We are very sorry this happened and we will make sure that it does not
happen again. This is something that ruins a company and we are lucky
to have a chance to fix it. We are working very hard on this and have
seen some good response. These are the steps we are taking.
Emailing site owners to remove our links.
Contacting sites with the themes we designed to remove them.
So far a good amount of site owners have gotten back to us and removed
our links so we are excited about that, I am not sure how long it is
going to take to get the links removed but we are going to keep
working on it.
> We are very sorry this happened and we will make sure that it does not
> happen again. This is something that ruins a company and we are lucky
> to have a chance to fix it. We are working very hard on this and have
> seen some good response. These are the steps we are taking.
> Emailing site owners to remove our links.
> Contacting sites with the themes we designed to remove them.
> So far a good amount of site owners have gotten back to us and removed
> our links so we are excited about that, I am not sure how long it is
> going to take to get the links removed but we are going to keep
> working on it.
Just an update we have had some good success from site owners we could
get in contact with. We will be starting it up again in the morning.
This weekend we are gonna keep trying to get a hold of these people
and then Monday we are gonna file our reconsideration request since so
many site owners have been responsive. Thanks to everyone who has
helped us out especially John, we will continue to provide updates and
let everyone know what happens with our reconsideration request
Monday.
Well we put our reconsideration request in yesterday and we are still
working on getting more of these links removed. Does anyone have an
idea of how long it takes for someone to review our request?
Hey just an update, to this point we have successfully had a majority
of the links removed. Right now we are just hoping to hear back from
Google about the reconsideration request we filed on Tuesday. I
noticed that alot of the links showing in webmasters tools have been
removed hopefully that and our continue effort will help us to get
back where we were. Our site had good ranks previous to releasing the
themes so we hope that we can get it back. I will be crossing my
fingers all weekend!
> Hey just an update, to this point we have successfully had a majority
> of the links removed. Right now we are just hoping to hear back from
> Google about the reconsideration request we filed on Tuesday. I
> noticed that alot of the links showing in webmasters tools have been
> removed hopefully that and our continue effort will help us to get
> back where we were. Our site had good ranks previous to releasing the
> themes so we hope that we can get it back. I will be crossing my
> fingers all weekend!
Good insight JLH so basically there are no replies you either come
back or you dont. I wonder how many reconsideration requests they get
a day probably 10000 or more. Im hoping they can get to mine soon :)
It looks like you have made some good progress with regards to those
links. However, I'm still seeing templates being distributed with
them; not only that, the links are disguised in a way that the average
webmaster cannot find them. For example, one template I was
looking at contained the following as "footer.php" (with spaces
added):
Personally, I think having footer links are fine if they are relevant
to the site or template and nofollow'ed. However, hiding them in this
style is - in my opinion - not ok at all. Just this week I helped a
friend with his template: it had a block of code similar to this in
it. It turned out that not only was it hiding links, it was also
spreading malware. It really upsets me to find code like this in a
template: it shows that whoever made the template not only knew the
contents were not ok, but also wanted to prevent the user from finding
or editing it.
When submitting a reconsideration request, it's always good to make
sure that as much as possible is cleaned up and detailed in your
report (including potential paid links in other forms).
John that will help alot, thank you! We have been emailing those sites
to get the themes off, but alot of them dont respond. We are going to
start aggressively contacting these sites again to get our themes
removed to prevent further spread. Again thank you for your help,
please stand by for updates we will be spending the week trying to get
all of them removed.
After a long 4 days we have made some great efforts and genuine
strides to get this issue resolved. We have taken the following steps
and I will be submitting another reconsideration requests in a few
minutes with detailed reports of the work we have completed. I am
hoping that Google will find the work we have done what we will do in
the future acceptable to remove the penalty.
