Has anyone seen direct improvement after April 23 by requesting reinclusion?
-
Using the open site explorer I have figured out that my former seo agency was buying name spam (mostly Asian sites)for my main keywords and did the same in a private network of blogs. I don't speak any eastern languages and seo Super Dude has left the planet. So... I don't really have much to report to the Google Webmaster folks.
How much time - effort- cash do invest in removal requests vs, redo the whole darn site and hope for the best?
All the best.
Tom
-
For some reason I can't "thumb" up any comments, but these are all good answers.
In Ian's case, 40 domains is a reasonable amount. Most websites will have many more than this, often in the 100's or 1000's of spammy, low-quality links that they paid for over time.
Also, there's no guarantee Google will ever lift the penalty, even if you remove 100's of links and submit multiple fully documented reinclusion requests to the Google Web Spam Team. I've known SEO's that have literally sent 1000s of emails and removed 100's of links to no avail. I've also seen smaller sites remove just a handful of links and their rankings bounce right back.
Here's how I would tackle the problem:
1. Do you think you can reasonably remove 60-75% of the links? Or at least have a VERY good reason why you can't? Anything beneath this level and you'll most likely be fighting an uphill battle with Google.
2. In some cases, even if you've been penalized by bad links, some of those bad links still help you - even at reduced traffic levels. So you may be penalized, but you're still seeing more traffic than you would otherwise. In a few cases it's not worth it to remove the links at all.
3. Finally, as Ian said, how many good links do you have? If the sight is truly burned, can you walk away from the good links without too much regret? If the answer is yes, it may be time to start over.
There's no right answer for all circumstances, so weigh your options carefully.
-
I went through OSE a few months ago and got together a list of about 40 domains that we had never asked for links from and were just spam.
I wrote to all that I could asking for removal and then put everything in a spreadsheet and sent it to Google. Two weeks later I was informed that a manual penalty had been removed.
Our organic Google traffic is now up over 150% from last year.
For us it was worth it.
-
Here is another way to look at it:
If you could delete all the low quality links to your site, how many really good links would you have left? If you wouldn't have much left, you should probably start over, and work on building high quality links.
-
In my personal opinion language shouldn’t be a problem as English is considered to be the universal language amount the IT dudes in Asia (At least I think that way...)
How much time, effort and cash to do the link cleanup... I believe this is very much depends upon how you want to go with the cleanup process... I really like this post regarding that by Cyrus Shepard http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/
This post will help you identify how much time, effort and cash will be required to complete the cleanup process.
Hope this helps!!
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
-
Has anyone else seen a large drop in Domain Authority this week?
A site of ours and its competitors have all seen pretty big drops in domain authority over the past week or so. Just wondering whether this could be something to do with a change in how DA is measured or whether its our backlink profile that is the problem. Any feedback would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEO_Jellyfish0 -
Is good webhosting and CCL Certificate, improve website Ranking?
I am wondering if good web hosting and CCL certificate help website to rank? any Idea!
Technical SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
Ranking not improving
Our site is now 3 months old (although the domain is older) but rankings don't seem to be improving at all. We've got some good quality relevant links coming into the site, and the content is unique and often updated. Is there something holding the site back? Am I being impatient? the site is www.help-my-mobility.org Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google. Sad times. I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months. All 5000 of them! Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam. About 2800 of them were junk. As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content. As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed. There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites. And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to! As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them. I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines." As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done? Cheers Steve
Technical SEO | | SteveBrumpton0 -
Pages crawled is only 23 even after 8 days??
Hello all, My site www.practo.com has at least more than 500+ pages. Still seomoz says its only 23 crawled till date even after 8 -10 days of the trial period. Now most of the pages on my site are in-site search pages. They appear when you search relevant terms with combinations etc. Is that hindering the moz crawler to look for those pages? Aditya
Technical SEO | | shanky11 -
Guest Blog Posts (Originally Seen on . .)
We are making a push to get our blog posts featured on other blogs, and bring in guest bloggers. We figured we could just repost a blog post on our blog, and link back to the original post. Obviously this provides some link juice, but do you think it's a bad idea because of duplicate content? Specifically, I'm also a Huffington Post blogger, so I have the option of writing an article, posting it on our site and HuffPo, and linking back to the original to give us links. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Anyone else seeing increased duplication of domains since Penguin?
Hi Is it just me or are the Google SERPs showing more duplication of domains since the penguin update. As an example if I search for "business Christmas cards" on google.co.uk then results 2, 3 and 17 are from the same domain. Similarly results 4, 20, 21 and 22 are the same domain. All results are "reasonable" in that they are designed to catch traffic for variations on this term BUT I'm sure google used to filter this duplication per-penguin. Am I imagining this increased duplication of domains? Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
Settle an argument re first links from a page? Anyone?
If we accept "the first link from a page to another is the one that transfers anchor text and PR" - does that then apply just the same for internal linking as it does with linking from domain to domain?
Technical SEO | | AidanMcCarthy0