Do you have to wait after disavowing before submitting a reconsideration request

[ArenaFlowers.com]

Hi all

We have a link penalty at the moment it seems. I went through 40k links in various phases and have disavowed over a thousand domains that date back to old SEO work. I was barely able to have any links removed as the majority are on directories etc that no one looks after any more etc and / or which are spammy and scraped anyway.

According to link research tools link detox tool, we now have a very low risk profile (I loaded the disavowed links into the tool for it to take into consideration when assessing our profile). I then submitted a reconsideration request on the same day as loading the new disavowed file (on the 26th of April). However today (7th May) we got a message in webmaster central that says our link profile is still unnatural. Aaargh.

My question: is the disavow file taken into consideration when the reconsideration request is reviewed (ie is that information immediately available to the reviewer)? Or do we have to wait for the disavow file to flow through in the crawl stats? If so, how long do we have to wait?

I've checked a link that I disavowed last time and it's still showing up in the links that I pull down from Webmaster Central, and indeed links that I disavowed at the start of April are still showing up in the list of links that can be downloaded.

Any help gratefully received. I'm pulling my hair out here, trying to undo the dodgy work of a few random people many months ago!

Cheers,

Will

[firstconversion]

You seem to have a good handle on the issue but you might consider getting an experienced SEO in for at least a second opinion. We can only give very general help here on the Q&A, as we don't have access to your data

They do say to wait at least a few weeks for results

Cheers

S

[ArenaFlowers.com]

Hi Stephen

I've been using the links downloaded from Webmaster (as directed to by Matt Cutts in one of his videos IIRC) plus also the data set from Link Research Tools.  Is that insufficient? I've only got so many hours in the day as my day job is running this company...I figured taking the links that Google gave me would surely be enough...but these days who knows. G seems to want to make people jump through a lot of hoops...

[ArenaFlowers.com]

Hey Marcus

Thanks for your input. Yeah, we have a lot of links but then we've been around for 7 years and weirdo scrapers and random replicants of DMOZ alone contribute a zillion links without us even having done anything. Not saying we didn't do link building back in the day (we did, just like everyone else, in what was at the time a white hat fashion but apparently no longer is) but we have had no permanent marketing team at all for the last two years as we've focused on some B2B parts of our business. So frustrating that bad links just kept growing and we're supposed to be responsible for them!

Anyway, as you say, will need to go in a bit harder I guess. eg just because a site is PR0, I didn't remove it before, as some random person with a no marks blog who used our birthday balloon picture on their blog didn't deserve to be disavowed as far as I thought. But, well, I can't take any chances now so will just have to bin anything under PR1 and take another look at links from themed websites (eg should I disavow other blogs that have added us to their blogroll unsolicited even if they're in our vertical? It's hard to tell. What about genuine flower directories? Who knows?).

What's really frustrating is that the whole message from Matt Cutts is "you really shouldn't use this tool" (ref disavow) as you could damage your site but 1. barely anyone takes links down when requested as far as I can tell and 2. given the amount of junk that's been pointed at our site that we're not responsible for (though we are are responsible for some), then I think the contention that very few people would need to use it is a bit optimistic and there's therefore a danger or people like me totally shooting themselves in the foot, given there are no clear rules on the grey areas I mention above.

PS understood that it's not some magic solution and we'll rank #1 for everything afterwards. I just want to get it cleared up and be able to get back to my day job. God knows how a smaller business than us would cope with something like this. Seems to me it pushes the advantage even further in the direction of bigger companies with the resources to manage a screw up like this.

Anyway, blah blah. Time to get the machete out.

[Marcus_Miller]

In my experience, if you have this message again, you still have links they don't like. 35% of linking domains is not a great deal and as Stephen said, whilst Link Detox gives you a good starting place you really do have to audit these links in a brutal fashion.

You have 15000 external links from 2000 sites - that's a hell of a lot of links for a semi popular blog let alone a site that does not really publish any content that would attract links.

If you are holding onto links as you think they are 'ok' or because they 'don't look too bad' then you may need to get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.

Also, just because you remove the manual penalty, don't expect things to be amazing afterwards.

An alternative approach to finding the bad links and getting them removed is to identify the good ones and consider getting them repointed to a new URL and starting again with a rebrand / new URL. It can be easier to get a response from the good sites than it can be getting a response from the bad ones.

Failing that get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

[firstconversion]

How sure are you you have a full dataset of links? What did you use as you database for links to start cleaning from? (I would expect ahrefs, GWT, seomoz + majestic etc)

S

[ArenaFlowers.com]

Well, I also went through all the links manually which was the world's most boring task, then followed up with a healthcheck. Gah.

We've disavowed about 35% of all linking domains now...

[firstconversion]

I doubt its a time thing, it's more likely that they still see dirty links that you have not disallowed

That's the problem with these jump one the bandwagon tools like Link detox et al - they give you a nice score but that doesn't mean anything

404ing burnt pages and starting again may be a much quicker process than messing around with link disavowal

How many domains were linking and how many domains did you disallow?