: What constitutes a "substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links" We engaged the services of a 3rd party SEO consultant to assist us in managing our Meta data and to write regular blogs

@Courtney195

Simpler thing you can at the moment is to go to Bing WMT and disavow all those domains/links. If you see positive results in 1-2 months then it'd be that since Google's algo would be similar in penalizing for backlinks.

Also I've another idea - if a page is higly linked back from spammy pages then send a 404 for that page and also dispay the same page. I've never done it before but I want to test whether it could be done. Your server returns a 404 for that page also send full page content as of now. That means this 404 will not be shown by the browsers but will be observed by Googlebot hence removed backlink penalty to this page.


Cheers Google has introduced links disavow feature. That solves yours and mine problems.

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@Harper822

The Penguin update penalises sites that have a high proportion of "unnatural" inbound links. One thing that constitutes unnatural inbound links is identical anchor text used in a high proportion of those links.

In this report from Open Site Explorer for your URL, there are 22,735 links containing the anchor text "sydney web design". Proportionally, these appear to make up the vast majority of your inbound links. It's possible that this is the reason you've been penalised.



Open Site Explorer reports that those 22,735 links are spread across 48 root domains. (You can discover some of them by clicking the plus sign to the left of the "sydney web design" text.)

I would suggest focussing your efforts on these 48 domains to ask them to remove this text and reduce inbound links with that term to a level that's proportional to your other inbound terms. If you've already contacted some of these webmasters, persevere without being rude about it and see where it takes you. If you've already removed links on these pages, it might take time for the changes to take effect.

My experience is that when Google says things like "substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links" this is simply a nice way of saying "we want to see those links gone". They're probably not too interested in the effort you expend getting rid of the links; they're more interested in them disappearing altogether.

Finally, I would petition your "SEO consultant" to help you with the clean up if you can. This stuff is time consuming, and it sounds like it's not your fault that you've ended up in this position.

UPDATE 17 October 2012

Google have just launched their disavow links tool which lets you clean up backlinks by telling Google which incoming links you'd like them to ignore. I'd recommend that you use it to ignore any backlinks with boilerplate text that you feel may still be affecting your rankings.

Matt Cutts has a video on YouTube with more information. He says that disavowed links may take weeks to update, so it's probably worth waiting a few weeks before you ask to be re-included.

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@Hamaas447

I recommend these three articles (two from May, one from September) on the
SEOmoz blog where the authors give very detailed examples what they did.
Read also the comments that contain updates to their efforts.

It's scary to see how much effort and time all of them invested to get
their projects back running as they were, so it's important to focus
on the most harmful linking sites first. Maybe you have access to some
of the SEO databases (sistrix, seolytics, et al) that have historical records of keyword changes of
the sites that cause you harm. You might be able to identify the ones
that also got hit or got hit harder and focus on link removal on them
first.
www.seomoz.org/ugc/recovery-from-google-penguin-tips-from-the-trenches www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

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