This is how I recovered 3 penalized sites (SEO penalties)

Shane Dutka

April 22, 2025

I recovered the SEO traffic of 3 websites by deleting pages where the owner had bought 100s of paid links.

Here’s the thing…

It’s extremely easy to find websites selling links, and we know (through the API leak) Google has built-in facets of its algo that look for ‘BadBackLinks’.

So if it’s easy for you and me to find paid links, it’s easy for Google to find them and penalize you.

I just launched a free tool called ‘getseoshield.com’ that indexes all of the websites actively selling links (157,411 currently) around the internet.

The idea of the tool is to audit your backlink profile so you know how many links in your backlink profile are from websites actively selling links.

And in today’s video, I review a case study of exactly what I did to recover the traffic of these 3 websites and an example of how I’d use getseoshield to analyze a penalized website (k9ofmine.com).

Link to today’s video on recovering websites.

I find these links from various marketplaces, fiverr gigs, and those unsolicited emails we all love.

Getseoshield lets you audit your website to see how ‘toxic’ your backlink profile is and see which pages are the most affected.

Where we find multiple sources for the same link, we mark the website as ‘higher risk’ in that getting a link from that website is worse than getting a link from a website only found from one source.

The more paid links relative to non-paid = more toxic link profile.

In general, <10% is considered safe, >10% is getting bad, and >20% is high-risk territory.

That is if you have 100 links in your link profile, is 10 of them are from websites actively selling you have 10% toxicity.

To salvage a site, I typically ‘410’ pages with paid links pointing to them and then republish the pages on new urls without a 301 (i.e., breaking the link).

By breaking the link from websites that are actively selling links, you could potentially recover a site (again I did it 3 different times).

Now if you are actively buying links on link marketplaces but your traffic is up, great, but if your traffic is down, I would consider deleting the pages with too many toxic links.

The issue is always when you overdo it.

A few strategic purchases with optimized anchor text, great.

100s of paid links from marketplaces, not great.

Till next time,

Shane

P.S. – Want my 1:1 help with your SEO strategy? I’m taking on new clients for a limited time. Book a free call with me to see if I can help you grow revenue.