Google Webmaster Tools - When will the links go away!?

[zadro]

About 9 months back we thought having an extremely reputable company build our client some local citations would be a good idea. You definitely know this citation company, but I'll leave names out. Regardless, it's our mistake to cut corners.

Google Webmaster Tools quickly picked up these new citations and added them to the links section.

One of these citation spawned a complete mess of about 60K+ links on their network of sites through ridiculous subdomains of every state in the country and so many other domain variations. We immediately went into remove mode and had the site's webmaster take down the bad links from their site.

This process took about a month for outreach. The bad links (60K+) have not been on the spam site for well over 6 months but GWT still shows them in the "links to your site" section. Majestic, Bing, and OSE only displayed the bad links for a brief time.

Why is webmaster tools still showing these links after 6+ months? We typically see GWT update about every 2 weeks, a month tops. Any ideas? Could a changed robots.txt on the bad site prevent Google from updating the links displayed in GWT?

We have submitted to disavow, but Google replied with "no manual penalty". We even blasted the bad site with Fiverr links, in hopes that Google would re-crawl them. No luck with anything we do. We have patiently waited for way too long.

The rankings for this site got crushed on Google after these citations. How do we fix this? Should we worry about this? Any advice would really help. Thanks so much in advance.

[zadro]

Hi Sha,

Thank you for your response. I know Google can take some time to update, but the amount of time we've waited for Google to re-crawl seems a bit extreme. I went ahead and emailed the webmaster of the origin site to see if they would consider re-working their robots.txt file.

I really appreciate your response and helpful direction.

Dario

[zadro]

Hi Dana,

Thank you so much for your very helpful response. The Chartelligence app is very interesting, thanks for that nugget too! The rankings drop is right around the Panda 3/14 algo update, according to the app. We did run the entire site through copyscape just about a month ago. Maybe we need to focus some more efforts here? However, I almost positive these citations did the most damage. We will keep digging.

Really enjoyed the side note also

Thank you,

Dario

[danatanseo]

Thanks Shah. Dario, listen to Shah. She knows way more about this topic than I do. Her comments will be helpful I am sure.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Dario,

Just one thing to remember - links/domains submitted via the disavow tool will not disappear from your GWMT list as long as they still exist. Google simply discounts them when ranking your site, so you shouldn't spend time checking to see if they have dropped out of the list.

If they have absolutely been removed, then yes it is quite possible that googlebot has been unable to crawl the site of origin (but if there are hundreds of sites then they would all have to have the same roadblock in place) for none to be crawled.

Dana is quite right in saying that Webmaster tools is notorious for updating slowly (and incorrectly at times) and she is absolutely on the money in advising that you need to try to nail down the cause of the rankings drop so you know what you are dealing with.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[danatanseo]

This is one of those situations where it seems like you've done everything right, but you still lose. It's something every SEO can Identify with I am sure.

Here are some things I would think about before deciding what to do next:

• Google Webmaster Tools "Links to Your Site" is notoriously slow, and has, even in recent months, been completely wrong for more than a month at a time. There was a period of about 6 weeks in the past year alone where it was reporting "0" links to many peoples' sites. Remember, it's a free tool, not without its own problems.
• Google let you know there's been no manual penalty....regardless, that doesn't mean of course that an algorithm change or Penguin refresh didn't chew up your site and spit it out. I'm sure you've already considered this.
• Do you know the approximate date that these 60,000 links showed up? I am thinking you can narrow it down pretty accurately. Try uploading that date into Chartelligence (it's a Chrome app) and then overlay that on your Google Analytics data. Does that date correspond with any significant changes in site metrics? Can you reasonably show causation?

My point on the last thought is: you want to be absolutely certain that it's those links that caused your rankings drop. You also want to know if that rankings drop significantly affected your site performance.  It's very possible that it could have been something else, or a combination of several things that caused it, not just those links alone. If you can say, after considering all of the above, that you are 95% certain those links were the sole cause of the rankings problem, and the rankings drop is significantly impacting your site performance...then you will know more clearly how to proceed. I'm sorry it's not a better answer in terms of "do x" and you will "achieve y." But this is one of those situations when diagnosis can be difficult.

(Total side note: It's funny, you know, people go to doctors all of the time who have difficulty accurately diagnosing ailments, and they are pretty tolerant of that. They'll even take prescription medication from a doctor who might even say outright they don't know what the problem is, so they are going to try treating the symptoms. Even so, medicine is a highly-respected profession. Conversely, SEOs attempting to make accurate diagnosis and treat the symptoms of a problem are often maligned as being nothing more than "crafty guessers" because no one really knows the Google algorithm. I've had stakeholders refuse to follow my suggestions because I couldn't say with 100% certainty that my diagnosis was correct because, as one continually says: "You don't know Google's algorithm, do you?" He's gone so far as to completely throw out anything an SEO, SEO company or anyone associated with an SEO site like Moz has to say. If it doesn't come from Google directly, he views it all as bunk. This was a bit of a sidebar, but I just wanted to express that it can be very difficult to get a client to accept a diagnosis that's an "educated guess." We have a long way to go in building up our profession to the point where stakeholders value and trust our expertise.)