Cleaning up backlinks from a SEO attack

After having had success with SEO, thanks to the changes we made to the websites, suddenly google reported us a manual penalty. The company for which I worked flagged this as a primary issue. Because it was an startup several employees had to work on this. I led my team in order to help fix this.

The attack

It was a low backlink profile attack. The first step we did was to request a Google Reconsideration. We declare ourselves not guilty. Google replied with a message saying that we should clean the links anyway or do the most possible effort, Can you believe it?!

The fix

I decided to use a tool called majestic SEO. This tool reported us a lot of backlinks with a rating system so we could clearly see the low quality ones. After filtering all the natural backlinks macrojuegos.com received since 2006, we started to think about how to remove them. We tried contact forms, sending emails to the domain owners, but that only worked for a few cases. After a couple days Google just announced a Disavow tool.

We used this tool removed about 20 links and requested again. They denied it and also they didn't replied anything. After an entire week removed we had to add to that disavow list some LEGAL natural links we had which came from low profile websites like the old blog sites from blogspot. So sad.

Finally, we sent a reconsideration request and they accepted it.

Conclusion

It was a time when google went crazy and banned a lot of websites. We heard a lot of histories from other webmasters, a lot of manual penalties. After a while, we stopped listening stories, perhaps Google calmed down. Because of this a lot of black hat SEO people started to perform backlink attacks so Google had to do something about this issue. We will never know what they did.