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 had problems with Wordpress plugins on their blog causing payment issues on the main site?
Looking to migrate a subdomain Wordpress site onto the main domain, but the payment system breaks based on one or more of the plugins used on the blog having been linked with spammy activity in the past. Need to isolate the plugin and remove before migrating or it'll break the site! Has anyone had any similar issues with some of the following plugins? Akismet Wordfence Security Subscribe2 Timber Backup Buddy
Technical SEO | | Amelia.Coleby0 -
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 -
Does Anyone Know How Linstant Works??
I recently installed Linkstant after reading lots of great reviews. I'm eager to use the new tool, but I would like to know HOW it works. Does it send Google queries?? Just to give you some background info, I was recently burned by Rank Tracker...after using the tool it killed any access to Google and ruined a Google+ event that our company had planned. I do not want this to happen again, so I'd like to know how exactly it works. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TMI.com0 -
Are we really at the mercy of anyone who wants to damage our SEO ranking?
I Hired a SEO specialist last December from India.. I was paying him every month and was feeling he was not doing is job. He was insuring me he was a White hat seo but in practice he was not doing anything good for my business: -Writing low quality content
Technical SEO | | groupemedia
-Getting constantly refused for article and press release post
-Flooding my social media of followers who have nothing to do with my business
-Always needed to push him so he was doing is job. He insured me I would start to see some results after 3 months. But nothing. He state that he send about 10 press release and article but those are no where to be found.. is defense is always "give it a couple of months." I search google for last month result with my name. every month I was doing it and I was just seeing some little non important results. Anyway I didnt make my payment and I block him access to all my site and social media and here is what he wrote me: "if I don’t see $500 payment in my account by 6<sup>th</sup> May, 2014 believe me you will face consequences. You would face set back in your business, if I know White Hat very well, then I know BLACK HAT ALSO FAR MUCH BETTER. IT WOULD ONLY TAKE ME TO SETUP FEW THINGS ON THE SOFTWARES AND I WILL LINK EVERY ODD WEBSITE TO YOUR WEBSITE" This guy is against is own rule of stating that he is a white hat SEO. My question is are we really at the mercy of those kind of Threat? Anyone can put my website down? Which recourse Do I have? I have his name, business information, photo...0 -
Does anyone use Ning (Custom social site)?
We just got a custom Ning site developed and the second we moved it to our domain, we lost almost all of our rankings in Google. So, we sign up for a SEOMoz Pro account and within a week we see that we have over 6,000 errors and warnings on our site. Duplicate content, duplicate page titles and pages with too many links. Is anyone using Ning and successfully maintaining 1st page rankings in Google? Seems to me that we need hundreds of fixes and modifications in the code of our site to fix all of these errors and get Google to take our penalizations off.
Technical SEO | | danlok0 -
Ambiguous Response to Google Reconsideration Request
Hello, On 9/11/12, we submitted a reconsideration request to Google for http://macpokeronline.com, at the time we received penalties from both penguin and manual removal. We have since worked on cleaning up our link profile, and got this response from Google: We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.macpokeronline.com/. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take. I honestly don't even know how to take this, we always showed up #1 while doing a site search, so it is kind of irrelevant to us in this case. Is this the reply of them accepting our request? Thanks Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Is this 302 re-direct on Magento a problem?
The SEOmoz crawler has pointed out this warning on my Magento store.. http://mydomain.co.uk redirects to http://www.mydomain.co.uk Is this a problem? My site is new, so don't want to get penalised this early on! Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MoA0 -
Has anyone worked with Edgecast?
They have a caching system where they assign multiple ip's based on location and we are curious how it affects SEO.
Technical SEO | | DragonSearch1