Manual Penalty Reconsideration Request Help
-
Hi All,
I'm currently in the process of creating a reconsideration request for an 'Impact Links' manual penalty.
So far I have downloaded all LIVE backlinks from multiple sources and audited them into groups;
-
Domains that I'm keeping (good quality, natural links).
-
Domains that I'm changing to No Follow (relevant good quality links that are good for the user but may be affiliated with my company, therefore changing the links to no follow rather than removing).
-
Domains that I'm getting rid of. (poor quality sites with optimised anchor text, directories, articles sites etc.).
One of my next steps is to review every historical back link to my website that is NO LONGER LIVE. To be thorough, I have planned to go through every domain (even if its no longer linking to my site) that has previously linked and straight up disavow the domain (if its poor quality).But I want to first check whether this is completely necessary for a successful reconsideration request?
My concerns are that its extremely time consuming (as I'm going through the domains to avoid disavowing a good quality domain that might link back to me in future and also because the historical list is the largest list of them all!) and there is also some risk involved as some good domains might get caught in the disavowing crossfire, therefore I only really want to carry this out if its completely necessary for the success of the reconsideration request. Obviously I understand that reconsideration requests are meant to be time consuming as I'm repenting against previous SEO sin (and believe me I've already spent weeks getting to the stage I'm at right now)... But as an in house Digital Marketer with many other digital avenues to look after for my company too, I can't justify spending such a long time on something if its not 100% necessary.
So overall - with a manual penalty request, would you bother sifting through domains that either don't exist anymore or no longer link to your site and disavow them for a thorough reconsideration request? Is this a necessary requirement to revoke the penalty or is Google only interested in links that are currently or recently live?
All responses, thoughts and ideas are appreciated
Kind Regards
Sam
-
-
Thanks again for your response Gary.
With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not.
In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so.
So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains.
The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably).
So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming.
Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this?
Sam
-
Thanks for your response Richard.
This is however an extremely generic response to quite a specific question. I didn't ask what a reconsideration request does!
-
So sorry for the delay getting back to you, its been a crazy week and didnt notice the response.
"Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes."
OK, just to let you know, once they lift the manual penalty, you still need to wait for a Penguin refresh. my penalty was lifted in May 2013 the vast majority of crap links had not been crawled and took a very long time for Google to do so. For the disavow file to take effect it needs to crawl each of those pages with your disavow file in mind and change them to a nofollow. Once a healthy amount is crawled you will then be in good standing when the Penguin algo is run. If Penguin runs before you have an acceptable level of healthiness you will not be released form Penguin and will have to wait for the next. So it took us until Oct 17th 2014 for us to finally get released. This was WITH John Muellers help!
My advice is don't be too picky with what you keep. Go through everything, mine was 20,000 Referring domains with 250k links! We had a 10 year history of business online and at one point also attacked with negative seo. So was a big job
"Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch."
Yes, create a report to show the work you have done, whats removed, who you have contacted, who did not respond. I did an Excel spreadsheet, one domain per line, with a few fields like, last contacted, date, removed etc..
There are lots of programmes out there that help with this now. Not so easy when your the first and there are no tools for it!
Also its best to do domain instead of links, how many links do you have pointing to your site?
-
A good reconsideration request does three things:
- Explains the exact quality issue on your site.
- Describes the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue.
- Documents the outcome of your efforts.
-
Actually, I agree with you. What you're describing are sites that look like the link has been deleted, but where the link actually still exists. My answer was regarding sites where the link actually has been deleted and doesn't exist.
-
Thanks for your response Gary.
That does make sense and to be honest is something that worries me! I am putting faith into software here (ie. I haven't gone through every single domain manually and checked that the link is still live) which is telling me whether the link is still live or not. If Google's software tells them otherwise when they review my reconsideration request, then all my other efforts are most likely wasted. I take it from this that you would advise addressing the none active domains too?
Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes.
Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch.
cheers
Sam
-
Sorry I have to disagree,
There are many sites, specifically directory sites that list websites and as more sites get listed they push your link to page 3, 4, 5. It looks like the link does not exist but it does on another page.
Some sites are that are crappy also have poor connections/bandwidth etc... So they go up and down and overload all the time. Just because its down now does not mean its down later when Google crawls it.
When I did my now famous! link clean up these were both issues that came up when I got help from John Mueller at Google.
