Unnatural links can either be incoming, outgoing or both. According to Google, practicing in such exchanges including paid options as a way to manipulating link juice can lead to manual spam actions on involved sites. For WordPress users who have suffered from manual action penalities, following the step by step procedures in this guide will help you get rid of those unnatural outgoing links, a step which will help in Google penalty removal.
Since most of them are manufactured links, it relatively becomes pretty easy to deal with those toxic backilinks after which you will be able to submit a manual action reconsideration request. Remember, Google ranking systems favors sites with good standing with their algo.
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Google Manual Actions
Google manual spam actions are actions which are performed on sites which seem to be in violation of the Google Webmaster tools guidelines thus leading to penalties. Unlike the Panda and Penguin updates where sites which were affected never got notifications through their webmaster tools account, this is a different case.
With manual actions, webmasters are notified of any actions taken on their sites and too have the ability to check themselves of any possible web-spam which can lead to a penalty using the Google manual spam action viewer. Google manual action viewer is a feature which was added by Google in the webmaster tools to help webmsters makes ue of it with regard to their sites.
Manual spam action viewer features
- To view manual webspam notifications
- Find the case of such actions.
- Possible activns required.
Examples of Google manual actions
- Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing.
- Link Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects.
- Spammy freehosts.
- User-generated spam.
- Pure spam.
- Thin content with little or no added value.
- Hacked site.
- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links.
- Unnatural links to your site.
- Unnatural links from your site.
Note: You can find out in detail by visiting the Google manaul actions help page. Please note that the above actions can affect your website site-wide or partial.
How to detect an action taken on your site?
To get started, you will need to visit and log into your Webmaster tools account, Select the site you want to check and click on manual action under search traffic as seen below in image. And assuming there is an action taken on your site, you will see a notification message and too where the action affects e.g whole or partial site. Example of unnatural outbound links actions are traffic loss from search engines.
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What To Do Once Penalized?
The moment you realize either a drop in your web search traffic, your page rank being dropped or removed or get any of the WMT messages about a related action, the first thing you should do is to read the message and its contents well. This will help you to know where you went wrong and what you can do. You can additionally use the action query option and see which one exactly. And since there are recommendations on what you can do, it is important to first read the Google Webmaster Guidelines on the same and too make sure that you put into action what is recommended. Once you have made corrections of everything as suggested and recommended for example using;
- A”rel nofollow” attribute using WP Nofollow Post
- Redirecting links to 404 page or blocked page.
- Deleting the links.
- Tagging links with rel=”sponsored”, rel=”ugc”, etc.
How to remove Unnatural links in WordPress
You can remove unnatural links from your site instantly using WP Nofollow Post. WP Nofollow Post is a popular WordPress plugin by Xrvel available for free. The plugin helps deal with toxic links by way of attributing a Nofollow attribute to all external links apart from those you whitelist.
The plugin does this automatically across the entire website including both old and new outbound links. The plugin also has an option to remove all comment links thus putting your WordPress site in a position fit for submitting a reconsideration request.
Get WP nofollow post plugin.
- Login to your website dashboard.
- Go to plugins and click add new
- Search for WP Nofollow Post
- Click install from results
- Activate the plugin
- Click settings and click WP Nofollow post
- Set post status to enabled and save changes.
Note: From the plugin dashboard, you can set everything from domain exclusion list (those which indeed deserve a natural link eg Wikipedia and other sites), rels attribute to add eg sponsored, Nofollow, user generated etc, comment link removal, etc as per Google guidelines. Once you are sure everything is OK, you can then submit a reconsideration request as seen below or site review and wait for Google’s action. For incoming links, Google recommends to disavow them if attempts to remove them have failed.
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How to disavow inbound links to your site
- Create a .txt list of domains or pages to disavow.
- Visit disavow links tool page
- Choose target website.
- Click “Disavow links”.
- Click “Choose file and select the .txt file you created.
How to submit a reconsideration request
- Log into GWT.
- Click Manual action.
- View action
- Click request review.
Note: You will get a notification once your request is recieved.
We’ve received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://ww38.yoursite.com/
We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can’t reply individually to each request.
You should make sure that in order to avoid another action not to repeat what you just corrected. This will help your site to stay in good stand with the Giant search and possibly avoid any related problems. Here is how to write a good reconsideration request.
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Upon success review of your site, the manual actions are revoked and below is a message you are likely to get…
Reconsideration request for http://ww38.yoursite.com/, manual action revoked:
We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for http://ww38.yoursite.com/.
Previously the webspam team had taken action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this action.
You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site. It may take some time before recent updates to your site’s status are reflected on this page and in our search results.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking. Google determines the order of search results using a series of computer programs known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see our Help Center for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of search results for our users.
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