Manual action recovery

Unnatural Links From Your Site - Manual Action Recovery

Google believes your website is selling links or taking part in link schemes, so we audit every outbound link on the site, fix the ones causing the problem and get the manual action reviewed and lifted.

Free recovery brief · Written diagnostic · Fixed quote before booking

Unnatural links from your site illustration

Is this the message in your Search Console?

Google’s Manual Actions report ↗

Search Console / Report example

Manual actions

Unnatural links from your site

WHAT IS AN UNNATURAL LINKS FROM YOUR SITE MANUAL ACTION?

This is the other side of the link penalty, where the issue is the links going OUT of your website to other people's sites and not the links coming in. A reviewer at Google has seen a pattern of outbound links on your pages that look paid for, exchanged or otherwise placed to pass PageRank to somebody else, and because buying and selling links that pass PageRank is against Google's link spam policy, your site has been actioned for its part in it.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

A site with this manual action loses Google's trust as a source of links, and the pages or sections listed in the Manual actions report can be ranked lower or left out of the results, which for a publisher, a blog or a news site that lives on organic traffic is a serious problem. It also tends to come as a shock, because the site owner usually thinks of sponsored content as a perfectly normal way to make money from a website, and it is, as long as the links are marked up properly.

Scope: Pages carrying outgoing links
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks, sometimes longer for links

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

You publish sponsored posts, advertorials or paid guest articles and the links inside them are normal followed links with no rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" attribute on them

Your site appears on link seller lists and marketplaces with a price next to it, which makes it very easy for Google to work out what's going on

You've been running excessive link exchanges with other sites, i.e. you link to me and I'll link to you, across a large number of pages

There are sitewide links in your footer or sidebar pointing at unrelated commercial sites with keyword-rich anchor text

Your site was compromised or a plugin has injected links you didn't know were there, in which case the hacked site page is also worth a read

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We crawl the whole site and extract every external link along with its anchor text, the page it sits on and its rel attributes, so we have a complete inventory to work from
Outbound link inventory
Evidence log · Unnatural links from your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We identify which of those links are paid, exchanged or otherwise unnatural by looking at the content they sit in, the sites they point to and the patterns across authors and categories
Placement assessment
Evidence log · Unnatural links from your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We either remove those links or change them so they no longer pass PageRank by adding rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", and where there are thousands of them we work with your developers to do it at template or database level
Link attribute changes
Evidence log · Unnatural links from your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We put a policy and a technical safeguard in place so that any sponsored content published from now on is marked up correctly by default
Live crawl results
Evidence log · Unnatural links from your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write the reconsideration request with examples of what was changed and take it through to Google's decision
Submission record
Evidence log · Unnatural links from your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

The request sets out how the links came to be on the site, how many were found, what was done with them and what has changed in your editorial process so that it doesn't happen again, with a sample of URLs showing the before and after. Google asks for examples of the bad content you removed and the good content you added, so we make sure the reviewer can check the fix for themselves within a few clicks.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

Do I have to stop selling sponsored posts?

No, you can carry on publishing sponsored content, the links in it just need rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" on them so that they don't pass PageRank, and that applies to the old posts as well as the new ones.

How long does recovery take?

Your diagnostic will include a clean-up estimate, and Google’s review usually takes several days or weeks, with link reviews sometimes taking longer.

What if I don't know which links were paid for?

That's very common on sites with several authors or a long history, and it's exactly what the audit is for, we look at the patterns in the outbound links and flag the ones a reviewer would consider unnatural whether or not there's a record of money changing hands.

Start your recovery brief