Reconsideration request failed - New website?
-
I am looking at website with MOZ PA 34. The website belong to a shop in Manhattan. Simple shop, simple man, not one that do tricks.
Reconsideration request failed twice! Never happened to me in the past.. Google ignored some domains in the two disavow files we submitted. All of these domains are asking $ to remove links that as much as I know we didn't even bought
My Question
Can I create a brand new domain/website and transfer the PA juice WITHOUT the bad links?
-
Great answer Sha. I will post the outcome when changes occur.
-
Sorry Marie,
Should have included you in my comments, but could not see that you had commented since I was dealing with a "disappearing answer" catastrophe by composing elsewhere and pasting in.
Why is it only the long ones that do that?
Sha
-
Hi Elchanan,
Well Eyepaq is batting a thousand today!
Eyepaq is quite correct. The only way to "transfer" the bulk of the link equity is to redirect the domain which would inevitably result in a transfer of the manual action as well. In fact, it is worse than that. In recent times a number of domains have been dealt a manual action by association without a redirect even being in place. These manual actions have been applied because the Webspam team believes that the sites are related and are part of a larger scale manipulative effort, or indeed an effort to get out from under a penalty. Matt Cutts talked about this at SMX West, stating that people should not be able to "move down the road" to avoid a manual action.
If you genuinely needed to build a new site before the manual action and have not put your life savings and years of effort into building a brand, there could be a business case for starting again with a brand new domain, BUT remember you will be starting with nothing - even less than you will have if you successfully clean up the existing domain. This has to be a careful business decision and any new site would need to be completely unique and without any connection to the penalized site. Personally, starting over would be my last resort unless the site was fundamentally broken (and the domain name was a poor choice) to start with.
There are generally five broad reasons why a reconsideration request may fail:
Insufficient data - maybe links in the backlink profile have not been surfaced in the data gathering stage. Incomplete data is common and is best remedied by using as many data sources as possible and in some cases by pulling multiple samples over a period of days or weeks.
(Remember that the links returned by the Webspam team when a reconsideration request fails are "examples". They are intended to point you toward other links in the backlink profile which follow the same patterns or use the same unnatural linking tactics.)Mistakes in Analysis - If links have been misclassified as natural and are kept, the reconsideration request will fail. Sometimes this happens because people rely solely on algorithmic analysis tools to determine which links to keep or remove and results are not 100% accurate. I would always argue that a real human should be the primary tool when doing analysis because I believe there is no room for mistakes in a job that your livelihood depends upon!
Sometimes human analysis can go wrong too - most often because people forget that this is about "unnatural" linking. That means links that were created rather than earned.
Another mistake that people make at this point is to try to just remove the worst of the unnatural links to preserve some of the benefits that were gained from unnatural linking. Omitting unnatural links from the cleanup effort because you think they are not so bad is a big mistake for two reasons:- It will mean leaving unnatural links in the backlink profile - on their own they could cause the manual action to be upheld, but even in the rare instance that this might be allowed to scrape past on reconsideration, retaining them leaves the site vulnerable to the Penguin algorithm
- It immediately shows the Webspam team reviewer that the site owner's manipulative mindset has not changed. Making a case for reconsideration requires that they are able to trust the site owner will never employ those kinds of tactics again.
Incomplete or ineffective Disavow submissions - As mentioned above, it is always best to disavow at the domain level to ensure that any links you are unaware of do not remain in play and sabotage your efforts. The only exceptions to this rule are unnatural links on high value domains you might reasonably love to have "natural" links from. In these extremely rare cases you should disavow the specific URLs to ensure that any natural links are preserved and any natural links you might earn from that domain in the future will be accorded their rightful value. Also - a red light went on for me when I saw "Google ignored some domains in the two disavow files we submitted". This causes me to wonder whether you have uploaded two completely separate files to the Disavow Links Tool? If so, then this could be the problem. The Disavow Links Tool submission is an overwrite, not an update. This means that you need to combine any existing disavow list with the new list before uploading. If you don't do this then you are effectively re-avowing all of the domains or links that were in the existing file.
