This is a continuation from the link removal post for UAW which you can read here first. What I failed to mention in the previous post was the first place you need to go when you get your log in details is the UberArticles site. This is where people can still get access to any articles you have published whether your account is active or not. You will have author access and you need to delete them straight away.
This goes the same for any article directories that may have been used when you were a member of UAW.
Like me you probably thought that cancelling the account was enough, but it wasn’t and it took me awhile to figure why articles kept appearing long after I had stopped using UAW
As I said in the previous post this is very tedious work but if you read between the lines of Google you will quickly realize that they much prefer links to be removed rather than disavowed.
Improving Your Profile
After collecting every site I could and seeing what level of access I had, such as can I edit the article or is it view only, and you will come across different access levels in the blogs where your articles are posted. Now that I have all of that information I then added every link into an excel spread sheet tabbed by domain name with every link and title. I did this firstly to see if there were any similar articles, as we know using UAW especially in the early days lead to many articles either having the same titles or paragraphs the same.
Then I went through everything and compared to see whether I could delete the article or not, keeping any similar articles on the sites where I had view only and re-writing those articles where I had edit access to make them completely different and removing the links to my site. I then used those newly re-written articles (100% percent unique not spun) to send links to the articles I could not remove and also made sure the new articles had internal linking to other articles on the same site, whether they were my posts or not.
My goal here is to not only try to make anything I do look natural but build up page authority on any posts that I can not remove, hopefully this will make those links of some benefit. If you are not sure what page authority is check out these guys.
As I do not have access to statistics for any of the sites I am relying on Alexa to tell me what the sites are doing after I update the links and the content. This is a screen shot of what happened after one week.
Another site just to show you that after cleaning everything up, the sites seem to come back to life. I also understand that this is not a true indicator of what is happening but it does show movement.
As a side note: any links pointing to the articles I can’t remove are not keywords, they are simply hyper-linked saying read more here, or check this post out and even see what this guy has to say. My intention is to remove anything that Google might deem to be spammy, I am even dropping down the density of keywords in the article content I am updating.
So Why Would I Waste My Time Doing This?
Initially I would not have, but after doing more than 15 disavow requests and even though my site had the manual penalty lifted it still never came back to where it once was, and still hasn’t. I was lucky enough however, to have a Google employee communicate with me when I first had the penalty and she was a great help. The one thing that caught my attention after going back over the emails I had received was that every one of them always referred to the removal of the links not the disavow even though it did help slightly.
This is how I stumbled across the way to access the articles, I was desperately trying to get these links removed emailing webmasters and literally screaming at the computer screen to make them go away. I was even hoping and praying that all these domains would just expire, some did but because I had articles still listed in the Uber Directory more domains would simply take their place.
I then for the 15th time started to update the disavow file as I had noticed that all the links in my webmaster account had changed again and were again pulling my website out of the listings.
I would go to every site that was a WordPress blog and use the details I had found in the old UAW account and that’s when I realized I had been able to access nearly all the posts and the links in those posts from the very first day they were published. So who looks pretty foolish now, yep that would be me. I can’t believe the weeks, time and money I have wasted trying to get rid of these links, in fact it’s down right embarrassing that I didn’t figure this out more than a year ago when i first received the penalty.
However with adversity comes innovation and that is why rather than just delete all those articles and waste the time and money it took to get them there, I am now updating and modifying them to help build a stronger more long-term profile that is all reality should never be penalized again.
This is only some of the strategies i am using, if you would like to know more about how I am increasing Page Authority and taking back control of my link profile then ask you questions below. Even if you are having trouble finding out how to access the articles let me know and I will help you out if I can.
If you have not read this yet you should it’s a post on why you article marketing is failing and will help you out when following the steps i have suggested here, you can read it here.
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