- As of today we have contacted all the sites we found with our
themes and made sure to get the themes removed or provided them with
the code so they can modify the footer as they please(these do not
have our links of course). We have had a great response from these
sites and we expect to have the links off their previews and downloads
this week as per our conversations with them. Its possible that they
change the theme footer file to keep the download without our link.
Our link may still be in the preview if they did not update their
previews.
- We will continue to email these wp sites until we cannot locate
our links anywhere anymore.
- We have contacted many site owners to remove our links off their
site footers, we have had a great response with this as well.
- We will continue to email these sites until we do not see our link
on any footers or in proper rel=nofollow format.
- We have not created any new themes and will not.
- We have emailed our owners and told them not to give away the free
themes we made for them.
- We removed the themes for download from our blog.
I also wanted to note that some of these things were done 2 weeks ago
and others last week. If there is anything that anyone would like to
add, please let me know this is a very hard to do and we are working
as hard as we can to clean up the site. Any advice helps!
Just wanted to give anyone who read this an update. We are still
contacting sites to get links dropped, we have heard back from a lot
and we have really cleaned up the problem very well. As of May 7th we
submitted a reconsideration request, but have not seen any change in
our sites penalty.
Please don't feel offended on this opinion.
The reason you won't be getting back right away is simple. Your great
ranking was based on the linking techniques. Once it was discovered
(or found as not the best practice), your site became what it
origianally was - a great site amoung hundreds of great sites in the
same industry. So now without any linking advantages you have to
compete with other greats in the industry and the rank is now based on
their ranking algorithm. I don't think your site is under any penalty
at all - the rank just reflects current (more accurate) position of it
on the net. I've seen it happen very often.
> Just wanted to give anyone who read this an update. We are still
> contacting sites to get links dropped, we have heard back from a lot
> and we have really cleaned up the problem very well. As of May 7th we
> submitted a reconsideration request, but have not seen any change in
> our sites penalty.
Yulia sorry I am going to disagree with you. The site ranked top 10
before these links got out of control. It is a big mistake that we
will not make again. The site ranked for alot of terms. Also to
think there is no penalty is not reasonable at all. If you search for
vacationrealty a very uncommon term you see the site is on page four
now at least not 6. To tell me that this site would not rank for
vacationrealty with no spaces is highly unlikely unless their is a
penalty.
> Please don't feel offended on this opinion.
> The reason you won't be getting back right away is simple. Your great
> ranking was based on the linking techniques. Once it was discovered
> (or found as not the best practice), your site became what it
> origianally was - a great site amoung hundreds of great sites in the
> same industry. So now without any linking advantages you have to
> compete with other greats in the industry and the rank is now based on
> their ranking algorithm. I don't think your site is under any penalty
> at all - the rank just reflects current (more accurate) position of it
> on the net. I've seen it happen very often.
> On May 14, 1:31 am, vr wrote:
> > Just wanted to give anyone who read this an update. We are still
> > contacting sites to get links dropped, we have heard back from a lot
> > and we have really cleaned up the problem very well. As of May 7th we
> > submitted a reconsideration request, but have not seen any change in
> > our sites penalty.
Also to date the penalty was placed on March 27th approximately and it
has been a little more than 2 months. The site has been moving back up
slowly. To our knowledge we do not see anywhere with our themes to
download. Anyone using them must already have a copy and they are
changing their theme. We continue to email sites we find using link:
search on google, and have emailed everyone we can. To date we have
made like 2-3 reconsideration requests and we are hoping that our
efforts to clean up will satisfy the engineer who reviews our site so
they can lift the penalty. Keeping my fingers crossed! Ironically it
is easier to take the long road cause the short road always leads to
more work that is retro instead forward moving. :(
To date its June 20th, there is no instance of our themes on anyone's
site. We are seeing that websites who have our themes, have taken them
and added their link so they can distribute. At one point we had all
the themes off sites, but now there are a few more, eventhought I dont
see any more links counted. It has been almost 4 months, I truly
wonder what it will take to get this site back.........
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