Google Reconsideration Request - Most Efficient Process
-
Hi,
I'm working on a Google reconsideration request for a site with a longstanding penalty.
Here's what I did:
Round 1
- Downloaded a CSV of all the domains and all the pages linking to the site. Went through the lot manually and sorted them into three types: Disavow Domain, Disavow Page, Keep
- All low-quality domains were disavowed, all pages from places like blogspot with low-quality links on certain blogs were disavowed. Submitted disavow file, then sent a detailed reconsideration request including a link to the disavow file.
Reconsideration request was not successful. Google gave two examples of links I should remove, bizarrely the examples they gave were already disavowed, which seemd a bit odd. So I took this to mean Google Webmaster Tools and disavow files were in themselves not enough. The links I kept were largely from PRWeb syndication which seems legit.
Round 2
Here's what I'm doing now. Any ideas for how the below process can be improved to get the maximum chance of a successful request, please let me know.- Get all linking pages from Webmaster Tools as before and also MajesticSEO's Historic Index. This gave me around three times more domains to remove. The additionnal domains from Majestic that weren't in Webmaster tools I just put them all in the disavow file.
- Conduct a manual link removal email campaign. I've got around 2500 domains to go through, so how can I best do this. My process at the moment is:
- Use software to get email addresses from whois records
- send them an email
- make a spreadsheet of responses
- include link to spreadsheet in Google Docs as well as link to new disavow file
Should I research each site manually to get email addresses? It does seem rather a waste of an offshorer's time, from what I've seen some people use offshorers and others have used software tools successfully. The other thing is sending the emails, how can I do this? Any smtp email campaign site won't let me use their service because the emails are not opt-in, they classify it as spam. Does anyone know a solution to send 2500 emails legitimately from a webmail account for example? I'm having to send bulk emails to get rid of spam links.
Finally most of the offending links have keyword anchor text from spun articles, I've deleted all the sites except EzineArticles. Would you delete this too, it's an awful site but client is hung up on it. ExineArticle links may have some value, on the other hand it's more of the same keyword-rich anchor text articles. Keep or disavow the individual pages?
Finally, anything else I've missed? Anything to add? Thanks for all your help
-
I personally do everything manually. I think that the link removal tools can work great for some sites, but your best chance at identifying the bad links and keeping the good ones is to look at them manually. 2500 domains is a lot, but not impossible. I'm currently working on an account of about that size and it will take me about 10-14 days to go through as many. Once you get going you will recognize patterns and it will go faster.
I used to get emails on my own but I have just hired someone to do this for me. I find that the automated tools miss a lot of them. I was considering hiring from o-desk or mechanical turk, but in my situation, because my business is expanding and most of what I do is penalty removal, it's worth my while to hire and train someone to do this for me.
btw...if you've got 2500 domains, you won't have 2500 emails. Many will be offline or nofollowed or perhaps even natural.
Ezine Articles links definitely need to be removed if they are followed links. Often times those links are nofollowed, but if you have a high enough account level there then they are followed and need to go.
A few other points:
-Yes you're right. It's not enough to just disavow. Google's going to want to see evidence that you've tried hard to remove links.
-Lately I have only be using links from WMT and not other sources like Majestic and ahrefs. That may cut down on the number of domains you have to deal with. So far it is working for me.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Dates on Google Search Results
Hello, I manage htts://globalrose.com When I search on Google for "Yellow Roses", "Yellow Roses Globalrose", or any search that might bring up one of our pages, sometimes our search results appear with dates right before the description. Does anyone know what this mean? Why they appear on some and not other pages? Here is a search result for example: Example Google Search Can someone please help clarify this for us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What should i do?
Hello, We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue. We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty . We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages. Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages. All thoughts or recommendations are welcome. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iThinkMedia0 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Why is our page will not being found by google?
Hi, We have a page that went live nearly 2 months ago. https://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate Why does google not notice it. Both site: URL's return nothing. site:www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate site:www.invoicestudio.com/Secure This is an important page for us and do not understand why google doesn't like it. Hope you can help Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Google places keyword variations
Hi all, I have a site that is ranking #1 in Google Places for its main <city><keyword>search... but it does not rank for any of its basic keyword variations, which I find very confusing.</keyword></city> ie (just an example) Chicago Caterer (ranked #1 in google places)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | x2264983x
Chicago Caterers (not ranked in google places)
Chicago Catering (not ranked in google places)
Chicago Catering Company (not ranked in google places)
Chicago Catering Companies (etc..) How can I secure a google places ranking for these simple keyword variations? Do I build links to the google plus page using that anchor text? Do I get citations that contain that keyword somewhere on the page? Do I optimize for these keyword variations on the actual website itself? (not the places listing). Obviously I don't stuff these keywords into the google places listing. Any help would be much appreciated!0 -
Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!0 -
Sitelinks: Does Google Recognize Your Requests for Removal?
I've been trying to influence branded SERPs recently by demoting certain pages from appearing in the Sitelinks feature provided in Google's Webmaster Tools. However, despite demoting various URLs, they continue to appear for the branded SERPs nearly a week after they should've been suppressed. What is your experience with Sitelinks? Do links you request to demote ever disappear or change positions in the SERPs for you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eMagineSEO0 -
Fixing Google Places once Banned
I have a lot of clients who have somehow botched up their Google Places listing, and now are not showing up in local search results. In one particular case, they were using 2 different Gmail accounts and submitted their listing twice by accident. It appears Google has banned them from local search results. How does one undo steps like this and start fresh? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocsearch0