My Reconsideration Request Was Denied, Now What?
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2 weeks ago, I submitted a disavow links request to Google and I was quite sure I did a great job at cleaning the links. I won't go into detail about how I did it but let's say that I reviewed manually each link that didn't get flagged as toxic by Link Detox.
At the same time, I submitted a reconsideration request explaining what I did and mentioning that I submitted a list of links to disavow.
I never got any reply about the disavow links request but I got my reconsideration request denied today:
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Dear site owner or webmaster of ...
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider ... 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
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Should've I waited to get some kind of reply about the disavow link list before submitting the reconsideration request?
Also I see links from scrappers increasing exponentially lately and I mean I get a sh*load of bad links from them with random anchor text gibberish. Do they expect me to include these links too?
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Interesting - hadn't heard that re: G-docs. Makes some sense. I only balked because I've seen plenty of people provide links directly in the request in the past and ultimately be successful. I can see where it could turn into a headache for Google. I would be surprised if they refused a request solely on that, but you never know.
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Hi Dr. Pete,
From what I can gather from the videos below. The reason Google wants you to use a Google Docs/Apps product when submitting links to what could be bad websites during a link disavow reconsideration request. It is because they are commonly getting links that will results in malware, redirects or other undesirable things for the web spam team. However using Google software assures they can tell if the link is bad or not without having to use other software or go through hoops. (It It can sometimes feel like fixing a hole in the wall.)
I queued up the video to the exact part where Matt Cutts starts to speak about it in the 1st video attached and added the entire video for information to help others in the future next to it. I also found a real message from Google replying to someone who had already submitted a cool disavowal link request. Is that think it's very interesting.
http://www.poweredbysearch.com/google-reconsideration-request-example/
I hope this is of some help and I agree with Dr. Pete and not is extremely diverse, and the answers you'll receive even from Google. There is no magic bullet in my opinion. I also think Sha has a lot of wonderful things to say.
These things are labor-intensive and never fun. I think it's somewhat like putting a lot of money into the slot machine and getting one turn only to find out that the machine operated differently than expected you thought you just had to pull on the arm only when you look to see if you've won you find out you have to pay to rebuild the machine. If anyone you hired in the past was doing black hat Seo this should be included in the letter. Or I should say presentation. It's designed to be the most transparent true confession to a private company I've ever heard of. However you must play by their rules, and what I would do is look at what's the best way to fix my site because unfortunately Google is brought to light that my site is not working correctly and has unfortunately penalized/changed their view on your ranking.As far as rebuilding or re-submitting
It comes down to what your site is making for you and how long it would take to create a site that was obviously not a copy of the original site obviously not intended to make any of Google's guidelines and that will take a significant amount of time to rank. The cost of just doing a thorough top to bottom inspection by an expert in this field is extremely high there are ways of making sure you have a good chance of alleviating the penalty. However you must understand that the traffic that was being generated from the bad links is gone if that significant that's a problem. If it's not significant it's not a problem. If it is gone then the battle is just started and you must start practicing real company stuff along with everything else there are no is no sense and actually trying a company that generates $40 billion a year in revenue at its own game. It's a losing war
6
You are also on parole essentially after you file a disavow you have the eyes and ears of Google on you if you mess up in the future they are less tolerant.
However I think Dr. Pete, and Sha will agree with me there are ways to keep your website and dropped the penalty however the cost is extremely high and there are never guarantees. Depending on how severe the penalty is it could take the amount of time a quality site needs to be built and rank that's the worst-case scenario. However you do not want to contaminate the new site with anything from the old.I hope this is been helpful,
Thomas -
The GWT showed me about 6,500 back links while other tools like Link Detox returned about 1,500 to 2,000 links and I merge all lists. If that ain't enough, I don't know how to find all the back links to my website...
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Hey Dr Pete,
The Googledocs reference comes out of Matt Cutts' specific advice not to provide external links to the Webspam Team as they have security protocols which mean they will be unlikely to look at them.
It is included in the Webmaster video embedded on this page: http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php
Unfortunately, the little advice that comes from Googlers varies wildly, so in the end, site owners need to apply a good measure of careful thought and common sense.
See you at Mozcon
Sha
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Unfortunately, this can be a very frustrating process. Let's say for example that you have 2,000 back-links, and 500 of them are of dubious quality (not outright spammy, but questionable). You remove 400 of those, at considerable time and cost, and think you're doing great, but it turns out Google only actually cared about 5 paid links, and you didn't touch those. So, no go. If they told you any of that, it might be easy, but since they don't, we've seen this situation play out over and over.
There has been some mixed information coming from Google regarding the relationship between disavow and reconsideration (one rep we talked to gave us information that differed a bit from John Mueller's info). My best guess is that, if you file reconsideration, they will take the disavow request into account, so it probably isn't a question of just bad luck with the timing. Odds are good that they're still seeing something they don't like.
Of course, also keep in mind that Google seems to want to see a good faith effort to actually remove those links. So, as Sha implied, just a disavow list might not be enough, and they may choose to disregard it if it doesn't seem to go hand-in-hand with an actual attempt to clean up the link profile. As Thomas said, you want to document that attempt as best you can. I'm not aware of any restriction that you use Google Docs, but the more information you can give Google to show good faith, the better.
