Manual Penalty Reconsideration Request Help
-
Hi All,
I'm currently in the process of creating a reconsideration request for an 'Impact Links' manual penalty.
So far I have downloaded all LIVE backlinks from multiple sources and audited them into groups;
-
Domains that I'm keeping (good quality, natural links).
-
Domains that I'm changing to No Follow (relevant good quality links that are good for the user but may be affiliated with my company, therefore changing the links to no follow rather than removing).
-
Domains that I'm getting rid of. (poor quality sites with optimised anchor text, directories, articles sites etc.).
One of my next steps is to review every historical back link to my website that is NO LONGER LIVE. To be thorough, I have planned to go through every domain (even if its no longer linking to my site) that has previously linked and straight up disavow the domain (if its poor quality).But I want to first check whether this is completely necessary for a successful reconsideration request?
My concerns are that its extremely time consuming (as I'm going through the domains to avoid disavowing a good quality domain that might link back to me in future and also because the historical list is the largest list of them all!) and there is also some risk involved as some good domains might get caught in the disavowing crossfire, therefore I only really want to carry this out if its completely necessary for the success of the reconsideration request. Obviously I understand that reconsideration requests are meant to be time consuming as I'm repenting against previous SEO sin (and believe me I've already spent weeks getting to the stage I'm at right now)... But as an in house Digital Marketer with many other digital avenues to look after for my company too, I can't justify spending such a long time on something if its not 100% necessary.
So overall - with a manual penalty request, would you bother sifting through domains that either don't exist anymore or no longer link to your site and disavow them for a thorough reconsideration request? Is this a necessary requirement to revoke the penalty or is Google only interested in links that are currently or recently live?
All responses, thoughts and ideas are appreciated
Kind Regards
Sam
-
-
Thanks again for your response Gary.
With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not.
In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so.
So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains.
The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably).
So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming.
Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this?
Sam
-
Thanks for your response Richard.
This is however an extremely generic response to quite a specific question. I didn't ask what a reconsideration request does!
-
So sorry for the delay getting back to you, its been a crazy week and didnt notice the response.
"Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes."
OK, just to let you know, once they lift the manual penalty, you still need to wait for a Penguin refresh. my penalty was lifted in May 2013 the vast majority of crap links had not been crawled and took a very long time for Google to do so. For the disavow file to take effect it needs to crawl each of those pages with your disavow file in mind and change them to a nofollow. Once a healthy amount is crawled you will then be in good standing when the Penguin algo is run. If Penguin runs before you have an acceptable level of healthiness you will not be released form Penguin and will have to wait for the next. So it took us until Oct 17th 2014 for us to finally get released. This was WITH John Muellers help!
My advice is don't be too picky with what you keep. Go through everything, mine was 20,000 Referring domains with 250k links! We had a 10 year history of business online and at one point also attacked with negative seo. So was a big job
"Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch."
Yes, create a report to show the work you have done, whats removed, who you have contacted, who did not respond. I did an Excel spreadsheet, one domain per line, with a few fields like, last contacted, date, removed etc..
There are lots of programmes out there that help with this now. Not so easy when your the first and there are no tools for it!
Also its best to do domain instead of links, how many links do you have pointing to your site?
-
A good reconsideration request does three things:
- Explains the exact quality issue on your site.
- Describes the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue.
- Documents the outcome of your efforts.
-
Actually, I agree with you. What you're describing are sites that look like the link has been deleted, but where the link actually still exists. My answer was regarding sites where the link actually has been deleted and doesn't exist.
-
Thanks for your response Gary.
That does make sense and to be honest is something that worries me! I am putting faith into software here (ie. I haven't gone through every single domain manually and checked that the link is still live) which is telling me whether the link is still live or not. If Google's software tells them otherwise when they review my reconsideration request, then all my other efforts are most likely wasted. I take it from this that you would advise addressing the none active domains too?
Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes.
Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch.
cheers
Sam
-
Sorry I have to disagree,
There are many sites, specifically directory sites that list websites and as more sites get listed they push your link to page 3, 4, 5. It looks like the link does not exist but it does on another page.
Some sites are that are crappy also have poor connections/bandwidth etc... So they go up and down and overload all the time. Just because its down now does not mean its down later when Google crawls it.
When I did my now famous! link clean up these were both issues that came up when I got help from John Mueller at Google.
It sucks because its just a hell of a lot of work, but based on how long it takes for a penguin update to come about, I would make sure you get it right FIRST TIME or you could wait more than a year to see returns.
Feel free to ask me anything.
Best of luck
Gary
-
Yes, I would be very surprised if Google wanted you to do anything with links that no longer exist.
-
Thanks for your response, Adam.
Would you say the same for domains that are still live but no longer contain links to your site?
Thanks
-
No, I would not spend time on links/domains that no longer exist. (I've never heard of that being necessary.)
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
-
PLEASE HELP - Old query string URL causing problems
For a long time, we were ranking 1st/2nd for the term "Manual handling training". That was until about 5 days ago when I realised that Google had started to index not only a query stringed URL, but also an old version of the URL. What was even weirder was that when you clicked on the result it 301 redirected to the page that it was meant to display... The wrong URL that Google had started to index was: www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling?channel=retail The correct URL that it should have been indexing is: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling-training I can't get my head around why it has done this as a 301 was in place already and we use rel canonical tags which point to the main parent pages. Anyway, we slapped a noindex tag in our robots.txt file to stop that page from being indexed, which worked but now I can't get the correct page to be indexed, even after a Google fetch. After inspecting the correct URL in the new search console I discovered that Google has ignored the rel canonical on the page (Which points to itself) and has selected the wrong, query stringed URL as the canonical. Why? and how do I rectify this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iHasco1 -
Please Help me! I need advice for my website
I have 2 Domains with the same name vps nine and vpsn ine with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file. A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down. I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent. Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again. All comments greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Pure spam Manual Action by Google
Hello Everyone, We have a website http://www.webstarttoday.com. Recently, we have received manual action from Google says "Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines." . Google has given an example http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com/. The nature of the business of http://www.webstarttoday.com is to creating sub-domains (website builder). Anyone can register and create sub-domains. My questions are: What are the best practices in case if someone is creating sub-domain for webstarttoday.com? How can I revoke my website from this penalty? What should i do with other hundreds of sub-domains those are already created by third party like http://smoothblog.webstarttoday.com? . Why these type of issues don't come with WordPress or weebly. ? Regards, Ruchi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
Hello, I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords. Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc. Now my question is: 1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net? 2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this? 3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal? Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php. Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hpk0 -
Need help for new website!
I want to a make new website. Can you please advise me what all things are involved which I should keep in mind before and during the website preparation. Like how to make pages, what to include in website, best way to create pages etc. Please provide me the link where I can study all the above information. I am planning to create global printing website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
Does a 302 redirect pass penalties?
I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on. I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain. However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new. This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand. A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty. So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?) Thanks for your help! MB.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?
Hello everbody! I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines. We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic? kind regards, Jeroen from the Netherlands
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeroenpf0