Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool
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This is a TRUE, SUCCESSFUL & UNREQUESTED story from Manuel Porras, one of our customers.
“I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google
Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been
publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted
to be 100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and
analyzed the situation carefully.”
Read the full-disclosure at the end of the article.
Let me tell you my experience with CognitiveSEO and the Google Disavow Tool.
I’ll begin a few months back in time.
PENGUIN our worst enemy
Note by Razvan – You can find another traffic screenshot in the mail conversation I had with Manuel, at the bottom of this email.
One of the websites I manage
SmartLipo.com
had suffered considerable Google ranking + traffic impact with the
release of PENGUIN back in April 2012. But the first releases of penguin
did not kill us completely from Google’s Organic results. Google
traffic kept dropping slowly over time. Until in May 22, 2013 the 4
th update of PENGUIN was released. After this release
we dropped and dropped and dropped in rankings for our main two keywords. Traffic from Google was almost none soon after that.
Note by Razvan – This is SmartLipo, the
site that recovered from the Google Penguin Algorithmic Penalty using
Google Disavow – here is the full history of the site on the WayBackMachine
We had been trying everything possible
- Removed links we could remove, and contacted webmasters to help us removing (suspicious links)
- Recreated the whole site, with a new backend, enhanced page speed
- Created new content (taking into account what users are and were looking for)
- De-optimized what we considered over-optimized SEO
- Tried to build new (clean and not black-hat) external links
- Improved our Social sites (facebook, twitter, opened a pinterest account)
- Corrected the errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools (as much as we could)
- Etc, and other things
Nothing seemed to have the slightest impact in our Google rankings (hence our Google traffic)
Discovering and getting to know CognitiveSEO
One day in May my boss tells me to try the disavow tool. I was very
skeptical of using it, having read that it could be harmful if used
wrong. But what else did we have to loose? Google de-indexing us
perhaps? He (my boss) pointed me to use this tool he saw that featured
an Unnatural link detection option. I went and played a little in
Cognitiveseo. I created a new campaign for the site, the report was
ready after a few minutes. I decided to import links that I exported
from webmaster tools. I just felt more secure adding some extra link
data.
Using the ‘Unnatural Links Detection’ option
I decided to run the link classification, it takes a few minutes. I
decided to go slow, and take my time. As I mentioned I am too skeptic
and cautious (that can be sometimes a problem when you need to react
fast). Anyway I decided to take a look at every domain and almost every
link, I was not sure to trust the unnatural link report from the
beginning. I went and checked with my own eyes almost every link and
every domain (no matter if suspect, unnatural or ok). I found some
unnatural links that I liked and some ok links that I did not trust. But
in general I ended up agreeing with the report in a considerable
percentage. Apart from the few links I manually readjusted from OK to
unnatural and vice-versa I did not have much work to do on the report. I
took a second look (took me some time), and decided to export the
domains I marked as disavowed (well actually all suspicious and
unnatural ones).
Once outside Cognitive I went and took a last look at the domain
entries of the disavow file, making sure no good domains were in it (at
least the ones I consider vital: e.g. Facebook, twitter accounts,
trusted customer sites linking back to us, some blogspots.com domains,
etc., you get the idea of which site you can trust).
Submitting the disavow file to Google
On July 9th submitted the disavow file to Google
(made the sign of the cross). I captured a screenshot to show later my
boss that I did use the disavow tool as he suggested a few days back. I
continued with my life. I kept checking rankings every other day,
nothing seemed to change the first days, the first weeks.
The resurrection
Close to 3 weeks passed after the disavow submission, when all of a
sudden one day when I run the rank check (using a VPN tool) from
different IPs and different states in the US, I saw that our site was
raking #3 and #2 from many different locations. At first I thought I was
doing the rank check wrong, maybe the VPN is not working and I am doing
a local search? Maybe the browser cache is holding onto my Google
session? Are these results personalized? I did not want to get any false
hope so I did not tell my boss about the news, I decided to track ranks
for the next days, every morning. The ranks were consistent, #3, #2 and
even #1 in some cities. I finally accepted it to be true as I saw the
increase in traffic in Google Analytics. I did not want to celebrate,
maybe its temporary, maybe google is playing a prank on us, maybe it’s
all a dream. Well that dream has been going on for the last 5 weeks.
Conclusion
Although I have done many things to my site, I am pretty f***ing sure
the disavow submission was the one that helped me back in rankings. I
could have done it without the help CognitiveSeo.com, yeah but it would
have taken me weeks if not months to find out by myself which links are
bad and which not, and webmaster tools does not give me many links that
Cognitive does. Cognitive is a perfect way to complement what webmaster
tools shows you (external links). And now I know that Cognitive saves a
mountain of time classifying bad from ok links.
Cognitive is not paying me to write this,
I just want to acknowledge and share this story with the skeptical ones
like me out there. Hope it works for you as it did for me.
If you do it right, I am sure it will.
-
Transparency Note and disclosure from Razvan Gavrilas(founder)
On September the 3rd I received the first mail from Manuel, (I did not know him until then).
I answered him that I would be interested in his story, but he never got back … until 17
th of September, when he mailed me the story that you just read.
I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow
on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly
reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be
100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and
analyzed the situation carefully. Here is the full transcript of the
mail discussion between me and Manuel
(for the sake of full transparency).
As the founder of cognitiveSEO, I am extremly happy and
proud when people connect with me and tell me their successful stories
on how the tool made their life easier.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you all, our customers, for making this possible. It is YOU that give us the power to innovate & solve your problems faster & better.
