You requested all dofollow links to your site be removed? What good links have you developed to replace these lost links?

I am afraid to develop more back links. Could you please write me more what do you mean by the good links?

this thread right here pretty much sums up more than 70% of webmasters in the SEO world. And when I say the SEO world, I mean the world of webmasters who use the term SEO. When you use the term SEO, you're most likely interested in manipulating googles algorithm so you rank high. This is exactly what google despises.

sam222 comes on here in search of help because his website was hit by google. By his post, it sounds like he ran a shady link campaign. Purchased links or some other shady link building method that google does not want you to do.

How do I know this you ask? Easy. Webmasters dont disavow links that they didnt purchase, or "develop".

SEO no longer exists in the sense that you can easily manipulate googles algorithms to fall into your favor by simply spending some money on links or tricks to gain links. I seen this coming, I seen this coming 4-5 years ago. I knew that every link you can easily acquire through trade, money or scheme will be done with. Over 90% of all links being purchased were either sitewide links or blog links with the typical 3 external links per post. Made it so ridiculously easy for google to spot.

Its time to go back to the more traditional word "marketing". When you market your site you're accomplishing a more natural SEO. When your mind set is "I need links to succeed at my business" then you're setting yourself up for failure and a lot of sleepless nights. Trust me, I have been there.

brinked, great post.

It's not just marketing... it's also having something to market. That means a unique and valuable product or services... excellent content, well presented, on a smoothly running indexable site... and promotion to call attention to your site and attract visitors, some of whom might link to you. Facebook and Twitter might help attract some visitors, but ultimately it will be about your site and your offerings.

Over time you will build a reputation, and that reputation becomes "etched into the web" via links or references to your site. If the site lives up to its reputation, you will attract more visitors and may do well. That depends also, of course, on your competition, on how well you serve your visitors, and on the circumstances of business and the world.

What good links are, in essence, are freely-given references from people who like your site.

Robert, about 3-4 years ago before panda/penguin etc happened I was heavily into "SEO". Now that I look back on it, its all about manipulating googles algorithms. It was all about money, and thats what ranking high brings.

Back then the types of links you could buy were sitewides, blogrolls, blogpost links with your typical 3 links per post nonsense. I then started requesting more natural looking links. I would request a page be made with 100% my unique written content on an inner page. Webmasters who sold links thought I was crazy. Why would I want some crappy inner link on a page that doesnt even yet exist when I can have a sitewide link on a pr4 website!? because I knew this very time was coming.

I also would request NATURAL link anchors such as "click here", "<Website url>, "awesome site" etc. Do you know how many times webmasters would try and tell me what I am doing is the wrong way to do seo? "Sir, you need to put your sites keywords in anchors to rank" I would respond by showing them how my sites currently already rank #1 for my desired positions and pretty much they still didnt understand what I was trying to do.

I wanted natural links and although it took me a VERY long time to buy/earn each link, it worked extremely well for me. I would never reveal that type of information in the past because that was my secret sauce. Yes, it was blackhat. Now it has come that any type of intentional link building is considered black hat.

You are correct Robert. But what I find from my personal experience, is I will not market something I do not believe in. If I have a product I want to bring attention to, you can be well assured I put a lot of time, thought and effort into producing a quality product.

"What good links are, in essence, are freely-given references from people who like your site. "

100% true and that is exactly the only types of links that will get you ranked high today. yet we will continue to debate over why sites were punished. People will continue to come on here and post how to recover from their past link building strategies. Playing the victim, acting like they don't have a clue why they do not rank anymore.

SEO had a complete overhaul the last few years, and those who fail to adapt will continue to beat themselves over the head with their past mistakes.

Today its more about marketing yourself, marketing the person behind the site, building relationships and building trust. Transparency is a huge factor today and "trust rank" is very much real and in play especially for sites that accept payments.

it sounds so simple right? Our 2 posts right here back to back descrive exactly what you need to do in order to rank, but they will get overlooked because they are not the answer people are looking for because its not what they want to hear. They want to hear how they can beat google by using old tricks/methods.

I used to do factory SEO too but saw it stop working every time about 7 years ago, and started looking for something else. That's when I found this forum.

I have seen on one small site over the past 3 years how building a site round a community brings long-tail traffic and then rankings for bigger terms.

Traffic was seeded with AdWords and we had a newsletter from the start. We've constantly asked our subscribers (now members) how to improve the site, looked at traffic and usage patterns, and added new pages and new features, new ways of navigating the site.

I've seen a correlation between numbers of direct visits and activity on site and Google referrals. We did a major revamp 18 months ago and stopped our newsletter for a few months before hand. Search traffic fell. Once we relaunched and started updating people, search traffic started to rise again.

The site is starting to get to a 'critical mass' stage; we're now considering adding moderators from among the membership. Sales of branded products and affiliate kick-backs are steadily rising.

We've not even started doing outreach yet because we've still got ideas for the site and we're still seeing rewards from that.

It has only 19 linking domains yet in the past few months traffic is going up by 500-1000 every month or two.

I realise that these are small numbers to some; it's a niche site, not a top flight one in a competitive niche.

But I'm positive that this PRINCIPLE, if followed, is what Google are trying to identify and reward at any level.

Sure Google does have other ways of ranking sites (I still see these ways working for me and for others) but if I had the means every time on a site I'd always do it this way. As brinked says, you're never looking over your shoulder - and it's so much more fun!

@brinked,

Thanks for your post about how to go about acquiring backlinks. It seems that you were ahead of the curve.

Any suggestions for things to keep in mind on site. Areas where we tend to over optimize that we should pay more attention to? Content writing advice?

gouri thats pretty simple. I know its been said a million times but create for your users. For example if you have a store and on your homepage you list a bunch of popular products, all the way below that why would you put a welcome paragraph there? It looks silly and its almost always made for search engines and to stuff important keywords there. Dont do that. You dont need to put content everywhere like its some requirement to rank. Images/video are content too. Let your site speak for itself and make the content for real people.

Create for your users

Agree.
The only time you'd want to think about search engines is when deciding on the title of a page or the title of site's section (Title is not a place to stuff keywords.) That's it.

I learned that even diversifying keywords (in the body of the page/article) is ineffective.
Just make your site as useful as possible for your readers.