After a Google manual penalty: hundreds of emails to clean up bought links

gaganghotra_ · x · 2026-09-03

SEO practitioners shared a real case on X: a client got hit by a Google manual penalty because a previous agency had bought backlinks. It took months and literally hundreds of personalized emails to webmasters to remove the problematic links, plus extensive documentation submitted to Google. The costlier damage was lost revenue from vanishing on highly profitable SERPs. The quoted post adds: link schemes may be fine for churn-and-burn side projects, but for a real business or client site, a manual action means hiring expensive specialists to dig you out.

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