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
-
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
When should we use Remove URLs feature on Google Webmasters Tool?
Hi there, I run an ecommerce website on Magento. We are no longer using a category. It actually does not appear on the menu: mydomain.com/category.html If this is the case, do you recommend to remove it through the Removal URL feature on GWT? I don't want this to affect the juice of other links of the site such as: mydomain.com/product.html Thanks very much. Regards
Technical SEO | | footd0 -
Reconsideration Request a Success!
Hi all, Well I've finally gotten been able to get the penalty removed judging by this email: "Dear site owner or webmaster of xxx, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider xxx for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue. Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team" This was after a reconsideration request was sent prior to disavow tool being released. In addition I also applied a disavow of all the links I was unsuccessful in removingwithout contacting Google and letting the original reconsideration request run it's course. I am making this post just to let everyone know that the hard work pays off and Google is just trying to make sure you are doing your best in removing the links. As 'Ryan Kent' always emphasizes, you must really be diligent and honest when trying to remove links. You also need to keep documentation, I anchored contact pages and email addresses, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th attempt dates. Now with the disavow tool, I believe if you do a "good faith" in removing the links, and it is well documented, you can use the disavow tool after multiple attempts, correlating both the disavow links and the spreadsheet sent to Google is and should be very important in a reconsideration request. Good luck! Also I received the message from WMT, and wondering does anyone know how long is 'some time' before site is reindexed? So far our organic traffic is still about the same prior. So I would like to hear what other's experience are after a successful reconsideration. Feel free to ask any questions!
Technical SEO | | William.Lau3 -
Does Google monitor which links are actually followed?
If a link to my site is posted on another site and many people start following that link and they stay on my site for a while, and I also have GA set up, does Google factor that information back into the Google rankings? In other words, are there ways that Google tries to use clicks and bounce rates and other user behavior to determine page rank and domain rank? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher1 -
Will frequently adding and frequently removing pages from my site hinder any SEO?
Hi Guys, Just looking through our crawl diagnositcs and we have a ton errors, well over 5000 actually, on 404 pages that cannot be accessed. Our website runs a lot of "Hot Offers" that are time bound, so they expire at the end of each month and we remove the page via our CMS. It's making the crawl diagnositcs loook bad, but will this be hindering our seo and Google 'stuff' because they are finding thousands of 404 errors? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Website: www.vospers.com Lee Greenhill
Technical SEO | | lee_greenhill0 -
Why has Google removed meta descriptions from SERPS?
One of my clients' sites has just been redesigned with lots of new URLs added. So the 301 redirections have been put in place and most of the new URLs have now been indexed. BUT Google is still showing all the old URLs in the SERPS and even worse it only displays the title tag. The meta description is not shown, no rich snippet, no text, nothing below the title. This is proving disastrous as visitors are not clicking on a result with no description. I have to assume its got something to do with the redirection, but why is it not showing the descriptions? I've checked the old URLs and he meta description is definitely still in the code, but Google is choosing not to show it. I've never seen this before so I'm struggling for an answer. I'd like to know why or how this is happening, and if it can be resolved. I realise that this may be resolved when Google stops showing all the old URLs but there's no telling how long that will take (can it be speeded up?)
Technical SEO | | Websensejim0 -
Does Google care how you write internal links?
I am changing ecommerce platforms. For my internal linking on the old site there was a lot of old links written like this: http://www.domain.com/page-name But now i am writing links mostly like this: /page-name Will that make a difference to search engines? Is one easier than the other for them to interpret?
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0