Help Identifying Unnatural Links
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Link Spring Clean
Hey, Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean? We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc) Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia1 -
Unnatural Links Warning Disappeared from Search Console Account
Hello all, In 2013 I had an Unnatural Links Warning message in my GWT account. I believe that it was a result of the work of an old SEO company. When I received the warning I was working with an SEO. He helped me clean up some links. He also uploaded a disavow file for me. He did not file a reconsideration request. He told me that it was not necessary at the time. The message disappeared from my account. A few months ago a similar message appeared in the manual accounts section of my account. I gathered inbound links from GWT, Majestic, etc. I went through them myself and tried to contact lots and lots of webmasters. I got many links cleaned up. I spent several months on this project. I just logged into my Search Console account this afternoon and clicked through everything and guess what... that manual penalty message is gone. So... what does that mean? I assume that I should still upload the disavow file for the sites that did not respond to me that are spammy. Should I still try to file a reconsideration request even though there doesn't seem to be a manual penalty? How should I proceed? Thanks. Melissa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pajamalady0 -
Help needed on HTTPS
Hi Can anyone help me. I need some help with some example of large e-commerce sites going to https. Ideally these need to be e-commerce sites but any large site will be great, so that I can show the impact. The site can be based anywhere in the world, its more the impact I am after. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Are footer links important?
We currently display a list of links in the footer of our site to help boost SEO. They were put in place years ago and in a recent discuss with our UX team they requested we remove them from the site. Do footer links have any value? Or is this an old dated practice that no longer works? If we remove the footer links should we expect to see if have an impact on our SEO traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mivito0 -
Are Links from Homepage safe?
I have the option of getting a link from 2 websites home pages. My site is a financial service website. I want to know if it is safe to do so. The first site is a hotel site, so their content has no relation to my site And the second is a Google News website about finances They have offered me a section in the sidebar to have a sentence or 2 about my site with a link. Can you tell me would these be safe to get? I don't want to be hit by any penalty
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Because Goolge chose this link to my site?
I'm better ranked in Google for that link (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html) and not in (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/), you know you explain why? In all keywords, except that (luxury escorts in Rio de Janeiro) Sorry my english, I'm from Brazil and I'm using Google translator.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMaster0210 -
Does 302 pass link juice?
Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains. However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com. Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0