When attending SEO conferences and reading blogs, two topics seem to persist between all the trending ones: link building and penalties. The two permanent hot topics are obviously related, as most penalties today seem to be caused by the backlink profile.

Being hit by a penalty – whether it’s a complete ban or merely a -50 filter, is a frustrating process. It is indeed Kafkasque as no one from the search engines will tell you anything. When trying to find information online, there tend to be a negative bias. People are writing “I tried XYZ; and it didn’t work”. This makes getting out of jail seem almost impossible. But it's not. it's just hard work. We got out of penalty - twice.

It seems that people who got out of jail are too busy living happily ever after, and don’t bother writing about how they got out of the penalty. This is the background of this post. I want to write a simple case study about how we got out penalty in a competitive niche. I know I would have been a lot more comfortable in the process if I had been able to read other peoples’ experiences from a trusted source like SEOmoz (in this regard I do owe Jane Copland a huge thanks for advices throughout the process – a box of chocolate is on the way!).

Please note that this post is not about determining whether or not you have received a penalty or filter. Rand already wrote a great post on this subject. Rather, this post is for you who experienced sudden ranking drops on all keywords. For you who can see your pages are ranking on page 3-5 on all keywords (including brand name / domain name) when you used to be on page 1 or 2. For you who are completely out of Google’s index.

The first step is to locate the skeletons in the closet. Most sites have a few skeletons in the closet, most likely old ones from back when most people did.. well gray hat stuff. It might be on-page issues (hidden text, over optimized pages, footer links, or unnatural outgoing links that you sold).

On our site, we identified two potential causes of the penalty:

• 60+ footer links, mostly pointing to internal pages – but also some external
• Unnatural backlink profile carrying. There were signs of both spammy link acquisition and over optimized anchor text (which seems to be causing a lot of penalties these days).

The first thing we did was to get rid of most of the footer links, so they comply with the best practices as defined by SEOmoz. It seems like too many footer links can result in some sort of automatic filter penalty that will be lifted once the footer links are gone. So it seemed like a natural first step to see if this was the issue – and maybe a quick fix.

As we realized this did not work, we started going through the backlink profile. We created a vast document triangulating back link data from Linkscape, Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, and ended up with a list of 49,000 links. Many of these links were footer or sidebar links, entailing many links were counted several times, as it appeared on multiple subpages. After cleaning out our spreadsheet, we ended up with a list on around 5,500 linking domains. Ouch.

And here came the boring part: manually revising all the links. A team effort is obviously required to check that many links, so we defined a number of criteria to evaluate each link:

• Placement (footer, context, sidebar)
• Language (same as our site with the penalty – yes/no)
• Relevancy (was the linking page/site about the same topic)
• Spammyness (gut feeling – does the link look spammy? yes/no)

After three weeks of work, we had evaluated each link and contacted thousands of webmasters/site owners. We decided to remove around 65% of the link portfolio, which meant 1,000s of emails and phone calls.

When we were done contacting all the webmasters, we waited a week to see how many webmaster had removed the links. Around 40% of the requested links were gone. We updated the spreadsheet and wrote a rather long reconsideration letter for Google. Fun fact: the maximum number of characters in a reconsideration request is 5,000 (including spaces).

Writing a reconsideration request for a site receiving the second Google penalty within 10 months is not easy. Most SEO’s will advise you to play dumb and naïve when writing your first request, but that does not really work the second time around. So we told Google the truth, and nothing but the truth:

• after the first penalty we fired our black hat seo company

• we removed some of the links back then, which was enough to get the site back

• we hired a new and well reputed SEO company, which unfortunately built more paid links

• we fired them too and promised (a) never to hire another company, and (b) never to acquire paid links again

To be as transparent as possible, we wanted to show Google the links we already removed and tried to remove. Therefore, we uploaded our spreadsheet to our server and linked to it from the request. Looking at our log file told us, that Google never looked at the document. A week after submitting the reconsideration request, we got the standard reply by Google.

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.xyz.com/. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take. 

After getting this message in Webmaster Tools, the site behaved weird in Google rankings. It started to rank for it’s domain name every now and then, but disappeared again for days.

We realized we weren’t done with the clean-up process, so we started some white hat link building to change the backlink anchor text profile. We activated our community on the site and got links from plenty of relevant blogs and sites. We did nothing to tell them which anchor text to use, entailing we got a lot of natural anchor text links.

A few weeks after we initiated this link building campaign the site got back to page 1 and 2 of the SERPs. It ranks a bit below its old rankings, but we are happy to be back. The total process took around 13 weeks.