Google Reconsideration Request (Penguin) - Will Google give links to remove?
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Can I redirect a link even if the link is still on the site
Hi Folks, I've got a client who has a duplicate content because they actually create duplicate content and store the same piece of content in 2 different places. When they generate this duplicate content, it creates a 2nd link on the site going to the duplicate content. Now they want the 2nd link to always redirect to the first link, but for architecture reasons, they can't remove the 2nd link from the site navigation. We can't use rel-canonical because they don't want visitors going to that 2nd page. Here is my question: Are there any adverse SEO implications to maintaining a link on a site that always redirects to a different page? I've already gone down the road of "don't deliberately create duplicate content" with the client. They've heard me, but won't change. So, what are your thoughts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rock330 -
Link removal from search rank checking sites
I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site. While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services? Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care? I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term). Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
If I switch my domain name, will I keep link juice from redirect?
I am moving one of my sites wellington-florida-homes.com to a new domain (wellingtonfloridahomes.com). Most of our link-juice is coming from another domain we purchased (theshockleyteam.com) that is redirected to our primary site. If I simply redirect theshockleyteam.com to our new domain (wellingtonfloridahomes.com) I will still have the link juice passing through, right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Would removing or making non relevant links no follow boost a site?
Hi, I have just been checking out the backlinks for a prospective new client. It appears they have a number of links that are totally irrelevant to their nature of business and I was wondering if they would improve in the rankings etc if I removed them or made them no follow instead? Or would I simply just be throwing away crucial link juice? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Benjamin3790 -
Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?
Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind. We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords. I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now. So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on. 1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long. Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter? 2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page. Here are the two pages: howtomaketutus.com/ howtomaketutus.com/?p=home They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that? 3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile? We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 123craft0 -
Link Detox
Hey guys, I'm currently working on cleaning up our link profile and have been looking at several tools. Has any one used this from http://www.linkresearchtools.com do you think its worth investing in? Matthew
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
If two links from one page link to another, how can I get the second link's anchor text to count?
I am working on an e-commerce site and on the category pages each of the product listings link to the product page twice. The first is an image link and then the second is the product name. I want to get the anchor text of the second link to count. If I no-follow the image link will that help at all? If not is there a way to do this?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0