your site a lot of time and heartache and maybe even your business.
