What are link penalties?

One of the main ways Google understands the value and relevance of your site (and where to rank you for the keyphrases your customers will use) is by looking at the links pointing to your site from other sites. The more links you have, the higher the quality of the sites linking to you and the more relevant the pages those links are coming from, the more appropriate and relevant your site is likely to be, and thus it will rank more favourably. Link building has been a staple of SEO agencies within recent years though Google has clamped down on sites that got ranked higher by purposefully building links from low quality sites without earning them.  

You or your SEO agent may have engaged in this kind of link building in the past. Or maybe you’ve built links that were once good, but are now seen as low quality. Maybe you've been a victim of negative SEO from a competitor. Either way, if your backlinks fall below the quality standards laid out by Google’s guidelines, you’re in danger of being hit by a manual or algorithmic link penalty. There are two possible scenarios: either a member of Google’s webspam team will manually lower your rankings, decreasing your visibility and traffic numbers in turn, or your site could be caught by Penguin, the algorithm in charge of policing link profiles, which can then send you tumbling down the rankings. 

What we can do

The most important thing for you is to find a penalty recovery service that understands the link profiling and cleaning process. We’ve built ours up by trial and error over many years and now have a proven system that analyses all your backlinks, cleans up the dodgy ones, secures your link profile against further risk and makes the necessary submissions to Google to get you out of trouble. 

Depending on your penalty type, we may be able to get your site successfully cleaned within a matter of weeks. If you’ve received a manual penalty you’ll need to submit a reconsideration request to get it lifted, within which Google will want to see evidence of a robust link cleaning process. We've built the necessary documentation right into our process, which is why we have a 100% success rate in getting manual penalties lifted. If you’ve received a Penguin penalty, you may have to wait for the next algorithmic update to come around. In the meantime, we can get your link profile looking healthy and ready to be given the all clear.