Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
-
Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google. Sad times.
I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months. All 5000 of them! Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam. About 2800 of them were junk. As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content.
As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed. There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites. And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to! As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them.
I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines." As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done?
Cheers
Steve
-
Tom has given you good advice. I'll put in my 2 cents' worth as well.
There are 3 main reasons for a site to fail at reconsideration:
1. Not enough links were assessed by the site owner to be unnatural.
2. Not enough effort was put into removing links and documenting that to Google.
3. Improper use of the disavow tool.
In most cases #1 is the main cause. Almost every time I do a reconsideration request my client is surprised at what kind of links are considered unnatural. From what I have seen, Google is usually pretty good at figuring out whether you have been manually trying to manipulate the SERPS or whether links are just spam bot type of links.
Here are a few things to consider:
Are you being COMPLETELY honest with yourself about the spammy links you are seeing? How did Russian and porn sites end up linking to you? Most sites don't just get those by accident. Sometimes this can happen when sites use linkbuilding companies that use automated methods to build links. Even still, do all you can to address those links, and then for the ones that you can't get removed, document your efforts, show Google and then disavow them.
Even if these are foreign language sites, many of them will have whois emails that you can contact.
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure that your good links are truly natural? Just because they are from news sources is not a good enough reason. Have you read all the interflora stuff recently? They had a pile of links from advertorials (amongst other things) that now need to be cleaned up.
-
Hi Steve
If Google is saying there are still a few more links, then it might be an idea to manually review a few others that you haven't disavowed. I find the LinkDetox tool very useful for this. It's free with a tweet and will tell you if a link from a site is toxic (the site is deindexed) or if it's suspicious (and why it's suspicious). You still need to use your own judgement on these, but it might help you to find the extra links you're talking about.
However, there is a chance you have gone and disavowed every bad link, but still got the rejection. In this case, I'd keep trying but make your reconsideration request more detailed. Create an excel sheet and list the bad URLs and/or domains and give a reason explaining why you think they're bad links. Then provide information on how you found their contact details. If there are no contact us pages, check the whois registrar's email. After that, say when you contacted them (give a sample of your letter to them too), and if they replied, along with a follow up date if you got silence. If there are no details in the whois, explicitly mention that there are no contact details and so you have proceeded straight to disavowing.
Then list the URLs you've disavowed (upload the .txt file with your reconsideration email). You've now told Google that you've found bad links, why you think their bad (also include how you discovered them), that you've contacted the webmaster on numerous occasions and, if no removal was made, you've disavowed as a last resort. This is a very thorough process and uses the disavow tool in the way that Google wants us to - as a last resort to an unresponsive or anonymous webmaster.
Please forgive me if you've already done all this and it seems like repetition. I only mention it because I've found it's best to be as thorough as possible with Google in these situations. Remember, a reconsideration request is manual and if they see that you've gone through all this effort to be reinstated, you've got a better chance of being approved.
Keep trying, mate. It can be disheartening, but if you think it's worth the time and effort, then keep going for it. I would bear in mind the alternatives, however, such as starting fresh on a new domain. If you find yourself going round the bend with endless reconsiderations, sometimes your time, effort and expertise can be better put elsewhere.
All the best!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I still monitor noindex, nofollow pages with Google Analytics?
I have a private/login site where all pages are noindex, nofollow. Can I still monitor external site links with Google Analytics?
Technical SEO | Mar 6, 2020, 8:38 AM | jasmine.silver0 -
Can an external firewall affect rankings?
For security reasons we are now routing traffic through an external firewall cum CDN. Our server and domain IPs remain the same, but any request is routed through an external IP, which then forwards the traffic. Would our rankings be affected because of IP changes? Thanks Sam
Technical SEO | Mar 11, 2020, 10:42 AM | samgold0 -
Can I use a 301 redirect to pass 'back link' juice to a different domain?
Hi, I have a backlink from a high DA/PA Government Website pointing to www.domainA.com which I own and can setup 301 redirects on if necessary. However my www.domainA.com is not used and has no active website (but has hosting available which can 301 redirect). www.domainA.com is also contextually irrelevant to the backlink. I want the Government Website link to go to www.domainB.com - which is both the relevant site and which also should be benefiting from from the seo juice from the backlink. So far I have had no luck to get the Government Website's administrators to change the URL on the link to point to www.domainB.com. Q1: If i use a 301 redirect on www.domainA.com to redirect to www.domainB.com will most of the backlink's SEO juice still be passed on to www.domainB.com? Q2: If the answer to the above is yes - would there be benefit to taking this a step further and redirect www.domainA.com to a deeper directory on www.domianB.com which is even more relevant?
Technical SEO | Jun 16, 2018, 5:22 AM | DGAU
ie. redirect www.domainA.com to www.domainB.com/categoryB - passing the link juice deeper.0 -
Tools/Software that can crawl all image URLs in a site
Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png
Technical SEO | May 5, 2016, 10:08 PM | jayoliverwright0 -
Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?
I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | Nov 10, 2015, 6:52 PM | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | May 7, 2015, 6:57 AM | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Can spiders crawl jQuery Fancy Box scripts
Hi Everyone - I'm not a technical person at all. I have some content that will be hidden until a user clicks "learn more" where upon it will be displayed via jQuery Fancy Box script. The content behind the learn more javascript is important and I need it to be crawled by search engine spiders. Does anyone know if there will be a problem with this script?
Technical SEO | Feb 17, 2014, 4:13 PM | Santaur0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | Nov 5, 2012, 1:05 PM | Dan-Lawrence0