SEO 2013: How to recover lost rankings in Google: Part 1: Identifying Toxic Links
[nonmember]
OK, 2012 was the year of the Panda and Penguin. Did you lose any rankings? We did, and we don’t mind admitting it.
It’s not surprising really – we’ve been doing SEO for so long that we were bound to have done something that would upset Google at some point.
The truth is that the problem itself was created by Google – they kept rewarding low quality links! So it was possible to rank highly for years just by buying links from any Tom, Dick or Harry.
But, those days are now well behind us. Today’s SEO is all about building relationships with people online, building your own personal online reputation (which we’ll cover soon) and creating content so good that people want (and do) share it.
[/nonmember]
[ismember]
OK, 2012 was the year of the Panda and Penguin. Did you lose any rankings? We did, and we don’t mind admitting it.
It’s not surprising really – we’ve been doing SEO for so long that we were bound to have done something that would upset Google at some point.
The truth is that the problem itself was created by Google – they kept rewarding low quality links! So it was possible to rank highly for years just by buying links from any Tom, Dick or Harry.
But, those days are now well behind us. Today’s SEO is all about building relationships with people online, building your own personal online reputation (which we’ll cover soon) and creating content so good that people want (and do) share it.
There will be more content soon on how to do all of this, but first let’s look at recovering lost rankings. To do this, we’re going to use a site of ours that got hit big time: topcontainerhire.co.uk
Stage 1:
Gather all your backlink data. Do this using:
Majestic SEO
Google Webmaster Tools
Open Site Explorer
Ahrefs
Get all the links into a spreadsheet and de-dupe them.
Once you’ve done that, go to stage 2…
Stage 2:
Check for Toxic Links using the LinkDetox.com service..
This will then give you a report on what toxic links your site has. As you can see here, topcontainerhire.co.uk has a whopping 22.9{4d2303c3d7018ed3e1a955ec2105d2bcecc5b881e14ee890535c5ae577f46e7a} toxic links, which ain’t good…
Next step is to see what those links are:
This is fascinating stuff – when you hover over the Rule column, TOX1, it tells you why these links are toxic. In the case of this site, most of these links are from sites that are not indexed by Google. When we look back over the link building history of this site, we know that these links have come from when we outsourced some link building to save time back in 2008. They’ve come back to bite us on the bum now, but all is far from lost.
Stage 3
The next step is to scroll to the right using that big arrow…
When you click on the little envelopes – hey presto! There’s the email of the webmaster for that site!
You then need to email each of the webmasters asking them to remove your link. Here’s a sample email we’ve used to do this:
“Hello,
I apologise for troubling you but we have the following links from your site that have been flagged up as potentially toxic.
Could you please remove them?
<a href=”THEIR DOMAIN”>THEIR DOMAIN</a> linking to <a href=”YOUR WEB PAGE”>YOUR WEB PAGE
</a>
I thank you for your co-operation in this matter.
Kind regards
Your Name”
VERY IMPORTANT!!
You are NOT going to get all of your links removed this way. In fact, a lot of the cheeky bastards will try and charge you to take these links down.
In fact, out of 445 toxic links we found for some of our sites, we have had replies from over 200 of the links webmasters. Replies were:
1) We have taken the link down
2) You need to pay us money to take the link down
3) This is a protected service.
Only 23 removed the links at no charge for us – a 5.1{4d2303c3d7018ed3e1a955ec2105d2bcecc5b881e14ee890535c5ae577f46e7a} hit rate. BUT – the most important thing is that you have done this process because Google will need to see that you have done this before reconsidering your site.
The next steps are to collect all the responses and put them in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
In the next post about this, we will go through how to use the Google Disavow Tool and then how to ask Google for a reconsideration.
It is very important you don’t skip to these steps before you’ve completed all of the above – the reconsideration request is a delicate matter handled by real human beings, so you need to make sure you do it right!
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