Diagnostics and removal of the Minusinsk reference filter in 2021. Case

In this case, I will tell you in detail how the Minusinsk link filter is applied today. How to diagnose the problem, speed up the filter removal process and speed up the re-indexing of toxic links.

Project subject: buying a car.

Site age: 10 years.

Region: Moscow.

Filter date: August 18th.

Start of work to remove links: October 26th.

Link filter removal date: January 19.

Filter diagnostics, correspondence with Plato

Yandex contacted me with the problem of a sharp drop in traffic and visibility at the end of September.

Drop in visibility in Yandex Substation

Initially, I decided to check the site for text filters. Conducted a manual analysis by TOP. Removed unnecessary entries from meta tags, partially reduced and rewritten texts. Also removed spam in micro-markup, altas to images and attributes of callback buttons.

The thought of a link filter was not discarded, but there were doubts, because:

• there was no notification in Yandex.Webmaster;
• I wrote to Plato twice asking about the link filter, both times they assured me that there are no restrictions;

Plato s unsubscribe: work to improve the site

• the site is over 10 years old;
• initial check of the ratio of anchor links from MegaIndex showed a ratio of 65% (Organic) to 35% (SEO), many competitors were doing worse;
• Ahrefs showed a little over 200 donors, and I had no idea that the filter can come even with such a small number of backlinks.

I started looking for confirmation of the hypothesis about Minusinsk and came across the article Pixel Plus, where it was advised to use the operator for diagnostics:

site host.ru @

The bottom line is that if for this request in incognito mode the site is not shown in Yandex in the first place, then with a high degree of probability a link filter is imposed on the domain.

Now this verification method no longer works, because:

After public coverage of this method of checking the site for the Minusinsk filter in Yandex, the search engine employees “broke” it and added a query to the number of vital ones for which the project is in the first place in the search results, regardless of the fact of the application of sanctions.

When modifying the request, I immediately found 4 working variations that indicated the presence of a filter (I will not write them publicly for obvious reasons, but if you need them, write to me in a personal FB, I will gladly share).

Analysis of the link profile, determination of the number of spam links

After confirming the hypothesis about the presence of a filter, I proceeded to analyze the link profile. Dumped all backlinks from GSC, Ya Webmaster and Ahrefs. I put together, cleaned out the takes and made a pivot table.

Selection of spam donors to remove links

A total of 253 active donors were found. 105 of them contained from one to three links with explicit commercial anchors. 96% of anchor links were dofollowed.

The distribution of anchor links turned out to be:

• 95 articles,
• 8 crowd links,
• 2 submits.

Also, during the analysis, I found about 10 anchor links in Ya.Webmaster, which, in fact, already gave the 404 response code (did not work), I first of all sent Yandexbot to them for re-bypassing.

Search for link exchanges and remove purchased links

First of all, I began to write to the site owners by mail in contacts and through whois at domain registrars. Most simply ignored the messages, some began to reply that links were purchased from them through link exchanges, and that they should be filmed there.

Through the “Link price” service, I calculated all the exchanges where links were purchased over the past 10 years, and began to restore accesses for further withdrawal. The principle of operation of the service is as follows: upload a list of URLs there in a bundle and you are given a list of all link exchanges where you can buy a link from this domain.

Unloading from the Link price service

Most of the links were found on five link exchanges:

• Blogun,
• Collaborator,
• MiraLinks,
• PR.Sape,
• GGL.

After correspondence with the support service, I restored access to all exchanges within three working days and started sending withdrawal requests.

Of the 95 articles on the exchanges, 79 sites were found, 16 articles were already absent from the exchanges – using them I manually contacted the owners and negotiated the removal of links. I also contacted the administrators and owners of the forums, I managed to remove 2 crowd links.

• In the Collaborator service, I had to independently correspond via PM with webmasters. Many had to write several times. Some “stubborn” webmasters removed the links only after I asked to duplicate my messages through the support service after the third time. Of the minuses – the process dragged on for 3 weeks, of the pluses – they did not ask for money for the withdrawal.
• In the Blogun exchange, the withdrawal process is more or less automated. For removing 100 links, I had to pay 1687 rubles with commissions (it is impossible to buy less). Additionally, I sent notifications to each webmaster via private messages.
• In the PR.Sape exchange, removing links also costs money, for activating a request to remove 3 links, you had to spend 402 rubles with commissions.
• The ML and GGL exchanges turned out to be the friendliest service. The administration itself sent requests to webmasters and did not take a ruble for this – respect!
• Out of 16 sites with articles that were not on the exchanges, on nine I managed to remove links through correspondence within a month. Two asked for the withdrawal of 300 and 500 rubles, the rest entered the position and removed the links for free.
• 2 generated submission links from the catalogs could not be deleted, it is impossible to contact the site owners.

An example of a letter template for mailing to webmasters:

What happened:

In 6 weeks I managed to remove 67 out of 105 toxic donors, which in general I think is a fairly good result.

Speed ??up reindexing and filter removal

Since the bulk of the links were purchased for the site many years ago, it can take a very long time to wait for Yandexbot to crawl these pages. Therefore, it was necessary to speed up this process as much as possible.

To check the reindexing of a specific page, you need to drive the operator into the Yandex address bar: site: host.ru/page*

Where:

• host.ru – your domain name,
• page * – the name of a specific page.

For example: site: ozon.ru/highlight/discount/.

Next, you need to open the saved copy and check which version of the page is saved in the database (with or without an active link).

Viewing a saved copy using the example of the Ozon website

I tried to run links through the IndexGator service every day, but it showed very low performance.

You can do some dirty stuff and drive links en masse through Hrumer, but I did not dare to buy a license for a one-time task. As a result, I ordered a package of 300 links in comments (on WordPress sites) on Kwork for 1300 rubles.

After completing the task within five days, about 85% of donors were successfully re-indexed by Yandex.

During the week I manually tried to re-index the remaining 15% in various ways. By the end, I had about 5 donors left, which for some reason were not indexed by Yandex, but this was not particularly important, because a week after the link run, the filter was removed and the site returned to the TOP.

Returning the site to the TOP

Final theses

• You should not count on the notification in the panel of webmasters and the answer of Plato.
• You need to diagnose the filter yourself by checking through search operators and comparing the ratio of anchor / non-anchor links.
• Before manual withdrawal and correspondence with webmasters, you need to ask the support of link exchanges for information about whether they purchased links to your site or not.
• The removed links must be re-indexed using any of the available methods – this will speed up the removal of the filter.
• It is advisable to check the reindexing of each link manually through a saved copy or in another way.