Google Reconsideration Request (Penguin) - Will Google give links to remove?
-
When Penguin v1 hit, our site took a hit for a single phrase (i.e. "widgets") due to the techniques our SEO company was using (network). We've since had those links cleaned up, and our rankings have not recovered.
Our SEO company said they submitted a reconsideration request on our behalf, and that Google denied it and didn't provide which links we needed removed.
Does Google list links that need removing if they are still not happy with your link profile?
-
I'm fairly certain we lost rankings/traffic a little while after the unnatural link warning come through. The warning came through 7/April and I believe we lost rankings later on in the month when Penguin hit. It's hard to tell because the drop in traffic was only a small amount - since it was only one keyword we got hit for.
Sounds like we'll need to try further cleaning up our back-link profile and see if there is anything else we can clean up and go for another reconsideration request?
-
I'm pretty sure you can have both an unnatural links warning and also be hit by Penguin for a particular keyword.
Did you lose traffic when you got your unnatural links warning? There were some warnings that went out in July that really didn't mean anything. Do you have a yellow caution sign next to the warning? If not, and if you didn't lose traffic, then I wouldn't do anything about the warning.
But, if it's got a yellow caution sign and you lost traffic then yes, it needs to be addressed.
-
Hi Robert
Cheers for the answer here. I have heard of very few Penguin recovery stories! Did your traffic come back in one big jump or did it recover slowly? (and did it go back to previous levels?)
Cheers
Stephen
-
Hi Marie,
Yes, prior to being hit by penguin we did receive an unnatural link warning from GWT.
So is the warning considered manual, or is it part of the penguin update? When penguin hit we lost rankings for a single phrase, but lost hardly any traffic when compared with the traffic the rest of the site gets.
If we got hit by the unnatural links notification, will a re-submission help?
-
Something's not adding up here. Did you have a warning in your webmaster tools about unnatural links?
Filing a reconsideration request is not something you do unless you've had a manual warning in your webmaster tools.
There is no point in filing a reconsideration request if you've been affected by Penguin as Penguin is an algorithmic change. Once you've cleaned up your link profile, you can only recover from Penguin once there has been a Penguin refresh.
To answer the other part of your question though...if you had had an unnatural links manual warning and you filed a reconsideration request....no, Google does not tell you which links need to be removed.
-
Great advice from Stephen....
Speaking from experience, we had a reconsideration accepted....it took 4 re-submissions, get to work ASAP as it can take 2+ weeks per response.
To add to Stephen's advice, one thing we did....extract all linking domains...search each domain in Google Search, any domain that has very few or zero indexed pages is also a red flag. If Google don't index it, then they likely don't like it. I'd send a list of those links to google asking them to ignore them.
Look out for sitewide links with non Brand Term optimised anchor text.
Good luck.
-
Nope. Best thing to do is grab them yourself out of GWT, Open site explorer. Majestic seo and ahrefs and throw them all into excel
Then use SEO for Exzcel plugin to pull in Pagerank. Then go and remove all links with PR -1, 0 and maybe 1 and also any that look spammy or that have non bran anchor text
S
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Google Crawling Issues! How Can I Get Google to Crawl My Website Regularly?
Hi Everyone! My website is not being crawled regularly by Google - there are weeks when it's regular but for the past month or so it does not get crawled for seven to eight days. There are some specific pages, that I want to get ranked but they of late are not being crawled AT ALL unless I use the 'Fetch As Google' tool! That's not normal, right? I have checked and re-checked the on-page metrics for these pages (and the website as a whole, backlinking is a regular and ongoing process as well! Sitemap is in place too! Resubmitted it once too! This issue is detrimental to website traffic and rankings! Would really appreciate insights from you guys! Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | farhanm1 -
Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png
Technical SEO | | ahming7770 -
Remove page with PA of 69 and 300 root domain links?
Hi We have a few pages within our website which were at one time a focus for us, but due to developing the other areas of the website, they are now defunct (better content elsewhere) and in some ways slightly duplicate so we're merging two areas into one. We have removed the links to the main hub page from our navigation, and were going to 301 this main page to the main hub page of the section which replaces it. However I've just noticed the page due to be removed has a PA of 69 and 15,000 incoming links from 300 root domains. So not bad! It's actually stronger than the page we are 301'ing it to (but not really an option to swap as the URL structure will look messy) With this in mind, is the strategy to redirect still the best or should we keep the page and turn it into a landing page, with links off to the other section? It just feels as though we would be doing this just for the sake of google, im not sure how much decent content we could put on it as we've already done that on the destination page. The incoming links to that page will still be relevant to the new section (they are both v similar hence the merging) Any suggestions welcome, thanks
Technical SEO | | benseb0 -
Google dance tools - do they still give an indication of rankings to come?
I can't remember the tool I used in the past but it searched a number of data centres which gave a pretty good indication of what your new rankings would be once full updated, is this still the case today? If so, can anyone recommend any tools?
Technical SEO | | designguy760 -
Internal Linking
Hello there, I own a "how to" website with 1000+ articles, and the number of articles is growing every day. Often some articles are easier to understand if I link a certain step to an article that was written before, because that article explains the step in more detail. Should I use "read here/read more" or the "title of the article I'm referring to" as anchor text? When is internal linking too much? Should I use nofollow?
Technical SEO | | FisnikSylka0 -
Google Sitelinks
Is there anyway to control the sitelinks under a listing in Google? I have a group of lawyers where 1 of the them is showing up in the sitelinks. They want all of the lawyers to show up. Right now it is showing 1 lawyer, about page, contact us page, etc. Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Is Over use of Twitter to link back to your website affect google rankings
Having a debate here that needs to be settled. A friend is using twitter to link back to his site but is falling down the google rankings. I think that he is over using and creating double content which looks like a robot . Can any body elsse explain this Better Please Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | Feily0