Do you have to wait after disavowing before submitting a reconsideration request
-
Hi all
We have a link penalty at the moment it seems. I went through 40k links in various phases and have disavowed over a thousand domains that date back to old SEO work. I was barely able to have any links removed as the majority are on directories etc that no one looks after any more etc and / or which are spammy and scraped anyway.
According to link research tools link detox tool, we now have a very low risk profile (I loaded the disavowed links into the tool for it to take into consideration when assessing our profile). I then submitted a reconsideration request on the same day as loading the new disavowed file (on the 26th of April). However today (7th May) we got a message in webmaster central that says our link profile is still unnatural. Aaargh.
My question: is the disavow file taken into consideration when the reconsideration request is reviewed (ie is that information immediately available to the reviewer)? Or do we have to wait for the disavow file to flow through in the crawl stats? If so, how long do we have to wait?
I've checked a link that I disavowed last time and it's still showing up in the links that I pull down from Webmaster Central, and indeed links that I disavowed at the start of April are still showing up in the list of links that can be downloaded.
Any help gratefully received. I'm pulling my hair out here, trying to undo the dodgy work of a few random people many months ago!
Cheers,
Will
-
You seem to have a good handle on the issue but you might consider getting an experienced SEO in for at least a second opinion. We can only give very general help here on the Q&A, as we don't have access to your data
They do say to wait at least a few weeks for results
Cheers
S
-
Hi Stephen
I've been using the links downloaded from Webmaster (as directed to by Matt Cutts in one of his videos IIRC) plus also the data set from Link Research Tools. Is that insufficient? I've only got so many hours in the day as my day job is running this company...I figured taking the links that Google gave me would surely be enough...but these days who knows. G seems to want to make people jump through a lot of hoops...
-
Hey Marcus
Thanks for your input. Yeah, we have a lot of links but then we've been around for 7 years and weirdo scrapers and random replicants of DMOZ alone contribute a zillion links without us even having done anything. Not saying we didn't do link building back in the day (we did, just like everyone else, in what was at the time a white hat fashion but apparently no longer is) but we have had no permanent marketing team at all for the last two years as we've focused on some B2B parts of our business. So frustrating that bad links just kept growing and we're supposed to be responsible for them!
Anyway, as you say, will need to go in a bit harder I guess. eg just because a site is PR0, I didn't remove it before, as some random person with a no marks blog who used our birthday balloon picture on their blog didn't deserve to be disavowed as far as I thought. But, well, I can't take any chances now so will just have to bin anything under PR1 and take another look at links from themed websites (eg should I disavow other blogs that have added us to their blogroll unsolicited even if they're in our vertical? It's hard to tell. What about genuine flower directories? Who knows?).
What's really frustrating is that the whole message from Matt Cutts is "you really shouldn't use this tool" (ref disavow) as you could damage your site but 1. barely anyone takes links down when requested as far as I can tell and 2. given the amount of junk that's been pointed at our site that we're not responsible for (though we are are responsible for some), then I think the contention that very few people would need to use it is a bit optimistic and there's therefore a danger or people like me totally shooting themselves in the foot, given there are no clear rules on the grey areas I mention above.
PS understood that it's not some magic solution and we'll rank #1 for everything afterwards. I just want to get it cleared up and be able to get back to my day job. God knows how a smaller business than us would cope with something like this. Seems to me it pushes the advantage even further in the direction of bigger companies with the resources to manage a screw up like this.
Anyway, blah blah. Time to get the machete out.
-
In my experience, if you have this message again, you still have links they don't like. 35% of linking domains is not a great deal and as Stephen said, whilst Link Detox gives you a good starting place you really do have to audit these links in a brutal fashion.
You have 15000 external links from 2000 sites - that's a hell of a lot of links for a semi popular blog let alone a site that does not really publish any content that would attract links.
If you are holding onto links as you think they are 'ok' or because they 'don't look too bad' then you may need to get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.
Also, just because you remove the manual penalty, don't expect things to be amazing afterwards.
An alternative approach to finding the bad links and getting them removed is to identify the good ones and consider getting them repointed to a new URL and starting again with a rebrand / new URL. It can be easier to get a response from the good sites than it can be getting a response from the bad ones.
Failing that get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
-
How sure are you you have a full dataset of links? What did you use as you database for links to start cleaning from? (I would expect ahrefs, GWT, seomoz + majestic etc)
S
-
Well, I also went through all the links manually which was the world's most boring task, then followed up with a healthcheck. Gah.
We've disavowed about 35% of all linking domains now...
