Manual action recovery

Unnatural Links To Your Site - Manual Action Recovery

Google has decided that links pointing at your website were built to manipulate rankings, so we find those links, get them removed or disavowed and take your reconsideration request through to the point where the manual action is lifted.

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Google’s Manual Actions report ↗

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Manual actions

Unnatural links to your site

WHAT IS AN UNNATURAL LINKS TO YOUR SITE MANUAL ACTION?

An unnatural links to your site manual action is what you get when a human reviewer at Google has looked at the links pointing at your website and decided that a pattern of them are artificial, deceptive or manipulative, i.e. they exist to push your rankings up and not because somebody genuinely wanted to link to you. It's the one most people are thinking of when they say they've had a Google penalty, and it covers everything from paid links and private blog networks through to guest post campaigns, link exchanges, widget links, directory submissions and more, whatever the method was it doesn't matter, if the links were built to pass PageRank then they are against Google's link spam policy.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

Because this is a manual action and not an algorithm doing its thing in the background, the effect stays in place until a person at Google agrees that you have cleaned things up, which means you can sit there for months waiting for rankings to come back and they simply won't. The action can be applied to specific sections of the site or to every page, you can see which in the Manual actions report where Google lists the affected URL patterns, and in both cases the pages involved are ranked lower or dropped out of the results altogether for the keywords that were bringing you traffic and revenue.

Scope: Linking domains and affected URLs
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks, sometimes longer for links

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

You, or an agency working for you, paid for links on other websites, whether that was sponsored posts, niche edits or links bought through a marketplace, and those links were left as followed links

Your site has a large number of links coming from private blog networks or expired domains that were rebuilt purely to sell links from

A guest posting or digital PR campaign was run at scale with keyword-rich anchor text pointing at your money pages, which gives the whole thing away when a reviewer looks at the anchor text profile

An SEO company you used years ago built directory, article, forum profile and comment links that you may not even know about, and they are still sitting there

You inherited the problem by buying a domain or a business that already had a history of link building behind it

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We pull every link we can find to your site from Search Console, Ahrefs and other link indexes and combine them into one de-duplicated list, because Search Console alone never shows you the full picture
Backlink inventory
Evidence log · Unnatural links to your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We go through the linking domains by hand and classify each one as natural, unnatural or needs a closer look, paying particular attention to anchor text, the sites that link to you the most and the links created most recently
Referring-domain classifications
Evidence log · Unnatural links to your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We contact the owners of the sites carrying unnatural links and ask for the links to be removed or nofollowed, and we log every attempt with dates, because Google wants to see a good-faith effort to remove links BEFORE you reach for the disavow tool
Publisher outreach log
Evidence log · Unnatural links to your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We build a disavow file at domain level for everything we couldn't get removed and upload it through Search Console, taking care not to disavow the genuine links that are holding your rankings up
Disavow file
Evidence log · Unnatural links to your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write and submit the reconsideration request with the removal log and the evidence attached, and we stay with you until Google replies
Submission record
Evidence log · Unnatural links to your site
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

Google is clear that blindly disavowing all your backlinks without attempting to remove any of them can get your request rejected, so the request we write explains where the links came from, who built them and why, how many were removed, how many were disavowed and why those couldn't be removed, and it links to a shared spreadsheet documenting all of it. We also explain what has changed in the way you approach link building, because a reviewer wants to know this isn't going to happen again. You can read more about how we write these on our reconsideration request page.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

How long does it take to recover from an unnatural links manual action?

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

Can't I just disavow everything and submit a request?

You can, and it's the reason a LOT of people come to us with a rejected request, because Google's own guidance says that disavowing without making an effort to get links removed is not considered good faith and may not be enough for the request to succeed.

Will my rankings come back once the manual action is lifted?

The suppression is removed and your pages can compete again, however some of your old rankings were being held up by the very links that have now been removed or disavowed, so you should expect to come back somewhere below where you were and build from there with links that are earned.

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