It sucks because its just a hell of a lot of work, but based on how long it takes for a penguin update to come about, I would make sure you get it right FIRST TIME or you could wait more than a year to see returns.
Feel free to ask me anything.
Best of luck
Gary
-
Yes, I would be very surprised if Google wanted you to do anything with links that no longer exist.
-
Thanks for your response, Adam.
Would you say the same for domains that are still live but no longer contain links to your site?
Thanks
-
No, I would not spend time on links/domains that no longer exist. (I've never heard of that being necessary.)
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
-
Looking for someone to help with a delisted site after a malicious hack
Hello, My website - www.musillawfirm.com was recently hacked and has been de-listed by google. It had some sort of a crypto mining script on it that I was able to remove. It shows up if you type in the domain but even a generic search for "musil law firm" does not show the site - it used to rank # 1 for that term and #1 or 2 for immigration lawyer in my local area. If anyone can assist me in getting it re-indexed please let me know and let me know how much it would cost. I tried getting it re-indexed through the search console, but no luck. Thank you kindly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | musillawfirm0 -
Site deindexed after HTTPS migration + possible penalty due to spammy links
Hi all, we've recently migrated a site from http to https and saw the majority of pages drop out of the index. https://www.relate.org.uk/ One of the most extreme deindexation problems I've ever seen, but there doesn't appear to be anything obvious on-page which is causing the issue. (Unless I've missed something - please tell me if I have!) I had initially discounted any off-page issues due to the lack of a manual action in SC, however after looking into their link profile I spotted 100 spammy porn .xyz sites all linking (see example image). Didn't appear to be any historic disavow files uploaded in the non https SC accounts. Any on-page suggestions, or just play the waiting game with the new disavow file? Hku8I
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTI_Digital0 -
Content question please help
Would content behind a drop down on this site Https://www.homeleisuredirect.com/pool_tables/english_pool_tables/ you have to click the - more about English pool tables text under the video Work just as well for SEO as content on the page like this site http://www.pooltablesonline.co.uk/uk-slate-bed-pool-tables.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Urgent Help - Ecommerce URL best practice for SEO
Guys i need some urgent help here as we need to get this sorted out soon. We have a page similar to wayfair shop the look: www.wayfair.com/Shop-The-Look/ What are the best practices for URL structure if we applies 2-3 filters? Is wayfair style good for SEO? FYI: We create our crawlable, link friendly AJAX website using pushstate() but unsure of the structure for this case. We followed http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
.com ranked where .co.uk site should After Manual Penalty Revoked - Help!!!
Hi All, I wondered if some could help me as I am at my wits end. Our website www.domain.co.uk was hit with a manual penalty back in April 26th 2012 for over optomizing our inbound links and after 9 reconciliation request later and over a year and many links removed the penalty was revoked. Yay I hear you cry! During the year .co.uk was banned we built .com yet did not build any links to it. The purpose of the .com site was to attract an American audience for our products. .com was hosted on a US server and Geo Targeting set to United States in WMT. So here is my problem after the ban was revoke we expected .co.uk to spring back to some reasonable positions. Nope that is not the case Google now is ranking our .com site where our .co.uk should be for powerdull keywords in position 1st to 10th .com has Zero link equity and .co.uk is very reasonable, So how can I rectify this balls ups and get co.uk listed back where it should be…. I am not bothered where .com ranks. Note: To the best of my knowledge there are NO cross domain 301 or the like only an image link between the two sites. I have posted this on WMT forum and it has fallen on deaf ears! ....help me MOZ members you’re my only hope! Thanks in advance Richard PS: If anyone would like the URL’s in question PM me and I will let you know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tricky-400 -
Our Robots.txt and Reconsideration Request Journey and Success
We have asked a few questions related to this process on Moz and wanted to give a breakdown of our journey as it will likely be helpful to others! A couple of months ago, we updated our robots.txt file with several pages that we did not want to be indexed. At the time, we weren't checking WMT as regularly as we should have been and in a few weeks, we found that apparently one of the robots.txt files we were blocking was a dynamic file that led to the blocking of over 950,000 of our pages according to webmaster tools. Which page was causing this is still a mystery, but we quickly removed all of the entries. From research, most people say that things normalize in a few weeks, so we waited. A few weeks passed and things did not normalize. We searched, we asked and the number of "blocked" pages in WMT which had increased at a rate of a few hundred thousand a week were decreasing at a rate of a thousand a week. At this rate it would be a year or more before the pages were unblocked. This did not change. Two months later and we were still at 840,000 pages blocked. We posted on the Google Webmaster Forum and one of the mods there said that it would just take a long time