We are launching a new service here at McKremie. It’s called The Fast-10 Google Penalty Recovery Service. To qualify for this service is simple, you just need to be a large enough brand, and have been slapped with a manual Google penalty. You also need to have received at least $15,000,000 in venture capital money. If your company qualifies for this service please get in contact with us today. (sarcasm, but we do provide a penalty recovery service)
In all seriousness, this post is about how Google treats small businesses compared to higher profile companies. Rap Genius is a large lyrics website that has a good amount of venture capital money behind them. When they were outed for violating Googles rules they received a manual penalty, on Christmas. Just ten days later their manual penalty has been lifted.
The odds that a small to medium size business will recover from a Google penalty within ten days is slim to none. When you consider that two of the days where holidays and that is hardly enough time to clean up spammy links. The fact that our last reconsideration request took nearly two weeks to get reviewed is another sad reality for small to medium businesses.
It’s one thing to deserve a manual penalty but it’s another to get attacked by negative SEO. We have clients that got hit with negative SEO over two months ago. There is no way for them to contact Google. They didn’t get a manual penalty but yet cannot do anything about it. Sure we uploaded a disavow file but it appears we have to wait for a Penguin refresh and who knows how long that will take. Maybe if my clients had $15,000,000 in venture capital money we could get it fixed in ten days. But the sad fact is most all business don’t have this luxury.
SEO for 2014: create great content until your link scheme get you busted, then use the press to get legit tech news links
— Michael Gray (@graywolf) January 5, 2014
We have been doing reconsideration requests and link removals since May of 2012. Here is how it works for the rest of us that don’t have millions of dollars in venture capital money.
Step One: Link Analysis. Depending on the website it can take 1-2 days to review all the links to determine if they are good links are spammy links.
*Note: With nearly 12,000 links this process alone would take several days.
Step Two: Start Outreach. The outreach is done to remove the spammy links. It takes time to ensure the link is still active and then gather the contact information. Once this is done an outreach email is sent asking to remove the links.
*Note: This process cannot be done in ten days. Some webmasters take weeks to get back to you, especially during the holidays.
Step Three: Documentation. Along the way, you have to be very detailed on who you contact, when you contact them, follow up and we even screenshot proof of outreach.
*Note: Not sure how Rap Genius did any follow up with only ten days, two of which were holidays. Oh, did I mention another two of those days were weekend days?
Step Four: Create Disavow File. This part is relatively easy but can take time. Some of the larger sites we’ve worked with this process can take several hours to a day.
*Note: Not sure how detailed the disavow file was for Rap Genius but with 11,937 (from aHerfs) links creating this file would take some time. Unless they didn’t disavow all the paid posts they have. Which some are still going live as of just a few days back.
Step Five: Reconsideration Request. This is a quick step that basically pleads to Google and documents all the work you did to clean up your act.
*Note: In the case of Rap Genius this couldn’t take too long. How much work could you really do in six working days?
I don’t have a problem with any website recovering from a penalty within ten days as long as the rest of us are on the same playing field. The fact that larger brands get special treatment is not only unfair but sends the wrong message to all the other webmasters. The ones doing all the hard work and not cutting corners. I doubt anyone from Google will read this but if they do we have two requests for you:
1) Make sure the rules apply to everyone equally.
2) Make it faster and easier for companies to report and recover from negative SEO. Or better yet, why can’t you just ignore crappy links?
