Rant: I spent $500 on a 'premium' guest post and it got my site a manual penalty

The service promised a placement on a 'finance blog' with 50k monthly visitors, but the site was clearly a PBN with spun content. Google caught it within a month, and I'm still trying to clean up the mess six weeks later. Has anyone else recovered from a penalty after a bad link buy, or is the site basically toast now?

3 comments

3 Comments

tessa_clark7417d ago

Manual penalties are a serious hit, but calling a site toast is giving up too easy. The disavow tool exists for this exact reason. You need to cut those bad links out and then prove to Google you're running a real site with good content. It's a lot of work, but people do come back from this.

jamesf2617d ago

Well, that's a rough way to learn that lesson. I once bought a "premium" electric toothbrush that just vibrated loudly and died in a week, so I get the feeling of buying a fancy name for junk. You can recover from the penalty, but it's a long process of disavowing those links and building real ones.

morgan_ramirez17d ago

Ever think a penalty was basically a death sentence? I used to. Seeing people actually work through the disavow process and come back changed my mind. It's a brutal lesson, but not the end.