Uh oh…one day your life is all rose tinted in high traffic volumes and page 1 rankings to give away and then one day…boom! You wake up to Google themselves emailing you direct saying “dude, cut this unnatural link crap out yer, otherwise, you know, well…we’ll get tough!” Well, not exactly but, you know, you get the gist!
So What Does This Google Email Mean???
Before you break out into hives and descend into a pit of eCommerce related depression just take a step back and assess what you’ve been doing and what the message from Google is saying! The particular message I’m going to touch on is the “unnatural links” email and you’ll see why below…
Anchor text RULES OK…NOT!
“Hey Google, look, I know it’s not kosher to hit up a load of crappy blogs with exact match anchor text but you know you love it really! I mean, you wouldn’t reward me with page one rankings all round if you didnt!”
And then suddenly, like a bitter partner Google strikes…they turn their back on you for too heavily flirting with “the dark side” and therefore you will be punished!
Cut With The Cryptic Crap – What Does This Mean
So…you’ve operated outside Google guidelines one way or another. Whether you actively built crappy links yourself or you hired a 3rd party to do it for you, either way – its NOT cool. So what does one do to rectify said situation?
Step 1 of Google Email Attempted Recovery
Aknowledge You’ve Done Wrong – Simples
Download your backlink portfolio from Google WebMaster tools and look at it. It’s as simple as that. Establish the following:
a) Crappy sitewides
b) Obvious low quality crap
Step 2 – Attempt To Identify The Source
So you’ve stripped out the crap…what next. DO NOT simply say, “hey Google, I found these crap links, don’t know where they come from, please dont count them and pretty please restore my rankings” THIS WILL NOT WORK!
You need to be honest…even if you personally did not build the offending links you need to try and work out where they came from and attempt to remove them one way or another!
Step 3 – Reconsideration Request
You better only be reading this if you’ve genuinely attempted step 1 and 2!!! DO NOT submit a half arsed reconsideration request if you have not genuinely attempted to sort the above!
Listen…you’re going to spend time, effort and most likely money on the above so as you’re doing it, take notes of what you’re doing! Sumarise it all in a Google Excel Doc. Once you’re confident that you’ve genuinly worked hard to sort this situation then submit your reconsiertion request. But as the gurus from Google admit you need to give them a proper idea of exactly what you’ve been doing and why!
Listen Kickstarters, this is not a sure fire, 10000% guranteed way of reversing the evil that is a penalty however, you need to start somewhere and this method is as white hat as they come so why not give it a go!
Hope this was helpful and make sure you tune in for the next edition of Kickstart that will be all focussed on our friend the Penguin!
Ciao for now,
Kickstart
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