If you need to update an existing disavow file with a new list, you can use this free tool to make it easy. Once you have created a free account you can upload your existing list, then upload any new list in the future to create an updated disavow file. When you upload a new list the tool will combine the data, remove duplicates and add date notations so that you can keep track of when domains were added. The tool also ensures that your new disavow file is within the 2Mb file size limit and generates it in the correct text format, ready for submission.Insufficient effort in the cleanup - Sometimes this is actually just that there is insufficient evidence provided that the work has been done. Most common mistakes here:
- Omitting domains completely from the cleanup effort because a WhoIs email address is not available
- Including domains that do not have a WhoIs email address, but not bothering to look any further to find a method of contact. If there are email addresses or contact forms available on the site, a "good faith effort" will require that you have used them to attempt to contact the domain owner.
- Being unhelpful when requesting that links are removed. The more that can be done to help the domain owner easily locate and remove the links, the better the success rate for the entire link removal campaign.The Webspam team needs to see that a "significant proportion" of the links have been removed. The better the cleanup rate, the smoother the path to getting a manual action revoked.
- The Bullying approach. Link removal requests should always be written with three things in mind a) You are asking someone to do you a favor b) threats or demands are unlikely to make someone feel that they want to be helpful c) the Brand is at stake here - whatever impression is created by the request will reflect heavily on the Brand. When people get this incredibly wrong, flow-on results can be catastrophic.
- Not recording and providing evidence of link removal efforts for domains that have not been successfully cleaned up. Keep good records. Provide evidence where domain owners have refused to help or requested payment.Provide evidence where on-site forms do not function. Make it easy for the Webspam team to make an assessment by providing good documentation.
Not making a case for reconsideration - Site owners need to demonstrate that they understand where they went wrong and will not repeat the same mistakes. In addition to this they need to convince the Webspam team that they have made a "good faith effort" to remove the links. Also, if there are links that are known to be natural, but may look suspicious, address them. Give a reasonable explanation as to why links have been retained (as long as there IS a reasonable explanation). You can use this checklist to make sure you have covered the most important things in your reconsideration request.
This Slide Deck provides an overview that might be helpful.
Any or all of these things can be playing a part in a failed reconsideration effort. It is not uncommon for it to take multiple attempts to have a penalty revoked, but the more of these potential problems we can eliminate by following best practice from start to finish, the more predictable the results.
Best of luck with resolving the manual action and getting things back on track.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Whether or not you should start over is a decision that probably can't be made in a forum post as there are many factors to consider. But, I would say that failing a reconsideration request is not on its own enough to make me want to start over.
Did Google give you example links that were already in your disavow? If so, did you disavow on the domain or url level? Often if you've disavowed on the url level you'll be missing links. If the link truly was disavowed then you've probably got other similar ones in your profile that need to be removed/disavowed.
Did you make extensive effort to get links removed? That's vital when you have a manual action.
"Can I create a brand new domain/website and transfer the PA juice WITHOUT the bad links?"
No. What makes up the PA is the equity from the links. If you start a new domain and 301 the old to the new you'll pass ALL of the link signals good and bad. There are ways to start over and redirect users from your old site to the new without passing the penalty, but it will be like totally starting afresh.
Another factor to consider is that if you start new you'll need new content as well. If you just put the old content on a new url Google will usually recognize that this is the same site and apply canonical tags which essentially still point the unnatural links at the new site.
I've yet to see a site that could not get its unnatural links penalty lifted....and I've seen some REALLY badly spammed sites. But, it's not uncommon for it to take several attempts in order to succeed.
-
Hi,
No, transfering (and by that you probabaly mean redirecting ) old authority to the new site will also transfer the manual action
Just make sure the disavow file is correct - make sure you use domains not links (as the disavow file is "sensitive" to duplicates: www vs non www, http vs https, slash at the end vs non slash at the end etc)
Cheers.
