Manual Penalty Reconsideration Request Help
-
Hi All,
I'm currently in the process of creating a reconsideration request for an 'Impact Links' manual penalty.
So far I have downloaded all LIVE backlinks from multiple sources and audited them into groups;
-
Domains that I'm keeping (good quality, natural links).
-
Domains that I'm changing to No Follow (relevant good quality links that are good for the user but may be affiliated with my company, therefore changing the links to no follow rather than removing).
-
Domains that I'm getting rid of. (poor quality sites with optimised anchor text, directories, articles sites etc.).
One of my next steps is to review every historical back link to my website that is NO LONGER LIVE. To be thorough, I have planned to go through every domain (even if its no longer linking to my site) that has previously linked and straight up disavow the domain (if its poor quality).But I want to first check whether this is completely necessary for a successful reconsideration request?
My concerns are that its extremely time consuming (as I'm going through the domains to avoid disavowing a good quality domain that might link back to me in future and also because the historical list is the largest list of them all!) and there is also some risk involved as some good domains might get caught in the disavowing crossfire, therefore I only really want to carry this out if its completely necessary for the success of the reconsideration request. Obviously I understand that reconsideration requests are meant to be time consuming as I'm repenting against previous SEO sin (and believe me I've already spent weeks getting to the stage I'm at right now)... But as an in house Digital Marketer with many other digital avenues to look after for my company too, I can't justify spending such a long time on something if its not 100% necessary.
So overall - with a manual penalty request, would you bother sifting through domains that either don't exist anymore or no longer link to your site and disavow them for a thorough reconsideration request? Is this a necessary requirement to revoke the penalty or is Google only interested in links that are currently or recently live?
All responses, thoughts and ideas are appreciated
Kind Regards
Sam
-
-
Thanks again for your response Gary.
With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not.
In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so.
So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains.
The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably).
So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming.
Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this?
Sam
-
Thanks for your response Richard.
This is however an extremely generic response to quite a specific question. I didn't ask what a reconsideration request does!
-
So sorry for the delay getting back to you, its been a crazy week and didnt notice the response.
"Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes."
OK, just to let you know, once they lift the manual penalty, you still need to wait for a Penguin refresh. my penalty was lifted in May 2013 the vast majority of crap links had not been crawled and took a very long time for Google to do so. For the disavow file to take effect it needs to crawl each of those pages with your disavow file in mind and change them to a nofollow. Once a healthy amount is crawled you will then be in good standing when the Penguin algo is run. If Penguin runs before you have an acceptable level of healthiness you will not be released form Penguin and will have to wait for the next. So it took us until Oct 17th 2014 for us to finally get released. This was WITH John Muellers help!
My advice is don't be too picky with what you keep. Go through everything, mine was 20,000 Referring domains with 250k links! We had a 10 year history of business online and at one point also attacked with negative seo. So was a big job
"Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch."
Yes, create a report to show the work you have done, whats removed, who you have contacted, who did not respond. I did an Excel spreadsheet, one domain per line, with a few fields like, last contacted, date, removed etc..
There are lots of programmes out there that help with this now. Not so easy when your the first and there are no tools for it!
Also its best to do domain instead of links, how many links do you have pointing to your site?
-
A good reconsideration request does three things:
- Explains the exact quality issue on your site.
- Describes the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue.
- Documents the outcome of your efforts.
-
Actually, I agree with you. What you're describing are sites that look like the link has been deleted, but where the link actually still exists. My answer was regarding sites where the link actually has been deleted and doesn't exist.
-
Thanks for your response Gary.
That does make sense and to be honest is something that worries me! I am putting faith into software here (ie. I haven't gone through every single domain manually and checked that the link is still live) which is telling me whether the link is still live or not. If Google's software tells them otherwise when they review my reconsideration request, then all my other efforts are most likely wasted. I take it from this that you would advise addressing the none active domains too?
Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes.
Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch.
cheers
Sam
-
Sorry I have to disagree,
There are many sites, specifically directory sites that list websites and as more sites get listed they push your link to page 3, 4, 5. It looks like the link does not exist but it does on another page.
Some sites are that are crappy also have poor connections/bandwidth etc... So they go up and down and overload all the time. Just because its down now does not mean its down later when Google crawls it.
When I did my now famous! link clean up these were both issues that came up when I got help from John Mueller at Google.
It sucks because its just a hell of a lot of work, but based on how long it takes for a penguin update to come about, I would make sure you get it right FIRST TIME or you could wait more than a year to see returns.
Feel free to ask me anything.
Best of luck
Gary
-
Yes, I would be very surprised if Google wanted you to do anything with links that no longer exist.
-
Thanks for your response, Adam.
Would you say the same for domains that are still live but no longer contain links to your site?
Thanks
-
No, I would not spend time on links/domains that no longer exist. (I've never heard of that being necessary.)
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
-
Merging Two Sites: Need Help!
