Help Identifying Unnatural Links

[LeeFella]

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

[ShaMenz]

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

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[CandymanKen]

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

[DennisSeymour]

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

[SEOAndy]

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