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Can backlink spam penalties be algorithmic or are they just manual?
I had a drop after the last major update, I went from 8.5K to 5K organic visits. A guy told me he was going to upload my Ahrefs DR a month ago, but I didn’t know how he was going to do it, until I found out it was backlinks spam. I got checked and I don’t have any manual penalty. So most likely it was an algorithmic penalty. So I want to know if my decrease was due to what this person did to upload my DR cheating Ahrefs, or if my site simply fell in so many visits due to natural things. I have never had such a strong decline, I lost position in all articles.
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1 Reply
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Nobody at google is manually checking websites backlinks ? it obviously is a algorithm
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both… you can be negatively hit by having bad backlinks. You can also get hit with a manual penalty from having bad backlinks. Check GSC, it will tell you if you’ve been manually hit.
You probably got hit by HCU or the core algorithm update that just started rolling out last monday
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Obviously its checking by algorithm periodically
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From my understanding it is quite uncommon to get hit by algorithmic or manual penalties because of backlinks, Google will simply ignore them.
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It happens. I has an increase in backlink spam that was astronomical…the back links happened so quickly without me knowing where they came from, around that time an algorithm update happened. It negatively impacted 3 of my clients, we don’t buy backlinks or partake in blackhat SEO…so, after ruling out every other possible cause, we found the bad backlinks, disavowed and within 3 months 2/3 clients were ranking again. The problem is these links are still being created by clone websites with different domains. It’s awful and I’ve got no clue how to stop it or how it started.
