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 and backlink methods used as well as whether any algorithmic updates or manual penalties were incurred.
In all cases the previous owner (Mr. John Smith) responded in what we felt was a positive and Google approved approach to marketing the site.
The claim was that no unnatural link building or backlinking took place, that no algorithmic updates had affected the site, and most importantly no manual penalties had been made against it.
After the assets were transferred including the sharing of Google Analytics and Webmaster tools we were astonished to see the low quality of bad backlinking techniques, major drop in traffic in March/April/May of 2012 and most recently the manual penalty for unnatural link building.
This method of online marketing is completely contrary to Google’s guidelines and to our personal philosophy to building a brand and company. We believe in writing good content, building an audience that is helped by our research and articles, and being a benefit to all those that reach our website.
Link Removal
We have rechecked as many backlinks as we can find here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/example-document/edit?usp=sharing
2164 now have links to our site removed.
From all the contact information we could find we still have email addresses for 83 domains, but so far these have been unresponsive or unhelpful – we are still trying, but to be on the safe side these URLs have been added to the disavow file.
Link Disavow
We definitely did not want any of the links listed above so they have been added to the disavow list too.
By monitoring WMT daily we found more links that we did not like, but were unable to get removed. We decide to add these sites at domain level to a disavow file which now contains 2902 domains and 8 URLs. The disavow file was uploaded on January 10, 2015.
We will visit the inbound links section of Webmaster tools regularly to check no bad links have appeared since writing this. If any do, we will do our best to remove them and if that is not possible we will disavow them. So far ones that we have been found are ones that have already been disavowed at domain level.
Moving Forward
Example.com operates as both an educator for self defense and helping women and men prepare for the unexpected encounter with a criminal. In our experience the best way to prepare yourself for an attacker is to carry a non-lethal self defense weapon such as a stun gun or pepper spray. Because of this we stock these items in our E-Commerce store so that our readers and followers can purchase their self protection items from a business that provides great service, transparent prices, and an exceptional customer experience.
We now believe Example.com no longer violates the Google guidelines and ask for your reconsideration of the manual action.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Joe Blogger
Example.com