I have two existing e-commerce sites. The older one, is built on the Yahoo platform and had limitations as far as user experience. The new site is built on the Magento 2 platform. We are going to be using SLI search for our search and navigation on the new Magento platform. SLI wants us to 301 all of our categories to the hosted category pages they will create, that will have a URL structure akin to site.com/shop/category-name.html. The issue is: If I want to merge the two sites, I will have to do a 301 to the category pages of the new site, which will have 301s going to the category pages hosted by SLI. I hope this makes sense! The way I see it, I have two options: Do a 301 from the old domain to categories of the new domain, and have the new domain's categories 301 to the SLI categories; or, I can do my 301s directly to the SLI hosted category pages. The downside of #1 is that I will be doing two 301s, and I know I will lose more link juice as a result. The upside of #1, is that if decide not to use SLI in the future, it is one less thing to worry about. The downside of #2, is that I will be directing all the category pages from the old site to a site I do not ultimately control. I appreciate any feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KH20171 -
Number of indexed pages dropped. No manual action though?
I have a client who had their WordPress site hacked. At that point there was no message from Google in webmaster tools and the search results for their pages still looked normal. They paid sitelock to fix the site. This was all about a month ago. Logging into Webmaster Tools now there are still no messages from Google nor anything on the manual actions page. Their organic traffic is essentially gone. Looking at the submitted sitemap only 3 of their 121 submitted pages are indexed. Before this all of them where in the index. Looking at the index status report I can see that the number of indexed pages dropped completely off the map. We are sure that the site is free of malware. This client has done no fishy SEO practices. What can be done?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | connectiveWeb0 -
Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.
Hi, A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com. If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain? Many thanks! Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThisisPlanB0 -
Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benbug0 -
Time sensitive: HELP! We are having a problem doing a 301 redirect.....what can we do instead?
Our website has dynamic URLs and we are moving to another server/platform. 301 redirects is looking like a highly unlikely solution. A 3rd party company is handling the back-end of the website which they say works more like a "search engine" than a traditional website. Maybe that explains why they're having a hard time with the 301 redirects. Worst case scenario: we can't use the 301 redirect. What else can we do? We are considering "Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap" as Google describes here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#2. I'm wondering if this method only applies to duplicate content........and what would happen once the old website results in a 404 page...... HELP! We need to cross over to the new platform as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatriotOutfitters810 -
Certain Pages Not Being Indexed - Please Help
We are having trouble getting a bulk of our pages indexed in google. Any help would be greatly appreciated! The Following Page types are being indexed through escaped fragment: http://www.cbuy.tv/#! http://www.cbuy.tv/celebrity#!65-Ashley-Tisdale/fashion/4097-Casadei-BLADE-PUMP/Product/175199 <cite>www.cbuy.tv/celebrity/155-Sophia-Bush#!</cite> However, all our pages that look like this, are not being indexed: http://www.cbuy.tv/#!Type=Photo&id=b1d18759-5e52-4a1c-9491-6fb3cb9d4b95&Katie-Holmes-Hot-Pink-Pants-Isabel-Marant-DAVID-DOUBLE-BREASTED-Wool-COAT-Maison-Pumps-Black-Bag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CBuy0 -
5th Reconsideration Request, Have i missed anything...
Hi Guys, I wonder if any of you can help me out.I'll be shortly submitting another reconsideration request to Google.I've been working on removing bad / spammy links to our site http://goo.gl/j7OpL over the past 6 months and so far every reconsideration request I have submitted has been knocked back with the following message:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear site owner or webmaster of http://goo.gl/j7OpL , We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://goo.gl/j7OpL for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines . Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes . We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've removed over 70% of all our links - we had some large sitewide links on big sites with exact match anchor text to our main money keyword, I've also removed a large link network that our previous SEO company setup. Today I have completed an overhaul of all our internal links, near enough every blog post that we added to the site had a link back to the home page with an exact match money keyword. 1 thing that I did notice was when we got hit by the penalty it didn't affect every keyword we target just our main / most competitive keyword, yes some of our other keywords took a dip in rankings but not as much as our main keyword. When I submit our next reconsideration request I'll also attach a spreadsheet of links that I can't remove either because I can't find any contact details / blocked by whois or I'm just not getting a response when I email them. If anyone can point out anything else that I have missed or might have missed that would be great. Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Corporate pages and SEO help
We own and operate more than two dozen educational related sites. The business team is attempting to standardize some parts of our site hierarchy so that our sitemap.php, about.php, privacy.php and contact.php are all at the root directory. Our sitemap.php is generated by our sitemap.xml files, which are generated from our URLlist.txt files. I need to provide some feedback on this initiative. I'm worried about adding more stand-alone pages to our root directory and as part of a separate optimization in the future I was planning to suggest we group the "privacy", "about" and "contact" pages in a separate folder. We generally try to put our most important pages/directories for SEO in the root as our homepages pass a lot of link juice and have high authority. We do not invest SEO time into optimizing these pages as they're not pages we're trying to rank for, and I've already been looking into even no-following all links to them from our footer, sitemap, etc. I know that adding these "corporate" pages to a site are usually a standard part of the design process but is there any SEO benefit to having them at the root? And along the same lines, is there any SEO harm to having unimportant pages at the root? What do you guys think out there in Moz land?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_edvisors0