Google reconsideration nightmare
-
Hello and thanks in advance
The website has had a penalty on it for a while now, around 10 months, it was worked on by an agency who bought bad links to it but before then it was worked on by other agencies that may have done the same.
I cleaned up as many bad link (according to many posts read) and filled for reconsideration and was told to get rid of a whole bunch of links which i did not know existed.
Downloaded WMT links as instructed by Google admin person and contacted a heap of people which took a lot of man hours and cost us a fortune.
Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out.
I emailed back and showed that everything I could do was done and am happy to disavow any other link which they though violated their terms.
This was not enough and I was told to show more efforts in removing links and then resubmit for reconsideration.
I have done as much as I can on the website, I cannot see any more links which show violation, if there are some I am happy to remove but am now at a stage where i need direction from others to tackle this matter.
Any advice would be helpful; I cannot start over from scratch as it's a brand and not a small website.
-
Good point to disavow the domain. I've also seen sites fail at reconsideration because their disavow file was improperly formatted. Be sure you're using a .txt file.
I'm of two minds about the popular idea of getting links from as many sources as possible. I think the thought process behind this came from a while back when WMT really only showed a small sample of your links. But, since WMT added the ability to download your links, the numbers have been much more inclusive. A few months ago John Mueller said in a webmaster forum thread (damned if I can't find it now) that in most cases it is ok to just use the links from WMT.
Lately, in some cases, when you fail at reconsideration you get an email from Google with a couple of sample links that they want to see removed. In every case where I have seen this the links are ones that are present on the WMT list.
What I have seen though is that if you spend a couple of months working on your request and then file for reconsideration, Google will often reject the request and show you as an example, new links that WMT has picked up. So, when I do my requests, I always go back and get the latest links and assess those as well.
I personally don't think that Google wants webmasters to have to pay for subscriptions to external tools in order to clean up their links.
I used to use a combo of ahrefs and WMT links and have always done well. For my current projects I am using just WMT. My theory is that they will do just fine, but we'll see!
-
I've had really good success, but it's hard to say whether it's because I'm so thorough. I bet you I could get away with doing a lot less and still pass.
-
Hi Ben, I think you got really good answers especially the Marie strategy is really a gold piece. However I'm adding my two cents here.
If you want to get rid of bad links you'll need to get more backlinks data not only relying on GWT, the same googlers said that you'll need to rely on more tools because doesn't show the whole data. Try the historical index from majestic SEO tool or the raw export of ahrefs or even here in seo moz you got good tools for that (although I recommend for this majestic historical which is the widest one, sorry mozzers
).
Then get those backlinks through a tool which may help you finding the toxic links which are poisoning your site (dtox tool is really popular this time) and disavow all the toxic and the more suspicious ones.
Be sure to disavow by domain not url because you may be missing other urls not indexed in the same domain which may get you in troubles in the future.
Add many attachments demonstrating your efforts to remove the links because google overstated that you should try to do everything to try remove the link before asking for a disavow
(here) -->"You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"
-
Hey Marie that was interesting, I've never attached all the emails I sent to google, I 'm sure that they won't see them all but it's definitely impressive to show how much work you did. HAve you got a better "consideration" from the web spam team making this process? Or it didn't get their attention?
-
The process is frustrating, isn't it?
"Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out."
This brings up two points for me:
-If a few of these were on your disavow list, this means that some of them were not. Google is showing you some links that needed to be addressed that are not. I am seeing quite often lately that site owners are saying, "I removed xx% of links and still failed." It is not the percentage that matters. Google wants to see that you have attempted removal for each type of link that they deem unnatural. "Unnatural" really means self made. So, let's say you had a link profile containing a bunch of blog comment spam and also a little bit of article spam. Let's say you removed almost all of the blog comment spam which accounted for 80% of your links but you didn't touch the article links. Even though you got 80% removed, Google wants to see that you have tried to get the article links taken down.
I've done a lot of consultation for site owners who have failed at reconsideration and by far the most common reason is that not enough kinds of links were deemed necessary to be removed.
-Next, it is not enough to just disavow. You've got to show that you've really tried to get the links removed. What I do is contact the webmaster via any available contact info I can find on the site, the whois contact and also contact forms. I show evidence by including a copy of the text of each email sent and screenshots of each contact form. Some may say that this is overkill. Perhaps this degree of work does not need to be done, but in my opinion it shows that I have REALLY tried to get links removed.
I hope that helps. The process is so darn time consuming.
-
From the comment "show more efforts", I'd say you'll want to show not just more success at removing links, but how many times you contacted each webmaster and how.
I've had experiences with a couple of clients where the kinds of links that kept getting pointed out by the Google spam team tended to be article marketing examples, where the pages linking to my client's site were not in the WMT links, not in OSE, etc.....far too weak. So you're not alone there.
I would advise looking at all the examples you can find of any article marketing that was done for your site, then try to find all related pages...i.e., don't JUST try to remove the examples they pointed out. In other words, if you find there's someone named "Andy Smith" authoring some of the article marketing posts they've pointed out, then do a Google search for "Andy Smith" and your brand name to try to find any other article this person wrote for you. In my case, I was able to find quite a collection of pages in the Google Index (not even supplemental...the regular index!) that weren't in the WMT links nor in OSE etc. Also, take a big block of text from the start of each article and search for that in double-quotes, to see if it was posted elsewhere under a different name.
Then, chase these down, try and get them taken down, ping the webmaster 3-4x each, then disavow them and submit your reinclusion request.
-
This is interesting, thanks for posting it. The more cases like these we as an SEO community hear about the more we learn on how to approach and deal with them.
