Sailing away from bad links and Google penalties
Lanzarote Guidebook has been providing tourists with in-depth online information about the Spanish island since 2004.
Created by long-term island resident Nick Ball, the website offers comprehensive information about Lanzarote’s unique attractions, whilst also enabling tourists to find and book apartments and villas in Lanzarote directly online.
The Challenge
We received an enquiry through our website for a review of backlinks to find out and fix what was causing a partial Google penalty.
The only issue; there were over 35,000 backlinks to check and time was tight.
The challenge was how quickly we could download, filter and review 35,000 backlinks and then upload a disavow file to Google so the website recovered.
Our Answer
The first thing to do is to make sure Google knows you have taken some action to remove the offending links. Simply uploading a file back in 2016 was not enough to get success. We had to actively see which sites we could remove the links from first and then contact them for removal. Having done that it was a case of grouping sites together that were never going to respond to a removal requests as they were spammy .php directories and letting Google know that we had identified that nothing we did would ever remove the link.
After that, we used a manual process to review every domain that we felt might be bad and compile a definitive list of the sites we wanted nothing to do with.
The outcome was within a week the site had recovered. Not to rest on our laurels though we went back twice more and found additional links over the next three months which we were able to add to the disavow file.
What our customer said:
We approached Aqueous to help us get a Google manual penalty removed from our site.
They rapidly identified the toxic links and guided us through the whole process of disavowal and reconsideration.
A short time later Google informed us that the penalty was lifted. I would be happy to recommend their services to anyone.
Nick Ball – Managing Director
100%
all penalties lifted
35,690
backlinks reviewed
830
domains disavowed
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