Google Reconsideration - To do or not to do?
-
We haven't been manually penalized by Google yet but we have had our fair share of things needing to be fixed; malware, bad links, lack/if no content, lack-luster UX, and issues with sitemaps & redirects.
Should we still submit a reconsideration even though we haven't had a direct penalty? Does hurt us to send it?
-
Thanks for the feedback! We are confident that there isn't anything 'black hat-ty' going on with our website; just lots of issues that have been heightened because of the updates this past year or two with no real movement from management to take action.
I was advised by our SEO consultant that we should submit a reconsideration because we have made a quite a few changes but still seem to have no impact, even thought, for instance, we have added over 250 articles to our main directory pages.
I guess I have to have a think on this, it seems from the few comments here, that we don't really have anything to gain, just opening ourselves up to Google's finer comb..
Hmm!!.... Thanks! SEOmozers
-
We have filed a few reconsideration requests in the past, and in all but one case I have received responses about there being no manual penalty.
A few years ago we had a site that had been manually penalized, but we did not know about it (no notification was sent to us through Google Webmaster Tools). After we sent a reconsideration request, the manual penalty on this site was removed.
For the sites that did not have a manual penalty, we have not seen any impact (negative or positive) as a result of the reconsideration request.
Since you know about several issues that are hurting your SEO performance, in your case I would likely work on those before contacting Google. I have only contacted Google for sites that I believe don't have significant issues.
-
As Mat said, you could be risking more scrutiny, so if you submit a recon request, be sure you can endure the attention your site will get.
However, I can see no possible gain to doing so. So why bother? All you'll get out of it is a message saying they found no manual action against your site, and advising you to check for other possible causes of a loss of traffic, yada, yada, yada... -
If you are (REALLY) confident that there is nothing off-white going on with your site and it's links then you theoretically have nothing to lose. Whether or not there is anything to gain is an oft-discussed point.
You would though be inviting to |Google to look manually at your link profile, so if you aren't so confident then there could be lots to lose.
For my money I wouldn't do a re-inclusion request without having received a penalty warning. If you haven't got a manual penalty then there is nothing to remove, so I don't see any gain.
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
-
Number or percentage of new visitors impact Google rankings?
Hi all, Does the number/percentage of new visitors (from different IPs and countries) impact the Google rankings? If there are more number of new visitors, will Google favours the website in rankings considering the fact that new visitors are better than returning/same visitors? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google Latest Algorithmic Change about Https & Mobile Friendliness
How effective did it prove for anyone with the latest algorithmic change google search engine made for being mobile friendly and using https (valid ssl certificate). I see a good change being made under the ecommerce category for sites being used for online shopping. Let me know if anyone observes a major difference.
Algorithm Updates | | mozexpone0 -
Where has Google found the £1.00 value for the penny black? Is it Google moving beyond the mark-ups too?
Hi guys, I am curious, so am wondering something about the Penny Black SERPs.
Algorithm Updates | | madcow78
Apparently Google shows a value of £1.00 Penny Black SERP From where does it come from? It's not the value Penny Black Value SERP The Wikipedia page hasn't any mark-up about it, actually it has the Price value mark-up of 1 penny Penny Black Wiki Markup Among the rare stamps, also the Inverted Jenny shows a value Inverted Jenny SERP But it's clearly taken from USPS and it's the cost of a new version of this rare stamp USPS Inverted Jenny Indeed, the mark-up matches that value USPS Inverted Jenny Mark-up I've been looking on-line for a new version of the Penny Black, but couldn't find anything.
The only small piece of information that I've found to correlate one pound with the Penny Black is on the Wikipedia page, but the point is: is Google able to strip those information from that piece? It's not a mark-up, it's not a number and mostly it's not a simple sentence like "The penny black cost was of £1.00" It reads "One full sheet cost 240 pennies or one pound sterling". Penny Black Wikipedia particular Is it Google moving beyond the mark-ups too? Thanks, Pierpaolo 9Cm3MOs.jpg f7XYNtF.jpg 5PpwapB.jpg hYUJswI.jpg 7kbIC4Q.jpg jnu1Gbe.jpg Wzltg0t.jpg2 -
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br mented in the key word, how can I find out why at and what to do to get back? He fell after he put the google analytic code on all pages of the site, it may have acid? Meu site caiu da 1º para a 5º Pagna do google br em tadas as palavra chaves, como posso descobrir o motivo e oque fazer para voltar ? Ele caiu depois que coloquei o codigo do google analytic em todas as paginas do site, pode ter cido isso ?
Algorithm Updates | | Guedes0 -
Drop in Traffic from Google, However no change in the rankings
I have seen a 20% drop in traffic from google last week (After April 29th). However when I try to analyze the rank of the keywords in the google results that send me traffic they seem to be the same. Today (6th March) Traffic has fallen further again with not much/any visible change in the rankings. Any ideas on what the reason for this could be? I have not made any changes to the website recently.
Algorithm Updates | | raghavkapur0 -
How much does Google take Social into account in serps
I have been reading and trying to learn more about how google takes social media into account when ranking sites, but I cant seam to find a definitive answer to this, does it make a big difference or does it not really matter?
Algorithm Updates | | MiracleCreative0 -
Google above the fold update
Hi everyone, Ever since the Jan 19th Google 'above the fold update' I have noticed some strange ranking changes in some of my sites. 1. rankings increased dramatically (not in top 50 to page 2) on Jan 19th for about 5 days then dropped out completely from the top 50. 2. our rankings then did the same thing again around Feb 2nd for about 5 -6 days then has bottomed out ever since. We do not have any ads on the site but our pages are dominated by images for most of the 'above the fold' section then followed by the content down the page. Any insight into this would be much appreciated. Cheers, Andrew
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
Removing secure subdomain from google index
we've noticed over the last few months that Google is not honoring our main website's robots.txt file. We have added rules to disallow secure pages such as: Disallow: /login.cgis Disallow: /logout.cgis Disallow: /password.cgis Disallow: /customer/* We have noticed that google is crawling these secure pages and then duplicating our complete ecommerce website across our secure subdomain in the google index (duplicate content) https://secure.domain.com/etc. Our webmaster recently implemented a specific robots.txt file for the secure subdomain disallow all however, these duplicated secure pages remain in the index. User-agent: *
Algorithm Updates | | marketing_zoovy.com
Disallow: / My question is should i request Google to remove these secure urls through Google Webmaster Tools? If so, is there any potential risk to my main ecommerce website? We have 8,700 pages currently indexed into google and would not want to risk any ill effects to our website. How would I submit this request in the URL Removal tools specifically? would inputting https://secure.domain.com/ cover all of the urls? We do not want any secure pages being indexed to the index and all secure pages are served on the secure.domain example. Please private message me for specific details if you'd like to see an example. Thank you,0