What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
-
Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google. Sad times.
I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months. All 5000 of them! Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam. About 2800 of them were junk. As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content.
As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed. There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites. And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to! As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them.
I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines." As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done?
Cheers
Steve
-
Tom has given you good advice. I'll put in my 2 cents' worth as well.
There are 3 main reasons for a site to fail at reconsideration:
1. Not enough links were assessed by the site owner to be unnatural.
2. Not enough effort was put into removing links and documenting that to Google.
3. Improper use of the disavow tool.
In most cases #1 is the main cause. Almost every time I do a reconsideration request my client is surprised at what kind of links are considered unnatural. From what I have seen, Google is usually pretty good at figuring out whether you have been manually trying to manipulate the SERPS or whether links are just spam bot type of links.
Here are a few things to consider:
Are you being COMPLETELY honest with yourself about the spammy links you are seeing? How did Russian and porn sites end up linking to you? Most sites don't just get those by accident. Sometimes this can happen when sites use linkbuilding companies that use automated methods to build links. Even still, do all you can to address those links, and then for the ones that you can't get removed, document your efforts, show Google and then disavow them.
Even if these are foreign language sites, many of them will have whois emails that you can contact.
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure that your good links are truly natural? Just because they are from news sources is not a good enough reason. Have you read all the interflora stuff recently? They had a pile of links from advertorials (amongst other things) that now need to be cleaned up.
-
Hi Steve
If Google is saying there are still a few more links, then it might be an idea to manually review a few others that you haven't disavowed. I find the LinkDetox tool very useful for this. It's free with a tweet and will tell you if a link from a site is toxic (the site is deindexed) or if it's suspicious (and why it's suspicious). You still need to use your own judgement on these, but it might help you to find the extra links you're talking about.
However, there is a chance you have gone and disavowed every bad link, but still got the rejection. In this case, I'd keep trying but make your reconsideration request more detailed. Create an excel sheet and list the bad URLs and/or domains and give a reason explaining why you think they're bad links. Then provide information on how you found their contact details. If there are no contact us pages, check the whois registrar's email. After that, say when you contacted them (give a sample of your letter to them too), and if they replied, along with a follow up date if you got silence. If there are no details in the whois, explicitly mention that there are no contact details and so you have proceeded straight to disavowing.
Then list the URLs you've disavowed (upload the .txt file with your reconsideration email). You've now told Google that you've found bad links, why you think their bad (also include how you discovered them), that you've contacted the webmaster on numerous occasions and, if no removal was made, you've disavowed as a last resort. This is a very thorough process and uses the disavow tool in the way that Google wants us to - as a last resort to an unresponsive or anonymous webmaster.
Please forgive me if you've already done all this and it seems like repetition. I only mention it because I've found it's best to be as thorough as possible with Google in these situations. Remember, a reconsideration request is manual and if they see that you've gone through all this effort to be reinstated, you've got a better chance of being approved.
Keep trying, mate. It can be disheartening, but if you think it's worth the time and effort, then keep going for it. I would bear in mind the alternatives, however, such as starting fresh on a new domain. If you find yourself going round the bend with endless reconsiderations, sometimes your time, effort and expertise can be better put elsewhere.
All the best!
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
-
Can I canonical the same page?
I have a site where I have 500+ Page listing pages and I would like to rel=canonical them to the master page. Example: http://www.example.com//articles?p=18 OR http://www.example.com/articles?p=65 I plan on adding this to the section from of the page template so it goes to all pages - When I do this, I will also add the canonical to the page I am directing the canonical. Is this a bad thing? Or allowed?
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Can Not Save the SEO Settings on Attachement/Media Page
I am trying to save SEO settings to a wordpress gallery attachment page for a picture. When I fill up all info and hit save all the writing disappear from from the form. Is it a software bug or there is a solution for it??
Technical SEO | | ExpertSolutions0 -
Duplicate Page Content error but I can't see it
Hi All We're getting a lot of Duplicate Page Content errors but I can't match it up. For example this page: http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/32-antique-cottage It is saying the on page properties as follows: Title DayTripFinder - Things to do reviewed by you - 7,000 attractions <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Meta Description</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Read Reviews, Browse Opening Hours and Prices. View Photos, Maps. 7,000 UK Visitor Attractions.</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">But this isn't the page title or meta description.
Technical SEO | | KateWaite85
</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">And it's showing five (many others) example pages that share it. Again the page titles and description are different.</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/mckinlay-theatre</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/bakers-dolphin</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/shipley-park-fishing</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/king-johns-lodge-and-gardens</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/city-hall
</dt> Any ideas? Not sure if I'm missing something here! Thanks!0 -
How can i improve alexa rank of my website
www.meetuniversities.com Meet Universities - Get connected to your dream university
Technical SEO | | debal0 -
How can you manually diagnose the canonical problem
Good Monrning from snow dusted minus 3 degrees C Wetherby UK... Is there a quick way to diagnose wether or not a website has a canonical problem or not? So far Ive been doing this for example: Typing a full web address then one without the w's and seeing if a 301 redirect has been set up. But I'm not confident this is the best way to diagnose if there is a canonical problem with a site. I would like to ad that I want to see if a canonical problem exists with any site and webmanster tools is not available. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing1 -
How can i get google adsense to work properly to earn income
Hi i am trying to get google adsense to work properly but i am not winning. What i am trying to do is, to get the adverts to reflect on the content. So for example this page here http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/mark-feehily/westlife-mark-feehily-announces-split-from-long-term-boyfriend I would like google adsense to have celebrity adverts such as celebrity news sites, celebrity fashion, concert tickets etc. I want the adverts to be related to celebrity but it is not happening. Can anyone please let me know how to do this and also if i have the google adsense in the right place as since rebuilding the site we have not earned anything with google adsense many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How can affect the website redesign to my ranking position in Search Engines?
Hi, I have a few questions for you: I’ll will update my booking system and my website design. Now, I'm ranked in number one position with the keyword HOTELES EN CHIAPAS. In fact, several urls of my webiste appear in the search engines. Internal URLs like this: www.hotelesenchiapas.com.mx/obmp30/hotel/villa_mercedes_palenque/1/es/ My question is: I need to conserve this link structure or may i change it for something more friendly like this: www.hotelesenchiapas.com.mx/Palenque/Hoteles/Villa-mercedes-palenque/ And how affect this change to my rank position ?
Technical SEO | | hotelesenchiapas0