Ambiguous Response to Google Reconsideration Request
-
Hello,
On 9/11/12, we submitted a reconsideration request to Google for http://macpokeronline.com, at the time we received penalties from both penguin and manual removal. We have since worked on cleaning up our link profile, and got this response from Google:
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.macpokeronline.com/.
We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
I honestly don't even know how to take this, we always showed up #1 while doing a site search, so it is kind of irrelevant to us in this case.
Is this the reply of them accepting our request?
Thanks
Zach
-
For those wondering, Matt Cutts answers the question in this video; It basically means that your site is is a grey zone. Not completely clean nor completely useless. Unfortunately for http://macpokeronline.com, it seems that the issues are not that easy to resolve.http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/organic?url=MacPokerOnline.com&cc=US
-
We received exactly the same response following a recent reconsideration request after several failed attempts where they reiterated that we still had bad links. We continued removing questionable links over the following six weeks while I waited to see if they would follow it up with something a little more enlighten but unfortunately nothing was forthcoming.
As such I submitted another reconsideration request asking if they could possibly elaborate slightly and after just two days received exactly the same response again. As such I’m still a little puzzled.
-
You are correct, that's why I'm doing a huge linkbuilding campaign focusing on .edu TLDs. The .edus should help us recover from what we were losing before, especially since they are high quality domains, with a high DA.
-
Don't forget because you removed those links, those links that could have been helping you were the same ones you were being penalized for.
Thus if you remove those, you will not have as many links.
-
Irving,
Thank you for your response. I understand what your saying. MacPokerOnline.com isn't an online betting site, it's simply a site where users can get reviews and discount codes for online casinos, but specializing with Poker on the mac OS.
Please be aware that when you search google (in an incognito window) for "mac poker" (broad match), that our site is #1 there, with Google Authorship. We never lost rankings on our main pages, it is just for longtail phrases.
Just thought I'd let you guys know this.
-
This is a good sign because you didn't get the email that says they found it is still in violation. But it doesn't mean your site will automatically bounce back by any means it means they are considering it. Given that it's a online betting site and that sites like that are illegal in the US you're fighting an uphill battle.
Keep tracking your rankings and see if they are coming back. Keep looking at backlinks and on page areas of improvement. Make a new reconsideration request every two weeks stating specific areas of improvement that you have made showing very specific examples.
-
I'm laughing at some of the responses.
My suggestion is just send off another reconsideration request. And under explanation, tell them you were unsure what they previous reconsideration reply mean't. I'm sure that should work out and couldn't hurt.
Its not like they would say, hey we are indexing your site again but for the smart--- reply we will deindex your site or vice versa.
-
Hmm, it's a tough one, but it seems like they are saying you have no further problems else, they would certainly state that the site was still in violation.
The standard type of message you see if they still detect problems is more like this:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.site.com/,We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.site.com/ 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."
Now, your message does not have that, but it is still very strangely worded so I would imagine you still have some kind of problems.
What I am seeing with a few clients I have picked up is a cluster of problems. So, they may have a manual penalty, then some penguin issues and some panda issues on top of that.
Additionally, whilst your manual penalty may have been lifted, you could still have a period where you will remain penalised in my experience but that penalty should, at some point, timeout.
But... depending on when you picked up this manual penalty, who knows what other penalties you have picked up in the meanwhile (panda / penguin etc).
Ultimately, it's impossible to give a generic answer here. You need to review the site attempt to identify any remaining algorithmic penalties which there are some fairly good guides available to do that now.
Here are some links that may help:
General content improvement
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
**Anchor text ratios **
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/
Penguin
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/ - complicated
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/ - a little simpler
Panda
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/beating-the-panda-diagnosing-and-rescuing-a-clients-traffic/
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/google-panda-problems-and-solutions/
I have had a quick dig in the link profile and it seems you have cleaned up a lot of what is reported in Open Site Explorer so maybe it is just a case of waiting things out a little longer and seeing if a Penguin refresh sorts things out a bit. It's hard to get a real guage of your link profile, anchor text, relevance of linking sites etc based on the current data returned by open site explorer but some general rules that are coming out of the research done by several sites (the microsites and anchor text articles above make for a good read)
- Have at least 50% of your links from topically relevant sites
- keep keyword anchors below 30%
- branded URL anchors should make up about 70% of your link profile
- Ensure that at least two of the top five anchors are branded (really, post penalty, aim for three +)
When you have got to those kind of conservative levels with your link profile then you can be a little more happy that you are going to be able to bounce back but again, it may take time.
It is a frustrating situation and any 'attempt' at sorting this out should be given 110% else you are really going to struggle. I am not really sure what another agency could do to help you at this point other than more of what you are doing and maybe a solid on site review but you are probably in the position where you just have to wait and see (however frustrating that may be).
Let me know how you get on!
Marcus
-
What if we were to increase the amount of "good/great" links that we having coming to the site? Wouldn't that assist in creating a more "natural" link profile?
-
You should focus on removing those nasty backlinks from the blog networks... or at least provide a list of them in your reconsideration request with appropriate explanation. Usually it would take around 1-2 years for these backlinks to evaporate by themselves, why? because there is no reason whatsoever to renew those de-indexed domains & also cover the hosting costs.
-
Okay. I'll see what I can do with that. We can't to PPC since were promoting gambling unfortunately. Maybe well wait it out a few weeks to see what happens. Our site isn't deindexed and we have seen an increase in traffic the past few weeks of 5-15% week over week. I think this is penguin penalties getting lifted as google detects more links we've removed.
-
Find someone who can make Google look bad in public for deindexing your site. That always seems to work.
All jokes aside, I'd just wait it out. See what Google says and go from there. Perhaps invest in Adwords for a while and then beg your account manager to look at your reconsideration request again.
-
I'm actually working in house for the owner of this website, a larger marketing firm screwed him over from a Penguin and link perspective. I live in Philadelphia and know some employees from Seer, do you think I should ask them if this would be something Seer could take on?
-
I don't know what you should do.
If this was my site I would either find a pro who knows how to redeem sin.... start working on sites in a different niche.... or.... go to Vegas and get a job as a dealer.
-
So what should I do now?
-
"We've now reviewed your site."
They are being weasels. They are saying "wait and see if we have forgiven you".
I think you are screwed.
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
-
Google not show results for my domain as keyword
Hello seomoz! The problem My issue is that from around 28-7-2014 when i search on google "domain.com" it doesn`t return any webpages of my website. What is working as it should I get results for the homepage if i search any other keywords. For example if i search "site:domain.com" i get many results including the homepage. Other helpful information On Google webmaster tools i didn`t receive any message regarding this, or a penalty.
Technical SEO | | vatraxos
Also at manual actions there is nothing. The traffic coming from google didn`t dropped. Actually the last weeks i have an increase on visits Any idea what could be wrong ? Any solution for this? Thanks a lot for your time!0 -
Google Indexing - what did I missed??
Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!
Technical SEO | | Yunhee.Choi0 -
When to re-submit for reconsideration?
Hi! We received a manual penalty notice. We had an SEO company a couple of years ago build some links for us on blogs. Currently we have only about 95 of these links which are pretty easily identifiable by the anchor text used and the blogs or directories they originate from. So far, we have seen about 35 of those removed and have made 2 contacts to each one via removeem.com. So, how many contacts do you think need to be made before submitting a reconsideration request? Is 2 enough? Also, should we use the disavow tool on these remaining 65 links? Every one of the remaining links is from either a filipino blog page or a random article directory. Finally, do you think we are still getting juice from these links? i.e. if we do remove or disavow these anchor text links are we actually going to see a negative impact? Thanks for your help and answers!! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Google plus
" With a single Google search, you can see regular search results, along with all sorts of results that are tailored to you -- pages shared with you by your friends, Google+ posts from people you know" Would i be able to see my own post which i shared with someone in my Google plus circle, when i do a search ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Mobile Google Not Indexing Mobile Website
Google currently does not index our mobile website. It has the WWW website in it's index. When a user from a mobile phone clicks on a mobile search result for WWW we redirect them to our mobile website. This is posing problems for us as our mobile website is a fraction of the # of pages/sections as our WWW. So for example, mobile search results show that we have a "careers" section; but that's not the case for the mobile website. As a result a user gets a 404. How do we force mobile Google to index our mobile website instead of our WWW?
Technical SEO | | RBA0 -
Frustration With Google Places
I have been trying to solve this problem with Google Places for quite some time now and just can't figure out where to go from here. I've tried several sent messages explaining the problem and even received several phone calls from Google Places trying to correct the issue with no luck. I have even tried totally deleting the listing and started over from scratch and re-verified the address with a mailed postcard. My site: http://www.captainrichsmith.com has a Google Places account set up and verified http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&georestrict=input_srcid:1c8fa43cf77e0c93&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=14&vpsrc=0 For some reason when you do a Google search for one of my keywords Miami Fishing Charters On the listings normally under the letter "E" on the Map another website has a placemark at my location Miami Fishing Charters Directory
Technical SEO | | captainrichsmith
www.fishing-charters-miami.com/ - Cached Fishing Charters Miami is a quality directory of the best fishing boats in the Miami area. The top Miami fishing charters are listed on this website.
2550 South Bayshore Drive, Miami
(786) 263-9231
captainrichsmith.com (7) When you view this Google places listing further. I see it is using my images, videos, placemark on map but NOT the address, phone number, or reviews. Any help on this issue would greatly be appreciated0 -
How to show ratings on Google?
One thing I have noticed recently is "review ratings" appearing in the Google search results. I have attached a screenshot which shows an example of this. I think this is a really good feature and helps make a listing stand out in the SERPs, I would certainly be more likely to click this one. My question is how do you code for it so that Google will display it? The URL of the page in question is http://www.footy-boots.com/inter-milan-away-shirt-2011-2012-9430/ 4nXyk
Technical SEO | | ukss19840 -
Blocking Google from Crawling Parameters
Hi guys: What is the best way to keep Google from crawling certain urls with parameters? I used the setting in Webmaster Tools, but that doesn't seem to be helping at all. Can I use robots.txt or some other method? Thanks! Some examples are: <colgroup><col width="797"></colgroup> www.mayer-johnson.com/category/assistive-technology?manufacturer=179 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/assistive-technology?manufacturer=226 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/assistive-technology?manufacturer=227 <colgroup><col width="797"></colgroup> www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?condition=212 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?condition=213 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?condition=214 <colgroup><col width="797"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | DanaDV
| www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?roles=164 |
| www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?roles=165 |
| www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?roles=197 | | |0