Google Unnatural Links Penalty:

How to Recover

1. Assess

2. Link Audit

3. Link Removal Outreach

4. Review

5. Disavow and Reconsideration

6. Evaluate

7. Learn

8. Natural SEO

9. Monitoring and Management

10.Repeat…

1. Assess

• Stop. Think. Breathe. You can't rush this

• It’s important - get it right - from the start

• Seek expert guidance from a good SEO agency

• An agency will have much more experience than in-house SEOs

• Check Google Webmaster Tools for a manual action or alert

• Make sure it is a penalty! (have you blocked your site to robots?!)

• Identify the type of penalty - manual action or algorithm?

• Identify the keywords and pages that are worst hit

2. Link Audit

• Analyse the entire link profile

• Check each homepage’s PageRank and keyword anchor text

• Prioritise links for removal or protection - good, bad, neutral

• Protecting natural links is also vital!

• This is best left to SEO professionals

3. Outreach

• Find contact details from each site - domain registrar, etc.

• Contact sites to request removal - log the date of each request

4. Review

• Have a significant number of links been removed?

• Identify links that you were unable to remove

5. Disavow and Reconsideration

• Disavow remaining bad links

• Submit a reconsideration request

6. Evaluate

• Monitor results at keyword and page level

• Look for a response message in Google Webmaster Tools

7. Learn

• Try to assess exactly what led to the penalty

• Seek to avoid it happening again

8. Natural SEO

• Build linkable content

• Seeding and outreach

• SEO fundamentals

• A holistic SEO strategy

9. Monitoring and Management

• Prevention

• Rapid response

• Actively and constantly manage and monitor your link profile

10. Repeat

• It’s not over – it’s never over, SEO never ends

• If the process is unsuccessful or the outcome is unknown

• Repeat the process and remain vigilant

Good luck!

Let us know if you need help

www.digivate.comThe London SEO Agency