How do I presuade Google to re-consider my site?
-
A few weeks ago I got an emai from Google that my site is suspected to violating Google guidelines-->suspected links manipulationg Google Page rank.
My site dropped to the second page.
I have contacted some of the top webmasters who link to me and they have removed the links or added a nofollow.
When I asked for re-consideation I got an answear that there are still suspected links.
What do I do now? I can't remove all of my links?!
BTW this happened before the offical Pinguin Update.
-
You got a manual link penalty i think. I have dealt with such penalties 3 times now (2 turned successful and 1 is in the go). Here is what you should do:
1. Get rid of spammy links (low quality and medium quality too) When you're manually reviewed, even the good links can become bad (algo can't detect them, but humans do)
2. Use disavow tool to ignore the remaining medium/low quality links you couldnt delete ( and the one you deleted too). Try to disavow domains either than simple urls. Struggling in taht penaly is worse than over-disavowing links, as it's easier to build ne links again.
3. Build a link asset onsite and try to grab some high quality and natural links (this should be done before reconsideration request). If your site is deserves to rank high, it should still receive High Q links even if it's not showing in G results.This sounds logic, right ?
4. Wait 4-6 weeks after submitting the diseavow file to google, and then send reconsideration request.
Bear in mind, you wil be most likely denied for the first and 2nd request like to 80% of the times, but the 3rd one can turn to be successful more often. So you have to be patient.
One last piece of advice: if recovering your website doesnt pay off the amount of work, time and money you will invest, just throw it away and start over with a new domain. And if you need someone with experience to handle the problem and take a closer look (audit) on your link profile, don't hesitate to call me back.
Wish you good continuation
-
Hey Ofer
There are different kinds of penalties and if you had this before penguin then you have a manual penalty and unfortunately, you have to work a bit harder to dig your way out of this hole as it will be manually reviewed.
So, if we just review what you said above:
"I have contacted some of the top webmasters who link to me and they have removed the links or added a nofollow."
Imagine how that looks to Google, you are almost saying:
"Hi Google, I have contacted some of the sites with dodgy links, but not all of them and some of these have removed or no followed them. Can I start ranking again where I was before and carry on benefiting from the rest of my manipulative links?"
I am really sorry to sound so harsh, but if you have a manual penalty, then you are going to have to do a little better than that if you want to get out of this and unfortunately, when these links are removed and you are no longer benefiting from them, depending on how much of your link profile this makes up, you may well rank lower than where you were.
Lets just look at something else you said:
"What do I do now? I can't remove all of my links?!"
Unfortunately, if you have followed short cuts to the top, and not invested in content and safe link building then the days of easy ranking are over and if all of your links are manipulative, you may do better to burn this house down and start again.
Really sorry to be the barer of bad news but with a manual penalty, we need to be transparent and show you have done your very best to sort this situation out which at the moment, you have not done.
Marcus
-
I would assume they stick to their word
-
In the Google guidelines they state that making a link a nofollow link is good enough from their point of view to not consider the link as trying to manipulating google ranking.
Is it true? Or do you need to actually remove the link?
-
Slow down Ofer, or you will cause more damage to yourself
I know you want to fix this as fast as possible, but don't ask until you are sure you got everything.
If you fix a little bit but not all and keep asking, they may stop responding to you.
You should also thoroughly check things on your own site. I could be wrong, but I think a page rank drop penalty will not be because bad sites link to you or that strong sites link to you, but more likely that you sell links based on your PR, so google's way to stop you is by hitting your PR. Certainly your PR could drop because of the loss of incoming PR due to their sites being hit, but that would just be ranking, not a penalty. Even if you made no money, but you did a trade, it amounts to the same thing.
Did you sell paid links? If so, either nofollow or remove them.
Did you do a lot of multiway links? ( that was stupid) Remove them
Did you trade links with bad sites? ( that was stupid) Remove them
Did you spin content and point links to your site? ( that was stupid) Try to have it removed.I think removing them is better than no following them, but if you have a quick way to nofollow, then remove afterwards, that might be useful to do.
Make sure your site is clean, then try to have other sites remove links. You need to go after the ones that don't make sense - unrelated sites.
Good luck - and don't ask for reconsideration until you fixed the problem.
When you do ask, document the changes you made, so write them down as you do them..
When you make hundreds of changes, you will never remember them all. -
I think this may help you. It was a popular blog post from a few weeks ago.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice
-
I read in the blog that it's a good practice not to add new links while you are planning on sending Google a re-consideration request.
-
Wow! You were quite that you shouldn’t be!
Try to plan the removals and don’t go for reconsideration that quick! I would highly recommend using open site explorer or Majestic SEO to extract your complete backlink profile and make the links that you feel are SPAM… then send the request for removal to all webmasters try not to play and request them to remove instead of no follow… as somehow Google still somewhere count no follow! (No follow still can indicate your bad link hood)
On a ground state, not all bad links can be removed from the Google’s profile… so before you ask for reconsideration request try to add some great links in your link profile… links from high authority blogs, magazines and press links can help you regain your rankings…
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
-
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Site Migration of 4 sites into 1?
Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though? Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google not taking Meta...
Hello all, So I understand that Google may sometimes take content from the page as a snippet to display on SERPs rather than the meta description, but my problem goes a little beyond that. I have a section on my site which updates everyday so a lot of the content is dynamics (products for a shop, every morning unique stock is added or removed), and despite having a meta description, title and receiving an 'A' grade in the MOZ on page grader, these pages never show up in Google. After a little research I did a 'site:www.mysite.com/productpage' in Google and this indeed listed all my products, but interestingly for every single one Google had taken the copyright notice at the bottom of the page as the snippet instead of the meta or any H1, H2 or P text on the page... Does anyone have any idea why Google is doing this? It would explain a lot to me in terms of overall traffic, I'm just out of ideas... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Implications from portfolio site
I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably. The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered. This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages. Would you go for it and isolate anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0