Google Still Penalizing Sites For Unnatural Links & It Can Hurt Bad

I absolutely love when the industry is transparent and Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO said his site was slapped by an unnatural links manual action by Google and the result was that his site no longer ranks for its name or key terms.

A lot of folks in the industry have been saying Google has toned down these manual actions, espesially around links but here is one example of one. Dan shared a screen shot of his manual action that says this is impacting all of his pages and it is because there is a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive or manipulative links pointing to the site.

Here is the screen shot:

His site does not rank for its name - [dejan seo] right now:

Here are Dan's tweets:

Full transparency. Here's my Search Console link export and copy of the link disavow file: https://t.co/8qaLznusJ5

Obviously I haven't been link building, it would be like adding droplets into a swimming pool as I have a very healthy organic link profile.

— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 23, 2019

All pages. Boom. pic.twitter.com/kaczv6oLF6

— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 23, 2019

Again - I love the transparency here.

You can go through the Twitter thread to see SEOs digging out all the bad links to his site.

You even have former Googler giving advice around this:

Also, just because some tool says you're clean, or gives you a fancy score. It doesn't mean you are.

— Pedro Dias: ~/pedro$ (@pedrodias) August 23, 2019

I have not seen any Googler's respond to this specific manual action, nor do I expect to see a Googler respond.

I highly recommend you look at the Twitter thread just to see what the SEO community is digging up around this, it is pretty fun to read. It shows the SEO community cares and it also shows how SEOs dig into problems.

And yes - clearly Google manual actions for links still exist and still can hurt really badly.

I hope Dan figures it out and recovers soon!

No worries Barry. I'll share everything new that happens. We're in the process of moving to another domain. Not willing to play reconsideration ping pong with Googlers for months while my customers can't find me by my brand name.

— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 23, 2019

Forum discussion at Twitter.