Video transcription
Today we have a question from Manchester in the United Kingdom.
Adeel asks– How did Interflora turn their ban in 11 days? Can you explain what kind of penalty they had, how did they fix it, as some of us have spent months trying to clean things up after a Google Webmaster Tools notification?
So this is an interesting question.And rather than talking about a specific company, because we typically don’t call out specific companies very often,we prefer to talk about things in more general terms.
Let me answer in a more general way.
So Google tends to look at buying and selling links that pass page rank as a violation of our guidelines.And if we see that happening multiple times, repeated times, then the actions that we take get more and more severe. So we’re more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeat violations.
If a company were to be caught buying links, it would be interesting if, for example, you knew that it started in the middle of and ended in March 2013 or something like that.
If a company were to go back and disavow every single link that they had gotten in 2012, that’s a pretty monumentally epic, large action.So that’s the sort of thing where a company is willing to say, you know what? We might have had good links for a number of years, and then we just had really bad advice and someone did everything wrong for a few months, maybe up to a year.
So just to be safe, let’s just disavow everything in that time frame.
That’s a pretty radical action.And that’s the sort of thing where, if we heard back in a reconsideration request that someone had taken that kind of a strong action, then we could look and say, OK, this is something that people are taking seriously.
So it’s not something that I would typically recommend for everybody to disavow every link that you’ve gotten for a period of years.
But certainly when people start over with completely new websites that they bought,we have seen a few cases where people will disavow every single link, because they truly want to get a fresh start.It’s a nice-looking domain, but the previous owners had just burned it to a crisp in terms of the amount of web spam that they’ve done.
So typically what we see from a reconsideration request is, people starting out and just trying to prune a few links. A good reconsideration request is often using the domain query, domain colon, and taking out large amounts of domains which have bad links.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going and removing everything for the last year or everything for the last year and a half. But that sort of large scale action, if taken, can have an impact whenever we’re assessing a domain within a reconsideration request.
Quick Answer: The more serious the action taken by the webmaster, the more serious Google treat it.