Search Engine Optimisation or SEO has been regarded as a \’black art\’ for many years now. If you have been involved in SEO you will have probably heard the terms, white hat, grey hat and black hat too. These various colours of hats refer to the level of danger you are prepared to risk before your site disappears off the face of Google. The truth is that black hat SEO worked fine until 2012, but is now a dangerous practice. Google don\’t want you to manipulate their results so that your site comes out top and they are now very good at finding out what you have been doing. This doesn\’t mean that it is the end of SEO as we know it, but the rules have changed.
Google recently unveiled a new featured in the SERPs that allows users to manually submit any URL to their index. Simply Google “Submit URL”, and you will see something like below: Unlike XML Sitemaps within Google Search Console (which only indexes URLs on owners’ sites), this feature allows for a way to legitimately get 3rd [...]
This is a successful Reconsideration Request that was used to get a manual penalty removed (Partial Match) revoked. The site was bought with the penalty and has now recovered very well. Dear Webspam Team, Site background example.com was purchased on August 15, 2014 from John Smith. During due diligence we requested all information about SEO [...]
This is a site that had thousands of spammy links and was penalised with a manual action in April 2012. The manual action was revoked in April 2014 using this template. Hi, mysite.com has a manual spam action: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links I believe the problem is that we have some poor backlinks [...]
The new Disavow File Audit Mode is a new mode for running Link Detox. This is a way how you can audit your disavow file to find links that were previously bad and are now good. We decided that this was such a significant upgrade to Link Research Tools we decided to launch a new [...]
This is a question I get asked a lot. I would say that if your site was doing great without using any black hat SEO and then you hired some old school SEO company who fired thousands of worthless links at your site which got you penalised the answer is no. If however your site [...]
Everyone in the SEO world has been speculating about the next Google Penguin update. I must admit I was expecting a 2 year anniversary update sometime around April 21st-23rd, but it never happened. I thought I would have some insight into it, especially as I am hanging around with some top notch SEO dudes at [...]
This is straight from the Facebook account of Christoph C Cemper, founder of Link Research Tools. Here it goes: great user feedback today; “I just wanted to let you know that yesterday Google notified us that they have revoked the manual action against us (see below) First I want to say we could not have [...]
Does this loss of traffic look familiar? The site in this example has been hit by Google Penguin 2.0 in May 2013 and then got hit again by Google Penguin 2.1 in October 2013. It lost a massive amount of traffic in May, but by the time Penguin 2.1 came along it had lost pretty [...]
I had an email from somebody yesterday who I believe is suffering from a Google Penguin 2.1 Penalty. I replied personally to her, but I thought there was some interesting points in there so I have made a more general version to go on the blog here. Here is her email with my answers and [...]
Getting a Google Penguin Penalty removed is not an easy thing to do, but this is what we can do… Do a full back link analysis and provide a report of toxic, suspicious and healthy links. Create a Disavow file for you to upload. Write a reconsideration request using a template that is known to [...]