Google reconsideration nightmare

[Benbug]

Hello and thanks in advance

The website has had a penalty on it for a while now, around 10 months, it was worked on by an agency who bought bad links to it but before then it was worked on by other agencies that may have done the same.

I cleaned up as many bad link (according to many posts read) and filled for reconsideration and was told to get rid of a whole bunch of links which i did not know existed.

Downloaded WMT links as instructed by Google admin person and contacted a heap of people which took a lot of man hours and cost us a fortune.

Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out.

I emailed back and showed that everything I could do was done and am happy to disavow any other link which they though violated their terms.

This was not enough and I was told to show more efforts in removing links and then resubmit for reconsideration.

I have done as much as I can on the website, I cannot see any more links which show violation, if there are some I am happy to remove but am now at a stage where i need direction from others to tackle this matter.

Any advice would be helpful; I cannot start over from scratch as it's a brand and not a small website.

[MarieHaynes]

Good point to disavow the domain.  I've also seen sites fail at reconsideration because their disavow file was improperly formatted.  Be sure you're using a .txt file.

I'm of two minds about the popular idea of getting links from as many sources as possible.  I think the thought process behind this came from a while back when WMT really only showed a small sample of your links.  But, since WMT added the ability to download your links, the numbers have been much more inclusive.  A few months ago John Mueller said in a webmaster forum thread (damned if I can't find it now) that in most cases it is ok to just use the links from WMT.

Lately, in some cases, when you fail at reconsideration you get an email from Google with a couple of sample links that they want to see removed.  In every case where I have seen this the links are ones that are present on the WMT list.

What I have seen though is that if you spend a couple of months working on your request and then file for reconsideration, Google will often reject the request and show you as an example, new links that WMT has picked up.  So, when I do my requests, I always go back and get the latest links and assess those as well.

I personally don't think that Google wants webmasters to have to pay for subscriptions to external tools in order to clean up their links.

I used to use a combo of ahrefs and WMT links and have always done well.  For my current projects I am using just WMT.  My theory is that they will do just fine, but we'll see!

[MarieHaynes]

I've had really good success, but it's hard to say whether it's because I'm so thorough.  I bet you I could get away with doing a lot less and still pass.  

[mememax]

Hi Ben, I think you got really good answers especially the Marie strategy is really a gold piece. However I'm adding my two cents here.

If you want to get rid of bad links you'll need to get more backlinks data not only relying on GWT, the same googlers said that you'll need to rely on more tools because doesn't show the whole data. Try the historical index from majestic SEO tool or the raw export of ahrefs or even here in seo moz you got good tools for that (although I recommend for this majestic historical which is the widest one, sorry mozzers ).

Then get those backlinks through a tool which may help you finding the toxic links which are poisoning your site (dtox tool is really popular this time) and disavow all the toxic and the more suspicious ones.

Be sure to disavow by domain not url because you may be missing other urls not indexed in the same domain which may get you in troubles in the future.

Add many attachments demonstrating your efforts to remove the links because google overstated that you should try to do everything to try remove the link before asking for a disavow

(here) -->"You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"

[mememax]

Hey Marie that was interesting, I've never attached all the emails I sent to google, I 'm sure that they won't see them all but it's definitely impressive to show how much work you did. HAve you got a better "consideration" from the web spam team making this process? Or it didn't get their attention?

[MarieHaynes]

The process is frustrating, isn't it?

"Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out."

This brings up two points for me:

-If a few of these were on your disavow list, this means that some of them were not.  Google is showing you some links that needed to be addressed that are not.  I am seeing quite often lately that site owners are saying, "I removed xx% of links and still failed."  It is not the percentage that matters.  Google wants to see that you have attempted removal for each type of link that they deem unnatural.  "Unnatural" really means self made.  So, let's say you had a link profile containing a bunch of blog comment spam and also a little bit of article spam.  Let's say you removed almost all of the blog comment spam which accounted for 80% of your links but you didn't touch the article links.  Even though you got 80% removed, Google wants to see that you have tried to get the article links taken down.

I've done a lot of consultation for site owners who have failed at reconsideration and by far the most common reason is that not enough kinds of links were deemed necessary to be removed.

-Next, it is not enough to just disavow.  You've got to show that you've really tried to get the links removed.  What I do is contact the webmaster via any available contact info I can find on the site, the whois contact and also contact forms.  I show evidence by including a copy of the text of each email sent and screenshots of each contact form.  Some may say that this is overkill.  Perhaps this degree of work does not need to be done, but in my opinion it shows that I have REALLY tried to get links removed.

I hope that helps.  The process is so darn time consuming.

[MichaelC-15022]

From the comment "show more efforts", I'd say you'll want to show not just more success at removing links, but how many times you contacted each webmaster and how.

I've had experiences with a couple of clients where the kinds of links that kept getting pointed out by the Google spam team tended to be article marketing examples, where the pages linking to my client's site were not in the WMT links, not in OSE, etc.....far too weak.  So you're not alone there.

I would advise looking at all the examples you can find of any article marketing that was done for your site, then try to find all related pages...i.e., don't JUST try to remove the examples they pointed out.  In other words, if you find there's someone named "Andy Smith" authoring some of the article marketing posts they've pointed out, then do a Google search for "Andy Smith" and your brand name to try to find any other article this person wrote for you.  In my case, I was able to find quite a collection of pages in the Google Index (not even supplemental...the regular index!) that weren't in the WMT links nor in OSE etc.  Also, take a big block of text from the start of each article and search for that in double-quotes, to see if it was posted elsewhere under a different name.

Then, chase these down, try and get them taken down, ping the webmaster 3-4x each, then disavow them and submit your reinclusion request.

[jesse-landry]

This is interesting, thanks for posting it. The more cases like these we as an SEO community hear about the more we learn on how to approach and deal with them.

At the moment I don't have any advice but I have a question -

Can you expand on the part where you "showed that everything you could do was done?" As in, did you take screenshots, list domains, post email text, spreadsheets, etc...? I'm wondering what exactly you gave Google in your reconsideration packet that they were simply not satisfied with.

Thanks and sorry to hear about all of this stress. It's not fun, I know.