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
-
I have followed all the steps in google speed ranking on how to increase my website http://briefwatch.com/ speed but no good result
My website http://briefwatch.com/ has a very low-speed score on google page speed and I followed all the steps given to me still my website speed doesn't increase
Local Website Optimization | | Briefwatch0 -
How to Get google to get to index New URL and not the OLD url
Hi Team, We are undertaking a Domain migration activity to migrate our content frrom one domain to another. 1. the Redirection of pages is handeled at Reverse proxy level. 2. We do have 301 redirects put in place. However we still see that google is indexing pages with our Old domain apart from the pages from new domain. Is there a way for us to stop google from indexing our pages from Old domain. The recommendations to have Noindex on Page mete title and disallow does not work since our redirection is setup at RP and google crawlers always discover the new pages after redirection.
Local Website Optimization | | bhaskaran0 -
GMB Website Create Competition That Can Hurt Your Own Site?
Hello, Does anyone know if creating a Google My Business website for a business using the GMB builder creates competition for that business's main, non-GMB website? Thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | lawfather0 -
How can I migrate a website's content to a new WP theme, delete the old site, and avoid duplication and other issues?
Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | jampaper1 -
What to do with localised landing pages on listings website - Canonical question
Hi Run a pet listings website and we had tonnes of duplicate content that we have resolved. But not sure what to do with the localised landing pages. We have everything pointing back back to the main listings URL http://www.dogscatsandpets.co.uk/for-sale-stud-and-adoption/ but haven't pointed the URLs that show pets for specific towns and cities eg http://www.dogscatsandpets.co.uk/for-sale/dogs-and-puppies/in-city-of-london/ back to the main url. Obviously this is giving us duplicate content issues, but these pages do rank in local search and drive traffic into the site. So my question is should we canonicalise the local pages back to the main url and if we do will this mean our local landing pages will no longer rank? Is there any alternatives?
Local Website Optimization | | dogscatsandpets0 -
Draft of my new responsive website redesign any opinions?
After a couple of years of talking about having a redesign of my website I finally taken the plunge and I'm paying for responsive design version. Before they go fully into the redesign I thought I would try to get some feedback on whether the initial look and functionality looks good or not. My old website is a very basic Dreamweaver website constructed by myself and because there's only 12 holiday properties on this holiday letting website it has done the job, but you have to scroll down to see the pictures and read the information. At the end of the day I'm certainly not a professional web designer I'm fully aware. With the new very first draft of the responsive design I've asked for functionality where clicking on the property allows you to check out the photographs and information without scrolling. This is the very first stage of a redesign any opinions regarding functionality and initial look would be very gratefully received. New draft website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/newsite/ Old website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/
Local Website Optimization | | WhitbyHolidayCottages2 -
Nominet have made the geographic new TLD available for UK. How will this affect SEO?
Nominet have made a new TLD available, the .uk TLD. Some might argue that this is a cynical move by Nominet to get more money out of British businesses, but either way, we need to decide how we handle this. As I see it we have 4 options. 1. Do nothing - At the moment, only websites can register their .uk domain. That won't last for ever though, and eventually, if we don't register it, someone else will.
Local Website Optimization | | Stewart_SEO
2. Register a domain but do nothing with it.
3. Register a domain and simply redirect it to the existing .co.uk domain. I suspect this is the best option.
4. Register the .uk domain and redirect the .co.uk domain to the new domain. From a technical point of view, what is the best option? For businesses that have multi-lingual sites the 4th appears the best option but why do we need to act when we do not even know the SEO value of any of this, and where Google sit regarding the new British TLD?1 -
UK website to be duplicated onto 2 ccTLD's - is this duplicate content?
Hi We have a client who wishes to have a site created and duplicated onto 3 servers hosted in three different countries. United Kingdom, Australia and USA. All of which will ofcourse be in the English language. A long story short, the website will provide the user 3 options on the homepage asking them which "country site" they wish to view. (I know I can detect the user IP and autoredirect but this is not what they want) Once they choose an option it will direct the user to the appropriate ccTLD. Now the client wants the same information to appear on all 3 sites with some slight variations in products available and English/US spelling difference but for the most part, the sites will look the same with the same content on each page. So my question is, will these 3 sites been seen as duplicates of each other even though they are hosted in different countries and are on ccTLD's? Are there any considerations I should pass onto the client with this approach? Many thanks for reading.
Local Website Optimization | | yousayjump
Kris0