to normalize. Very frustrating indeed considering how quickly the pages had been blocked. We found a few places on the interwebs that suggested that if you have an issue/mistake with robots.txt that you can submit a reconsideration request. This seemed to be our only hope. So, we put together a detailed reconsideration request asking for help with our blocked pages issue. A few days later, to our horror, we did not get a message offering help with our robots.txt problem. Instead, we received a message saying that we had received a penalty for inbound links that violate Google's terms of use. Major backfire. We used an SEO company years ago that posted a hundred or so blog posts for us. To our knowledge, the links didn't even exist anymore. They did.... So, we signed up for an account with removeem.com. We quickly found many of the links posted by the SEO firm as they were easily recognizable via the anchor text. We began the process of using removem to contact the owners of the blogs. To our surprise, we got a number of removals right away! Others we had to contact another time and many did not respond at all. Those we could not find an email for, we tried posting comments on the blog. Once we felt we had removed as many as possible, we added the rest to a disavow list and uploaded it using the disavow tool in WMT. Then we waited... A few days later, we already had a response. DENIED. In our request, we specifically asked that if the request were to be denied that Google provide some example links. When they denied our request, they sent us an email and including a sample link. It was an interesting example. We actually already had this blog in removem. The issue in this case was, our version was a domain name, i.e. www.domainname.com and the version google had was a wordpress sub domain, i.e. www.subdomain.wordpress.com. So, we went back to the drawing board. This time we signed up for majestic SEO and tied it in with removem. That added a few more links. We also had records from the old SEO company we were able to go through and locate a number of new links. We repeated the previous process, contacting site owners and keeping track of our progress. We also went through the "sample links" in WMT as best as we could (we have a lot of them) to try to pinpoint any other potentials. We removed what we could and again, disavowed the rest. A few days later, we had a message in WMT. DENIED AGAIN! This time it was very discouraging as it just didn't seem there were any more links to remove. The difference this time, was that there was NOT an email from Google. Only a message in WMT. So, while we didn't know if we would receive a response, we responded to the original email asking for more example links, so we could better understand what the issue was. Several days passed we received an email back saying that THE PENALTY HAD BEEN LIFTED! This was of course very good news and it appeared that our email to Google was reviewed and received well. So, the final hurdle was the reason that we originally contacted Google. Our robots.txt issue. We did not receive any information from Google related to the robots.txt issue we originally filed the reconsideration request for. We didn't know if it had just been ignored, or if there was something that might be done about it. So, as a last ditch final effort, we responded to the email once again and requested help as we did the other times with the robots.txt issue. The weekend passed and on Monday we checked WMT again. The number of blocked pages had dropped over the weekend from 840,000 to 440,000! Success! We are still waiting and hoping that number will continue downward back to zero. So, some thoughts: 1. Was our site manually penalized from the beginning, yet without a message in WMT? Or, when we filed the reconsideration request, did the reviewer take a closer look at our site, see the old paid links and add the penalty at that time? If the latter is the case then... 2. Did our reconsideration request backfire? Or, was it ultimately for the best? 3. When asking for reconsideration, make your requests known? If you want example links, ask for them. It never hurts to ask! If you want to be connected with Google via email, ask to be! 4. If you receive an email from Google, don't be afraid to respond to it. I wouldn't over do this or spam them. Keep it to the bare minimum and don't pester them, but if you have something pertinent to say that you have not already said, then don't be afraid to ask. Hopefully our journey might help others who have similar issues and feel free to ask any further questions. Thanks for reading! TheCraig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCraig5 -
Could large number of "not selected" pages cause a penalty?
My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update). I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken". The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty. I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed. Could this have been what caused the error? (If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
I need help with htaccess redirect
Hi guys, we have the domain cheats.co.uk, it has always displayed as cheats.co.uk without the www. However it is now showing 2 version of the site, both the www. and the non www. version. I know how to add to the htaccess folder to get the non www. version going to the www. version but i am worried about doing this because the non www. version has always been the one indexed in Google and has a page rank of 3. Should i in fact be redirecting the www.version to the non www. version to keep page rank etc? or will page rank be passed over etc if i redirect to the www. version I hope thats clear Thanks guys Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imrubbish0