Recovering strategies for unnatural link building penalty

It is quite painful when you see a notification of a manual action for unnatural links from Google in your Google Webmaster Tools account. It has become a common and a troublesome issue among the webmasters after Google’s unnatural link penalty changes. How to recover from this? The most important solution that everyone is eager to implement to recover their site. The answer is quite easy; by just following simple guidelines and working hard to take a prompt action can solve the issue to a great extent.

But before we move forward, identify the links that cause the trouble. Google does not provide an insight view on the unnatural links which penalized the site.

Here are a few examples which assist you to analyze the offensive links pointing your site:

  • Trading Links: This includes buying and selling “do-follow” links simply to boost rankings.
  • Extreme link building: Involved in excessive link building campaign just to enhance the site rankings.
  • Linking to spammers: Linking to low quality and unrelated sites in an effort to manipulate page rank. This includes links from low quality and spammy directories and bookmarks and forums that just created to provide room for submitting links.
  • Excessive footer links: Excessive footer links and links from blogroll and article directories.

Let’s move forward to remove this links:

Once you have an idea of the unnatural links you can start cleaning up them, in other words taking action to remove all those spammy and low quality links.

Get a list of all your links from your webmaster tool and make a separate spreadsheet of the unnatural links as you identify them. Removing unnatural links can be done in the following 3 ways:

  • Removing links that are under your control
  • Removing links by contacting other webmaster
  • Removing links with disavow tool

Removing links that are under your control

The best place to start is collecting and removing links that are under your control. This includes links of low quality and spammy article directories, bookmark sites, profile sites, forum and blog comments and excessive footer links that just created as brook for submitting links. If you have set up links from any of this and you have direct control over, you should remove or edit them. This step of link removal process works up faster than any other ways and you can see the results immediately.

Removing links by contacting other webmaster

This step works little bit slower than the preceding as it depends on your approach and the webmaster you reach for. If during your link building campaign, you have obtained links from unrelated or low quality sites or blogs you can remove them by contacting the webmaster to do so.

It’s a fluky process. Try to approach them in a way that makes the job easier for them to carry out. Don’t give up with the first try, remind them frequently until your job is done. When done right it has the second highest possible ways to get success in your unnatural link removal process to recover your site.

Removing links with disavow tool

Disavow tool – the biggest gift of Google to the SEO community and to the webmasters who were suffered by the unnatural link penalty. This tool can be very useful to add success to your unnatural link removal campaign where you cannot implement the above mentioned steps. By making use of this tool webmasters can explicitly submit links to Google that they consider unnatural backlinks to their site. Google treats all the links submitted using disavow tool as no-follow links. Though it works slowly and takes time to bring up the change, when used appropriately it can boost up your site recovery process.

So it needs a simple understanding and patient to be successful in recovering your site from the penalty of unnatural link building.

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