What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
-
Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google. Sad times.
I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months. All 5000 of them! Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam. About 2800 of them were junk. As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content.
As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed. There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites. And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to! As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them.
I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines." As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done?
Cheers
Steve
-
Tom has given you good advice. I'll put in my 2 cents' worth as well.
There are 3 main reasons for a site to fail at reconsideration:
1. Not enough links were assessed by the site owner to be unnatural.
2. Not enough effort was put into removing links and documenting that to Google.
3. Improper use of the disavow tool.
In most cases #1 is the main cause. Almost every time I do a reconsideration request my client is surprised at what kind of links are considered unnatural. From what I have seen, Google is usually pretty good at figuring out whether you have been manually trying to manipulate the SERPS or whether links are just spam bot type of links.
Here are a few things to consider:
Are you being COMPLETELY honest with yourself about the spammy links you are seeing? How did Russian and porn sites end up linking to you? Most sites don't just get those by accident. Sometimes this can happen when sites use linkbuilding companies that use automated methods to build links. Even still, do all you can to address those links, and then for the ones that you can't get removed, document your efforts, show Google and then disavow them.
Even if these are foreign language sites, many of them will have whois emails that you can contact.
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure that your good links are truly natural? Just because they are from news sources is not a good enough reason. Have you read all the interflora stuff recently? They had a pile of links from advertorials (amongst other things) that now need to be cleaned up.
-
Hi Steve
If Google is saying there are still a few more links, then it might be an idea to manually review a few others that you haven't disavowed. I find the LinkDetox tool very useful for this. It's free with a tweet and will tell you if a link from a site is toxic (the site is deindexed) or if it's suspicious (and why it's suspicious). You still need to use your own judgement on these, but it might help you to find the extra links you're talking about.
However, there is a chance you have gone and disavowed every bad link, but still got the rejection. In this case, I'd keep trying but make your reconsideration request more detailed. Create an excel sheet and list the bad URLs and/or domains and give a reason explaining why you think they're bad links. Then provide information on how you found their contact details. If there are no contact us pages, check the whois registrar's email. After that, say when you contacted them (give a sample of your letter to them too), and if they replied, along with a follow up date if you got silence. If there are no details in the whois, explicitly mention that there are no contact details and so you have proceeded straight to disavowing.
Then list the URLs you've disavowed (upload the .txt file with your reconsideration email). You've now told Google that you've found bad links, why you think their bad (also include how you discovered them), that you've contacted the webmaster on numerous occasions and, if no removal was made, you've disavowed as a last resort. This is a very thorough process and uses the disavow tool in the way that Google wants us to - as a last resort to an unresponsive or anonymous webmaster.
Please forgive me if you've already done all this and it seems like repetition. I only mention it because I've found it's best to be as thorough as possible with Google in these situations. Remember, a reconsideration request is manual and if they see that you've gone through all this effort to be reinstated, you've got a better chance of being approved.
Keep trying, mate. It can be disheartening, but if you think it's worth the time and effort, then keep going for it. I would bear in mind the alternatives, however, such as starting fresh on a new domain. If you find yourself going round the bend with endless reconsiderations, sometimes your time, effort and expertise can be better put elsewhere.
All the best!
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
-
Can you keep you old HTTP xml sitemape when moving to HTTPS site wide?
Hi Mozers, I want to keep the HTTP xml sitemape live on my http site to keep track of indexation during the HTTPS migration. I'm not sure if this is doable since once our tech. team forces the redirects every http page will become https. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Google still listing pages from old domain after 2 change requests
Good Morning I put forward the following question in December 2014 https://moz.com/community/q/google-still-listing-old-domain as pages from our old domain www.fhr-net.co.uk were still indexed in Google. We have submitted two change request in WMT, the most recent was over 6 months ago yet the old pages are still being indexed and we can't see why that would be Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
How can I best handle parameters?
