The process of recovering from Google rankings can be a tedious one, and it’s something we’ve been focusing on in the last week. You see we used to be #1 across every major search engine including Yahoo, Google and Bing. We had the #1 spot for over three years and with Beats4Legends we had top 10 positions across the board. Not just for one or two keywords either, but hundreds of them.

This was a good way to get traffic to our business and we soaked up a few thousand email opt-ins from these sources and thousands of dollars in sales. Google is a great place to advertise yourself because it is some of the most targeted traffic you can imagine. People go onto Google and specifically search for something like “how to sell beats” or “selling beats”, or in the case of Beats4Legends it’s more like keywords such as “buy beats” and “beats for sale”.

However Google has seriously reconsidered what it wants in terms of link building, and there then became something known as the Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithm updates. Google actually completely changed the way they choose to rank material from the bottom up. By completely remaking their algorithms, hundreds of thousands of websites were hit in a negative way.

The problem is if you’ve gotten links in the past from sources that Google no longer agrees with, it will actually effect your current rankings today. That means that even doing great, white-hat Google friendly back links isn’t enough to get you ranked unless you have a brand new domain name. If you have an old domain name it could take up to six full months and a lot of work to get your rankings back.

The good thing is you can do it, and there are definitely still back linking campaigns you can use to rank easily. For instance, check out these awesome recovery rankings we had for our domain Beats4Legends. We flew back up in the rankings and all was back to normal for several months, but then Google came out with an update which made it so old links heavily effect your current rankings. Even though these new links were making us fly up in the charts, the old links we had from years ago were still effecting us.

This is an interesting position to find yourself in because the new links coming in were giving us an incredible boost in rankings that ended up flying us up in just a few days back to the top ten. Here’s an image taken from the sales page of Viral Google Domination, where we explain the whitehat Google friendly backlinking techniques we used to rise in our rankings even after new Google updates.

Again though, this is not enough. A new update came along from the dreaded Penguin that made it so old links were weighed heavily. We haven’t worked on our SEO this year at all as we’ve focused on making other moves to grow our business as quickly as possible regardless of Google.

But now we are back to using Google marketing techniques and we’ve learned a lot about how to recover from Google penalties. Huge amounts of time and research has been put in and one thing we’ve learned is that old backlinks can sometimes be toxic.

After performing several analysis gigs we found that we have thousands of backlinks from domains which are hurting our rankings and keeping us down no matter how many viral, good backlinks we seem to get. We found thousands upon thousands of back links that were coming up as toxic. We used top SEO tools in the industry to come to this conclusion and realized there was a lot of work to do.

While we still have plenty of rankings on the third page of Google, we are looking to get those bad links going away so we can come back to the first page.

We created a disavow notepad file and uploaded it to the Disavow Tool in Google. This tool can be extremely helpful specifically to people who have old links holding them back. It allows users to actually tell Google not to pay attention to links coming from certain domains and that can be a game changer.

One problem though is that it will take a full six months in some cases for the disavow tool to take any effect after a file is uploaded. You also want to be absolutely sure that the links you are disavowing are the right ones. In some cases disavowing the wrong links can hurt your rankings rather then help them.

The real way to rank on Google in 2014 has to do with getting truly viral back links and using the power of other people to gain rankings.