Help Identifying Unnatural Links
-
http://bit.ly/XT8yYYHi,Any help with the below will be most appreciated.We received an unnatural links warning in Webmaster Tools and noticed a large drop in our rankings. We downloaded and carried out a full link audit (3639 links) and logged in an excel spreadsheet with the following status: OK, Have Contacted, Can't Contact, Not SureWe have had some success but the majority of the ones we identified are not contactable.We use the dis-avow tool to tell Google of these. We then submitted a reconsideration request where we explained to Google our efforts and that we can supply them with our audit if necessary by email as you can't upload any evidence.A few days later we received a response suggesting that we still have unnatural links. We are a little stuck as we don't know what they can be:1. Is Google actually looking at our dis-avowed links before making this judgement?2. We have missed something that Google is considering bad but we can't see in our audit?Again we need a little help as we are trying to sort this out but can't see what we are falling down on.I can provide our spreadsheet if necessary.Many ThanksLee
-
Hi Lee,
Some good information here from Marie.
You might find it this Reconsideration Request Checklist helpful too: http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
It sounds like you are doing the right things. I have a few thoughts.
You mentioned that you can't show evidence of emails. You definitely can. What I do is make copies of my emails (original source - with the email headers to show proof of being sent and received) and put them in a Google doc. You can reference the Google doc in your reconsideration request and the webspam team will view it.
The majority of the time though when you fail at reconsideration it is because you have not identified enough links as being unnatural. A brief look at your backlink profile shows me a number of directory links. I have worked with some sites that had unnatural link penalties because of an excess of directory links....especially if you have used anchor text containing your keywords.
Unfortunately in the few minutes I spent looking at your backlink profile I am not seeing many natural links at all. A natural link is one that is earned and not self made. This may be a case where you need to try to get all of your links removed in order to get the penalty off of your site.
-
My experience is similar to Dennis described, it may take another request.
When I got the letter, I went and contacted some of the hosts that had the unnatural links to our site and got some taken off. I sent in my reconsideration request and was denied as you were.
I got a few more removed and tried again, this time very explicitly telling Google that I had tried to get the remaining ones removed (with examples) but they were beyond my control and that I had disavowed them That time it worked and the manual penalty was removed.
Hope this helps.
Ken
-
here's from my personal experience since you already used the disavow tool
Try to explain what you did, why it's bad and why it's not going to happen again
Tell them that you made a mistake, and that you added more links to the disavow tool (include even clean looking web 2.0 properties and article directories. Basically, once you use the disavow tool, you have to have a mindset that you are starting over, treat it like you are starting over with a new site.
You dont usually get it in the first try.
On your second try: maybe
On your third: very likely
I've done a lot of cleanups the past year so that's my take
-
something I recall (though could be wrong) from the disavow frenzy is that it can take a long time for those pages to be discounted - mainly is they only get picked up the next time a page is indexed I think. Hope that helps
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
-
Need help with Robots.txt
An eCommerce site built with Modx CMS. I found lots of auto generated duplicate page issue on that site. Now I need to disallow some pages from that category. Here is the actual product page url looks like
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nahid
product_listing.php?cat=6857 And here is the auto generated url structure
product_listing.php?cat=6857&cPath=dropship&size=19 Can any one suggest how to disallow this specific category through robots.txt. I am not so familiar with Modx and this kind of link structure. Your help will be appreciated. Thanks1 -
Links not removed
Hello, I want some help regarding Bad links, I have Uploaded Disavow links, webmaster tools before 4-5 months But still, They are showing in Back links to my Site & Not disavow, can any one Help For this ? why they still appears in backlinks to my site, Why not removed Still ? Thanx in Advance, Falguni
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sanjayth0 -
Research on building links to a website
Hi building a brand new site with no domain authority. I have created all the content and now want to start building links to the website. Mostly through guest posting, niche directories, broken link building and other whitehat methods. Anyway i was wondering if anyone has seen any good research on the way you should link to a brand new website or any site for that matter. Like in terms of % you should focus at the homepage, inner pages, anchor distribution, internal link structure, etc. A good start would be looking at successful competitors, but i wanted to see if anyone knows any studies on this. My goal is to build a link profile which meets the standards of Google and that lasts! Thanks, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0080 -
'Nofollow' footer links from another site, are they 'bad' links?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
one of my sites has about 1000 'nofollow' links from the footer of another of my sites. Are these in any way hurtful? Any help appreciated..0 -
How do I find the links on my site that link to another one of my pages?
I ran IIS Seo toolkit and it found about 40 pages that I have no idea how they exist. What tool can I use to find out what internal link is linking to them so I can fix them or get rid of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Real impact of canonical links?
I am responsible for 2 e-commerce websites. SEO Moz and Google Web Master tools both inform me regularly that on both sites there are many instances of duplicate titles, headings, decriptions and page content. Obviously from an SEO point of view I am more than a little concerned about this! Out product pages struggle to perform strongly despite the fact that our website is of a decent quality and we are leaders in our field. Our competitors rank above us when they add a product page, whereas we normal flit in between 8-10 or on the 2nd SERP. I know it is hard without viewing the site, but is duplicate content likely to be a strong, leading factor in this? I think it is, but want to put together a business case to spend the cash to sort it out....just need someone confirmation that this is worth sorting as a priority. Here are 2 examples of what I mean: 1) Category pages www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx We have filters on our category page (so the customer can sort products based on their price, colour, size etc.). When filters are used a new URL is generared. www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=0||10 www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=10||20 The content, titles, description is the same although the links are different. Do I need to set up a canonical tag on the page that reads: 2) Product pages Product pages on the websites have different URLs depending on how to arrive on them. You get 1 URL if you navigated to the page via the website navigation, but you get another different URL if you used the website search functionality to find the page. Example: Search link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1/Product1.aspx Navigation link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/12345/category1/Product1.aspx Again, do I need to set up a canonical tag for 1 of these link types so that the link benefit is not shared over 2 pages? Any feedback would be welcome! At the moment the ability to add canonical tags is locked down by our CMS (I know, rubbish!)...so website development would be needed - hence the need for a business case!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Do comment links on blogs help the blog itself rank?
Hi I have a blog - Carzilla.co.uk - and it keeps getting what are pretty obviously spam comments with links to unconnected websites of various quality. The blog is quite new and not ranking highly in SERPs for anything in particular yet. So my question is, is it better to let some of these comments through so google can see activity on the site? Or do spammy comments with links make the site look like a link farm? Any advice on what my policy should be - purely from a Google serps perspective - would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Adding Links Under Embedded Videos?
What's the current opinion of adding do-follow links under video embed codes? Like what Vimeo does. Is this allowed, or does Google/Matt Cutts suggest always no-following these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DojoGuy0