Thank you for your help in advance! I've read a ton of posts on this forum on this subject and while they've been super helpful I still don't feel entirely confident in what the right approach I should take it. Forgive my very obvious noob questions - I'm still learning! The problem: I am launching a site (coursereport.com) which will feature a directory of schools. The directory can be filtered by a handful of fields listed below. The URL for the schools directory will be coursereport.com/schools. The directory can be filtered by a number of fields listed here: Focus (ex: “Data Science”) Cost (ex: “$<5000”) City (ex: “Chicago”) State/Province (ex: “Illinois”) Country (ex: “Canada”) When a filter is applied to the directories page the CMS produces a new page with URLs like these: coursereport.com/schools?focus=datascience&cost=$<5000&city=chicago coursereport.com/schools?cost=$>5000&city=buffalo&state=newyork My questions: 1) Is the above parameter-based approach appropriate? I’ve seen other directory sites that take a different approach (below) that would transform my examples into more “normal” urls. coursereport.com/schools?focus=datascience&cost=$<5000&city=chicago VERSUS coursereport.com/schools/focus/datascience/cost/$<5000/city/chicago (no params at all) 2) Assuming I use either approach above isn't it likely that I will have duplicative content issues? Each filter does change on page content but there could be instance where 2 different URLs with different filters applied could produce identical content (ex: focus=datascience&city=chicago OR focus=datascience&state=illinois). Do I need to specify a canonical URL to solve for that case? I understand at a high level how rel=canonical works, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around what versions of the filtered results ought to be specified as the preferred versions. For example, would I just take all of the /schools?focus=X combinations and call that the canonical version within any filtered page that contained other additional parameters like cost or city? Should I be changing page titles for the unique filtered URLs? I read through a few google resources to try to better understand the how to best configure url params via webmaster tools. Is my best bet just to follow the advice on the article below and define the rules for each parameter there and not worry about using rel=canonical ? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687 An assortment of the other stuff I’ve read for reference: http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/seo-clean-urls http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3857-SEO-When-Product-Facets-and-Filters-Fail http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-steps-to-seo-friendly-site-url-structure/59813/ http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html
Technical SEO | | alovallo0 -
Can up a page
I do my best to optimize the on-page parameters for my page www.lkeria.com/AADL-logement-Algerie.php for the kw "aadl" but i can't understand what Ii'm doing wrong (i desapear 2 mounths ago). The page is optimize (title, description, h1, h2 etc.) few links with different ancers, but google put a spamy site www[dot]aadl[dot]biz in top 3 ratheer my page. Can you give me some advice to fix this issue? What I am doing wrong? Tanks in advance
Technical SEO | | lkeria0 -
Ads above the fold penalty. Should I request reinclusion?
HI! My site has been losing traffic slowly for about 18 months. But it was in January 19 that was hit big time. My site has a lot of ads, including two 300x250 above the fold ads that were very lucrative for me. After January 19, I decided to remove only one ad of those two, but no change was reflected in the traffic. It is obvious that I needed to remove the other ad, but I didn't do it for two reasons. I still earn money from that ad and removing it would result in serious problems. A webmaster friend of mine that was hit too by this penalty, removed the ads and tried all sort of stuff to regain the lost traffic with NO LUCK in several months. He has unique and excellent content. So, after seeing his experience I didn't want to touch my biggest source of income and leave it as it is. My site has other problems that concerns Panda and maybe Penguin, and since yesterday I've been starting to fix them. Is it a good idea to request a reinclusion to check if I was manually penalized, without being previously notified by GWMT of any problem in my site? Thanks in advance, Enrique
Technical SEO | | enriquef0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
Can double content be a reason to not have PR?
In a bigger project are several domains that show the same content like the main-site (there is a reason to have it like that). Now those "double-content domains" are indexed and ranking in Google. But now I see that all those double-content domains have no pagerank visible, despite they do all have their unique own backlinks. Do you know why those domains don't show Pagerank? Can it really have something to do with the double-content situation?
Technical SEO | | kenbrother0 -
I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out.
I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out. In Google http://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&q=internet. The number 3 result is a big telecom provider in the Netherland called Ziggo. The ranking URL is https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/. However if you click on it you'll be directed to https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ HttpFox in FF however is not showing any redirects. Just a 200 status code. The URL https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ contains a hash, so the canonical URL should be https://www.ziggo.nl/. I can understand that. But why is Google showing the title and description of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/, when the canonical URL clearly is https://www.ziggo.nl/? Can anyone confirm my guess that Google is using the bulk SEO value (link juice/authority) of the homepage at https://www.ziggo.nl/ because of the hash, but it's using the relevant content of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/ resulting in a top position for the keyword "internet".
Technical SEO | | NEWCRAFT0