Google Reconsideration Request (Penguin) - Will Google give links to remove?

[crucialx]

When Penguin v1 hit, our site took a hit for a single phrase (i.e. "widgets") due to the techniques our SEO company was using (network). We've since had those links cleaned up, and our rankings have not recovered.

Our SEO company said they submitted a reconsideration request on our behalf, and that Google denied it and didn't provide which links we needed removed.

Does Google list links that need removing if they are still not happy with your link profile?

[crucialx]

I'm fairly certain we lost rankings/traffic a little while after the unnatural link warning come through. The warning came through 7/April and I believe we lost rankings later on in the month when Penguin hit. It's hard to tell because the drop in traffic was only a small amount - since it was only one keyword we got hit for.

Sounds like we'll need to try further cleaning up our back-link profile and see if there is anything else we can clean up and go for another reconsideration request?

[MarieHaynes]

I'm pretty sure you can have both an unnatural links warning and also be hit by Penguin for a particular keyword.

Did you lose traffic when you got your unnatural links warning?  There were some warnings that went out in July that really didn't mean anything.  Do you have a yellow caution sign next to the warning?  If not, and if you didn't lose traffic, then I wouldn't do anything about the warning.

But, if it's got a yellow caution sign and you lost traffic then yes, it needs to be addressed.

[firstconversion]

Hi Robert

Cheers for the answer here. I have heard of very few Penguin recovery stories! Did your traffic come back in one big jump or did it recover slowly? (and did it go back to previous levels?)

Cheers

Stephen

[crucialx]

Hi Marie,

Yes, prior to being hit by penguin we did receive an unnatural link warning from GWT.

So is the warning considered manual, or is it part of the penguin update? When penguin hit we lost rankings for a single phrase, but lost hardly any traffic when compared with the traffic the rest of the site gets.

If we got hit by the unnatural links notification, will a re-submission help?

[MarieHaynes]

Something's not adding up here.  Did you have a warning in your webmaster tools about unnatural links?

Filing a reconsideration request is not something you do unless you've had a manual warning in your webmaster tools.

There is no point in filing a reconsideration request if you've been affected by Penguin as Penguin is an algorithmic change.  Once you've cleaned up your link profile, you can only recover from Penguin once there has been a Penguin refresh.

To answer the other part of your question though...if you had had an unnatural links manual warning and you filed a reconsideration request....no, Google does not tell you which links need to be removed.

[RobertChapman]

Great advice from Stephen....

Speaking from experience, we had a reconsideration accepted....it took 4 re-submissions, get to work ASAP as it can take 2+ weeks per response.

To add to Stephen's advice, one thing we did....extract all linking domains...search each domain in Google Search, any domain that has very few or zero indexed pages is also a red flag. If Google don't index it, then they likely don't like it. I'd send a list of those links to google asking them to ignore them.

Look out for sitewide links with non Brand Term optimised anchor text.

Good luck.

[firstconversion]

Nope. Best thing to do is grab them yourself out of GWT, Open site explorer. Majestic seo and ahrefs and throw them all into excel

Then use SEO for Exzcel plugin to pull in Pagerank. Then go and remove all links with PR -1, 0 and maybe 1 and also any that look spammy or that have non bran anchor text

S