At the moment I don't have any advice but I have a question -
Can you expand on the part where you "showed that everything you could do was done?" As in, did you take screenshots, list domains, post email text, spreadsheets, etc...? I'm wondering what exactly you gave Google in your reconsideration packet that they were simply not satisfied with.
Thanks and sorry to hear about all of this stress. It's not fun, I know.
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
-
How does Google treat significant content changes to web pages and how should I flag them as such?
I have several pages (~30) that I have plans to overhaul. The URLs will be identical and the theme of the content will be the same (still talking about the same widgets, using the same language) but I will be adding a lot more useful information for users, specifically including things that I think will help with my fairly high bounce rate on these pages. I believe the changes will be significant enough for Google to notice, I was wondering if it goes "this is basically a new page now, I will treat it as such and rank accordingly" or does it go "well this content was rubbish last time I checked so it is probably still not great". My second question is, is there a way I can get Google to specifically crawl a page it already knows about with fresh eyes? I know in the Search Console I can ask Google to index new pages, and I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index. Some background The reason I'm doing this is because I noticed when these pages first ranked, they did very well (almost all first / second page for the terms I wanted). After about two weeks I've noticed them sliding down. It doesn't look like the competition is getting any better so my running theory is they ranked well to begin with because they are well linked internally and the content is good/relevant and one of the main things negatively impacting me (that google couldn't know at the time) is bounce rate.
Search Behavior | | tosbourn0 -
Google search operator "site:" show different result.
Search operator "site:" show incomplete information. When I search with just domain name it show only 3 link that got crawl in past week, this is the link https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=mLr3VfrhN4_BuATQuYugBg&gws_rd=cr&fg=1#q=site:sierralivingconcepts.com&safe=off&tbs=qdr: but when i look a specific link it show them in any time (search tools), https://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.sierralivingconcepts.com/p-6300-white-silver-regence-louis-xiv-mango-wood-ornate-hall-console-table.aspx&safe=off&biw=1600&bih=775&noj=1&tbas=0&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0CBUQpwVqFQoTCJ-4iOLK-McCFQFwjgod43gI9A But when i look in cached page it says "appeared on 11 Sep 2015" I am total confused why google not showing all the new link that it crawl from my site.
Search Behavior | | Sierra-Living-Concepts0 -
Search Analytics update in Google Webmasters Tools? Where can we find search queries bringing traffic to website?
I just got up and see Search Analytic's being updated today totally. Their is no option to see old reports. As Search Analytics only share 999 keywords.
Search Behavior | | csfarnsworth
Whats next now?
How can a webmaster finds all search queries bringing traffic to his website?
Any paid or free tool?
Google Analytic's > Acquisition > Search engine optimization > search queries will this area helps? Whole question revolves around. Any good tool that will help you find all the queries bringing traffic to my website?0 -
My website disappears off google!
So this might be kinda of a weird question... Every morning and night I check the ranking of a website that I am building.. The ranking has gone up a lot the last two months. It went from the fifth page to now the second page. I have a issue where some days I check Google my website is completely gone! I go through every page for my keyword and it's not there! After a couple of days of frustration I check again and all of a sudden it is there but now at a higher ranking... I went through the code to make sure there's a not a not follow code in the robots.txt page... Btw another weird thing is so then I look up my website on a google out of country like google.sg and I'm ranking first page like number 5 but again disappeared off google usa. Literally driving my crazy.. does anyone know why this could be? Btw the first time it disappeared I went into webmasters and sent a request because I thought I got penalized but they responded they could not find any spam and I was NOT penalized...
Search Behavior | | BecCan0 -
Why do all traffic curves show a "saw tooth" pattern in Google Analytics
Greetings Mozzers This sounds like a dumb question, but it's bothering me just the same and I would like to think what the fine community of SEO experts at MOZ thinks I have taken a look at the traffic curve for about 20 different sites in very different industries (home improvement, wedding party supplies, pet feeding systems) and it seems to me that they all show a saw tooth pattern, more or less like the one below.
Search Behavior | | Masoko-T0 -
Massive Google Drop on two sites!
Hi All, We have experienced a massive Google drop on Two of our eCommerce websites in the past week. From Feb - July we were ranked 2 for various key words In Aug we dropped to 8 In September to 96 if not lower. We pay for monthly link building and add unique product info each week (but not much new content such as articles or blogs). My SEO guys has not been that helpful and just sent me a link to the Panda update blog, which doesn't mean a great deal to me. Obviously this has had a massive effect on business, and ideally i need to diagnose the problem and find a new startegy on moving forward, so most likely looking for a for a new SEO guy/company as well. I need someone is proactive, communicates well and make constant suggestions about moving forward not just link building. One thing I would like to add is these two site have a different homepage, category and range structure, but do share some if the 2000 product database. Can anyone help? Any advice on sorting this would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks M
Search Behavior | | etsgroup0 -
Google Places rankings go away, but organic rankings stay the same / get better?
Hello, I hope you all can help me out here with the information I could provide. Anyways, the past number of months I have had 1 of our clients rank extremely high organically and on Google places. For example: My client is a law firm so if you search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” they would come up organically on the first page and if you were in that town and search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” or even just “Attorney” they would also come up in the Google Places list. Now for some reason starting a week ago I noticed they have completely disappeared from Google Places. No changes have been done to their site and everything is the same as it was. Their organic searches are the same if not better than before. Do you guys have any clue as to why this happened and how I could possibly turn this around? Thanks for your help in advance!
Search Behavior | | WhiteHat120 -
Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Hi,
Search Behavior | | ChrisHolgate
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised. There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back: "Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team" I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks. The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start. We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation. I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me. Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out! Thanks in advance. Kind regards Chris0