Manual Penalty Reconsideration Request Help

[Sandicliffe]

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

[Sandicliffe]

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

[Sandicliffe]

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!

[gazzerman1]

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?

[TheeDigital]

A good reconsideration request does three things:

1. Explains the exact quality issue on your site.
2. Describes the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue.
3. Documents the outcome of your efforts.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en

[AdamThompson]

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.

[Sandicliffe]

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

[gazzerman1]

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

[AdamThompson]

Yes, I would be very surprised if Google wanted you to do anything with links that no longer exist.

[Sandicliffe]

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

[AdamThompson]

No, I would not spend time on links/domains that no longer exist. (I've never heard of that being necessary.)