[trafficmarshals]

Just thought I would share my recent penalty experience:

Recently Google hit one of my sites with a penalty and I had no idea really why it had been hit. I have good content that is useful to the customer (coupon site with coupons that actually work and are real) as well as other information.

I constantly refresh the information with new coupons etc on site so I thought I was hard done by.

I then filed a request and Google actually pointed out what was wrong. They told me I had bad links pointing to the site (blog comments) and even gave me some examples of the ones they thought were bad!

This is brilliant I think by Google but annoying because I outsourced the link building and now I have to contact the owners one at a time to get them removed.

I'll try and get as many as I can removed and then send them an email back as I imagine I won't be able to remove them all!

[MrFreeze]

Oh here we go, bad links getting site penalized, especially blog comments. I see it now everyone's loading up sb as I type this to point at their competitors...

[Charybdis]

Weird to say the least. If this is true, then why not blast your competitors with "bad" blog comments? They should then disappear from the index!

[akula]

Yes sir. It is time to start spamming my competitors with some bestiality, hackkorz  and warez sites. Yes sir. imma gonna give them a penile-t.

[heyman]

You should send back a message asking why you should be penalized for links you didn't place. Then ask how they expect for you to remove the links since you're not in control of them.

[Parto]

heyman, on 14 February 2012 - 10:11, said:

You should send back a message asking why you should be penalized for links you didn't place. Then ask how they expect for you to remove the links since you're not in control of them.

I agree, we are waiting for their response

[Dan]

heyman, on 14 February 2012 - 10:11, said:

You should send back a message asking why you should be penalized for links you didn't place. Then ask how they expect for you to remove the links since you're not in control of them.

i think this would have been the best thing to do - deny any knowledge of the links... If your site was legit, you could have just played it ignorant and seen what happened. By admitting you placed the links, you lose any chance you get as it will be nigh on impossible to get rid of the blog comments..

[TerryKyle]

Looks like 2012 is turning into a negative SEOers dream year (i.e. negative SEO is where businesses hire you solely to zap their competitors).

[Charybdis]

I don't even believe the OP.

[stevejones003]

Are you serious?
Some blog comments got you penalized !!

Edited by stevejones003, 14 February 2012 - 10:30.

[mofoe]

lets see the mail/message from google please

[Fixer]

Sounds a little OTT to me, just for some blog comments, my guess there is more to it than this...

[trafficmarshals]

Ill take a screenshot tonight and show you guys.

I sent an email back saying it wasnt me (which it wasn't). Not sure they will believe me though.

-------------------------

BTW I never used scrapebox on this site once! Other links on the site are blog posts, stuff like that. In MajesticSEO I have 300 backlinks.

Below are the screenshots





Second screenshot

Edited by trafficmarshals, 14 February 2012 - 11:21.

[adamcm]

Interesting stuff!  In the OP you mentioned about receiving a penalty.  Do you know what type of penalty was applied?  I assume you were still indexed, just no where in the SERPs?

[Parto]

This is mental!

[mofoe]

http://foros.universia.es/mvnforum/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=12400&offset=40

thank me guys for taking the time to type it out. This forum has been spammed to feck. Another interesting thing that springs to mind is someone posted a very similar message on this forum and the message from G was almost identical.

I think google's response is even automated by the similarity in the messages. It seems to be some macro that is chosen by the keywords in the request. You been speaking to a bot

[Parto]

mofoe, on 14 February 2012 - 11:36, said:

http://foros.universia.es/mvnforum/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=12400&offset=40

thank me guys for taking the time to type it out. This forum has been spammed to feck. Another interesting thing that springs to mind is someone posted a very similar message on this forum and the message from G was almost identical.

I think google's response is even automated by the similarity in the messages. It seems to be some macro that is chosen by the keywords in the request. You been speaking to a bot

What does it matter if its spammed to death or not? The problem is that anyone could build links like that and nuke their competitors. Google are probably using templates, we had templates for everything when i worked at EA.

[mofoe]

Parto, on 14 February 2012 - 11:39, said:

What does it matter if its spammed to death or not? The problem is that anyone could build links like that and nuke their competitors. Google are probably using templates, we had templates for everything when i worked at EA.

Yes, correct so it looks like some other threshold.

Interestingly I went through 3 or 4 other pages on this site as I like to see if people's spam is working and I would say about 50% of their sites are ranking for their keywords So interesting how the OP got a kick in the balls. I think maybe not enought varied anchor or only spam lin ks coming from forums or something.

[akula]

Well shit just got real then. Time to fire up some spam sharts on my competition. Anyone want to get a list of bad neighborhoods going? I think we have at least two confirmed .

[Parto]

I found someone with a similar problem.

Here is googles response which is totally retard. You can read the whole thread here.

"You should make every effort to get rid of the unnatural backlinks you
have noted. Because of the large number of unnatural backlinks for your
site we need to see a much larger number of them removed before we can
reconsider your site. Please reply to this email when a substantial number
of these links have been removed detailing all clean up efforts."

"We know that perhaps not every link can be cleaned up, but we need to see
a substantial effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in
a decrease in the number of bad links that we see. Once you are confident
that you have done everything you can to remove these links, please reply
to this email with the details of your clean-up effort."

"In regards to Article Marketing for your site, we do not generally
recommend it because of low quality and unnatural links. You can learn
more by watching a video from a Google employee Matt Cutts,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY."

"In order to preserve the quality of our search results, we may take action
on inorganic links, regardless of the creator. We work hard to prevent
abuse of our systems, and understand that not all links to your site are
under your control, which is why we try to be granular in our actions.

Article marketing tends to create a situation where the same content and
links are duplicated across many sites that are often low-quality. If this
creates links that are unnatural (the webmaster did not choose to link to
your site as an organic recommendation to his or her readers), then that's
probably a situation you'd want to avoid and should make an effort to
clean up"

Anyone want to try to TANK a site and at the same time report it to google for inorganic links?

Edited by Parto, 14 February 2012 - 12:00.