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Hi sbrault74,
No, links that have been disavowed will not disappear from your GWMT most recent links list.
Google has made it clear that a disavow instruction is treated as a suggestion only and since the links have not actually been removed from the web, they will remain visible in the list.
Googler John Mueller made this clear in a public Hangout a few months ago.
While it is difficult to make judgements about your process, whether you have provided sufficient detail in your reconsideration request etc, there is one area to consider that jumps out at me from your post.
It seems the only data source you have used to identify troublesome links is the GWMT list. Google provides only a sample of backlinks in this list, and we know from experience that every tool which provides backlink data will return a different list. While there will be some overlap (which means you will need to deduplicate your list), there is always a number of links found by each which do not appear elsewhere.
You should also make sure that you include links from any old SEO reports and other lists that may have been provided by link builders etc.
There is information in these slide decks that will give you some tips (and there are some almost invisible links in the slides) for data mining and email outreach:
Move or Remove, The Where, Why and How of Dealing with Penguins & Penalties
10 Link Removal Mistakes You Never Want To Make
and if you haven't read this post from Ryan Kent yet, you should do that before going any further.
If you are looking for tools and resources that might be helpful, you will find a short list of both, including a reconsideration request checklist in the sidebar of rmoov.com under helpful tools and resources.
Hope that helps,
Sha
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Unfortunately PRWeb was a bad choice for it press release. Honestly today you do not want to issue press releases through companies like PRWeb it all. You want to issue them get your own website and try to distribute them to your own customers and newsletter sources. Only those who have opted in willingly. The reason why I was here in this link. I hope this is better information on the best way to distribute company news. I understand exactly why you would want to Büscher ratings. I don't believe that this had anything to do with your request being denied however it probably did not help.
http://searchengineland.com/how-prweb-helps-distribute-crap-into-google-news-sites-140597
I will look forward to hearing from you when you get some sleep and I will be available so please feel free to contact me when you have time.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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The press release was sent through prweb.com
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By the way, what I did is I imported the list of backlinks from GWT into Linx Detox (http://www.linkresearchtools.com/). I included all the "toxic" and "suspicious" links and I reviewed manually all the "healthy" links.
By the way, I think I screwed myself over by sending a press release in April. It is considered as spammy?
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Hi Thomas,
I'll keep you updated soon. I sent you a PM.
It's 5:27 am here... Google keeps me up at night. Too tired to give you all the details now, I'll come back in a few hours.
Thanks
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Fantastic I will have a look at that right now just wanted to let you know I was just writing the other message. I apologizes or not see this earlier. I will send you a message right back as soon as I do very QuickScan okay?
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Please accept my apologies for any words that sound strange or misspellings or grammar. I am using this cell phone right now to reply. You state
"2 weeks ago, I submitted a disavow links request to Google and I was quite sure I did a great job at cleaning the links. I won't go into detail about how I did it but let's say that I reviewed manually each link that didn't get flagged as toxic by Link Detox".
Each link that didn't get flagged as toxic by link detox? So you're saying that you used link detoxed to determine what you thought was toxic or not and then made the decision to keep the links or remove links based on your findings?
"Also I see links from scrappers increasing exponentially lately and I mean I get a sh*load of bad links from them with random anchor text gibberish. Do they expect me to include these links too?"
The answer to your second question cord above. It is most definitely unfortunately every single bit of information needs to be put in a very unique way to Google meaning you have to use Google Docs to submit links it's a very complex process and if you don't do it correctly they will Not remove the penalty for you they have so many people getting flagged these days that they're extremely busy. And things must be done in their order. I'm not saying that you did not do this as you did not explain your process. However apparently they believe that your website is still in violation of their terms. So if you would like some help with this I will be more than happy to assist you with it. However I don't know what You did to get the original warning? And did you even reply on the original request in the same email document that's important. I could go on and on. Let me know if you need some help I'm sorry if I sound redundant and I know this is not a fun topic but it's something I have experience in getting success results from Google I'm not saying I have any agreements or anything like that with them please don't get me wrong I just know it needs to be done in order to get your site to have the penalty lifted. And please remember depending on your site that might be where the re-ranking work actually begins you never know your site most has to deal with So many issues that I could speculate forever and I don't want to make it sound like I am implying anything. However Google is extremely strict I know what to do if you want my help I am more than happy to help you. All the best sincerely, Thomas
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Sent!
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Unfortunately. Without seeing your URL I can't tell you exactly how bad the problem is. However I can tell you that this is an extremely complex subject that you're talking about. And I have dealt with this many times. You truly need to make an effort to fix the links prior to resubmitting them. I don't know if you have or not?
This is a process that Google expects from anyone that has been flagged. Meaning you must make an effort a very true earnest effort to get his many links removed from the webmasters pointing them to your's website as you possibly can. If you cannot get them removed you must then include all the names of the webmasters and it on more documentation on what you've done. To Google before they will Ever lift a penalty. I can give you some more advice with this if you would like?
Sincerely,
Thomas
PS
please private message me your URL if you're uncomfortable sending it here I would be happy to speak with you regarding this.
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And by the way, if a disavow links file has been processed, should I expect these links to go away in GWT?
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