Making a site perform well in search sometimes means removing things like spammy links, which could be hurting a website’s performance. This process can be tedious and time consuming, but very beneficial once it’s complete. We have documented a process we’ve used to successfully remove a manual penalty, so that other webmasters can see just how it’s done using Ahrefs Site Explorer and Google’s process for cleaning up bad links. Finding Toxic Links A site we are working on already had a manual penalty. Keep in mind, most website owners will not need to go through a comprehensive link removal campaign.
The best way to
Find out if you have received a penalty is to configure your website with Google Webmaster Tools. Google will inform you by email if it has applied. Manual action executive email list against your site as a result of unnatural links. Once you know that you have a penalty, the first step in the process is finding the links that are pointing at the site, that may be contributing to the penalty. In our scenario, we used Ahrefs to analyze the backlink profile of the penalized website. Ahrefs provides metrics for identifying domain authority, inbound links, link acquisition timeframe, anchor-text and more. By understanding what these metrics mean, we were able to narrow down the list of suspects.
We added all sites
With DR 40 to our outreach list. We did an anchor-text distribution sort. If we found a high percentage of Exact Match Anchors on a site with. DR 50 (or a site that just appeared to be spammy), we added them to Find List our outreach list as well. By using Ahrefs we were able to narrow down the list of suspected toxic domains using their metrics (like DR) that indicate their quality. We went through our initial list and identified any domains that appeared spammy, had low domain authority, were not curated, had an unnatural anchor-text distribution percentage, irrelevant anchor-text use and added them to our “outreach list”. This part of the process can be very subjective. In general, we were looking for websites that clearly didn’t have any real value to offer.