-
I doubt its a time thing, it's more likely that they still see dirty links that you have not disallowed
That's the problem with these jump one the bandwagon tools like Link detox et al - they give you a nice score but that doesn't mean anything
404ing burnt pages and starting again may be a much quicker process than messing around with link disavowal
How many domains were linking and how many domains did you disallow?
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
-
The Bad effect of Submitting Sitemap frequently?
Hi Mozzer... so, i keep thinking of this... what is the bad effect of submitting the sitemap frequently? is it something like google would smell something suspicious and begin to decrease my website's authority? and is there any supporting articles for it? my website is an e-commerce website by the way... so please, help me with this.. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ricoplaza0 -
Disavow backlinks
Is there any benefit in requesting manual removal over using the Google disavow file? Or is it just extra work for little result. I.e. is it better to just disavow straightaway and not mess around? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Site recovery after manual penalty, disavow, SSL, Mobile update = but dropped again in May
I have a site that has had a few problems over the last year. We had a manual penalty in late 2013 for bad links, some from guest blogs and some from spammy sites. Reconsideration requests had me disavow almost all of the incoming links. Later in 2014, the site was hit with link injection malware and had another manual penalty. That was cleared up and manual penalty removed in Jan 2015. During this time the site was moved to SSL, but there were some redirect problems. By Feb 2015 everything was cleared up and a an updated disavow list was added. The site recovered in March and did great. A mobile version was added in April. About May 1st rankings dropped again. Traffic is about 40% off it's March levels. Recently I read that a new disavow file will supersede an old one, and if all of the original domains and URLs aren't included in the new disavow file they will no longer be disavowed. Is this true? If so, is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update? Can I correct this by disavowing all the previously disavowed domains and URLs? Any advice for determining why the site is performing poorly again? We have well written content, regular blogs, nothing that seems like it should violate the Google guidelines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robertjw0 -
Disavow links of my own in niche forums that i post to regularly?
Hi Yall, I'm disavowing a new set of links and have come across a wall: Let's say your niche is in web hosting and you post to forums such as a webhostingtalk.com (a forum very popular in the hosting business). If your sole purpose is mostly selling your business and you have links (not anchor text keywords) that you direct users to for specific products and such...do you do a disavow those links? I'm not leaving links like: Web hosting, or, Free Hosting... I'm posting deals and answering some questions on other posts that direct to my site with traditional links. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Do I need to actively disavow links to my site?
I check the "Links to my site" section in Google WMT on a regular basis. In the past couple of months I've been seeing more and more weird links, from pretty spammy domains and even a few from weird Iranian domains. It's Needless to say but I have never bought a link or been involved in any link schemes or the like. Like probably everyone in the Internet, I'm in a competitive vertical, and my competitors probably aren't so scrupulous. The question is, do I actively need to disavow suspicious links? Should I contact the domains and ask to remove them? I have usually just ignored these links, and not wasted time in doing anything with them (since weird automated links are always around) but the proliferation in the last couple months has started to worry me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don341 -
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Manual reconsideration request not going away.
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am in need of the support from a knowledgeable community, my brain is hurting over this query and is not providing any answers! So I have got my fingers crossed that someone can spot the issue of why a website I am responsible for has been bumped out of the Google search results. In March this website (www.message me for details.com) lost all keyword rankings and also all brand terms. Action was taken to remove unnatural links as you can see from the timeline below these links have been removed. The manual review request has come back from Google and now seems to indicate the reason for the serps removal is due to 'some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines', which makes me think it the website itself as well and links that were causing the issue. So what has happened so far? 9 March - Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to www.message me for details.com 20 May - All 'unnatural' links that could not be removed by contacting website owners were compiled and added to the disavow tool. 29 May - Manual resubmission request submitted. 6 June - The following message received (see end of post): 18 June - updated disavow request submitted - roughly 40-50% links removed. 27 June – Manual review requested. 2 July - The following message received (see end of post): So after reviewing thousands of links and removing any poor-quality links, contacting webmaster and when not ale to remove manually I have added to a disavow list. Although their is a chance I have missed something in the link reviews but I am pretty confident that anything that could be considered spammy as been removed or disavowed. I have also used the tech crawl tool and there are no issues showing up there. I am at a lose as to what is cauing this issue. I need some advice on what steps to take next.. Regards, Colin Google message Dear site owner or webmaster of www.message me for details.com,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TeamSEO
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.havenpower.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.havenpower.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visithttps://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.0 -
While SEOing .com.au websites should I submit blogs and PRs only in .com.au Blogging / PR sites?
While SEOing .com.au, websites I am submitting PRs in sites like prweb.com, pr.com, prlog.com etc. Is that the right way or should I submit these PRs in Australian PR sites only (.com.au)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0