Our Robots.txt and Reconsideration Request Journey and Success

[TheCraig]

We have asked a few questions related to this process on Moz and wanted to give a breakdown of our journey as it will likely be helpful to others!

A couple of months ago, we updated our robots.txt file with several pages that we did not want to be indexed.  At the time, we weren't checking WMT as regularly as we should have been and in a few weeks, we found that apparently one of the robots.txt files we were blocking was a dynamic file that led to the blocking of over 950,000 of our pages according to webmaster tools.  Which page was causing this is still a mystery, but we quickly removed all of the entries.

From research, most people say that things normalize in a few weeks, so we waited.  A few weeks passed and things did not normalize.  We searched, we asked and the number of "blocked" pages in WMT which had increased at a rate of a few hundred thousand a week were decreasing at a rate of a thousand a week.  At this rate it would be a year or more before the pages were unblocked.

This did not change.  Two months later and we were still at 840,000 pages blocked.

We posted on the Google Webmaster Forum and one of the mods there said that it would just take a long time to normalize.  Very frustrating indeed considering how quickly the pages had been blocked.

We found a few places on the interwebs that suggested that if you have an issue/mistake with robots.txt that you can submit a reconsideration request.  This seemed to be our only hope.  So, we put together a detailed reconsideration request asking for help with our blocked pages issue.

A few days later, to our horror, we did not get a message offering help with our robots.txt problem.  Instead, we received a message saying that we had received a penalty for inbound links that violate Google's terms of use.  Major backfire.  We used an SEO company years ago that posted a hundred or so blog posts for us.  To our knowledge, the links didn't even exist anymore.  They did....

So, we signed up for an account with removeem.com.  We quickly found many of the links posted by the SEO firm as they were easily recognizable via the anchor text.  We began the process of using removem to contact the owners of the blogs.  To our surprise, we got a number of removals right away!  Others we had to contact another time and many did not respond at all.  Those we could not find an email for, we tried posting comments on the blog.

Once we felt we had removed as many as possible, we added the rest to a disavow list and uploaded it using the disavow tool in WMT.  Then we waited...

A few days later, we already had a response.  DENIED.  In our request, we specifically asked that if the request were to be denied that Google provide some example links.  When they denied our request, they sent us an email and including a sample link.  It was an interesting example.  We actually already had this blog in removem.  The issue in this case was, our version was a domain name, i.e. www.domainname.com and the version google had was a wordpress sub domain, i.e. www.subdomain.wordpress.com.

So, we went back to the drawing board.  This time we signed up for majestic SEO and tied it in with removem.  That added a few more links.  We also had records from the old SEO company we were able to go through and locate a number of new links.  We repeated the previous process, contacting site owners and keeping track of our progress.  We also went through the "sample links" in WMT as best as we could (we have a lot of them) to try to pinpoint any other potentials.

We removed what we could and again, disavowed the rest.  A few days later, we had a message in WMT.  DENIED AGAIN!  This time it was very discouraging as it just didn't seem there were any more links to remove.  The difference this time, was that there was NOT an email from Google.  Only a message in WMT.  So, while we didn't know if we would receive a response, we responded to the original email asking for more example links, so we could better understand what the issue was.

Several days passed we received an email back saying that THE PENALTY HAD BEEN LIFTED!  This was of course very good news and it appeared that our email to Google was reviewed and received well.

So, the final hurdle was the reason that we originally contacted Google.  Our robots.txt issue.  We did not receive any information from Google related to the robots.txt issue we originally filed the reconsideration request for.  We didn't know if it had just been ignored, or if there was something that might be done about it.  So, as a last ditch final effort, we responded to the email once again and requested help as we did the other times with the robots.txt issue.

The weekend passed and on Monday we checked WMT again.  The number of blocked pages had dropped over the weekend from 840,000 to 440,000!  Success!  We are still waiting and hoping that number will continue downward back to zero.

So, some thoughts:

1.  Was our site manually penalized from the beginning, yet without a message in WMT?  Or, when we filed the reconsideration request, did the reviewer take a closer look at our site, see the old paid links and add the penalty at that time?  If the latter is the case then...

2.  Did our reconsideration request backfire?  Or, was it ultimately for the best?

3.  When asking for reconsideration, make your requests known?  If you want example links, ask for them.  It never hurts to ask!  If you want to be connected with Google via email, ask to be!

4.  If you receive an email from Google, don't be afraid to respond to it.  I wouldn't over do this or spam them.  Keep it to the bare minimum and don't pester them, but if you have something pertinent to say that you have not already said, then don't be afraid to ask.

Hopefully our journey might help others who have similar issues and feel free to ask any further questions.

Thanks for reading!

TheCraig

[PaddyDisplays]

Hopefully I'll never be in the situation you found yourselves in, but a great read and now I know what to expect if I ever do (touch wood).

This might have been better as a youmoz post than a forum post btw.

[siteoptimo]

Another thing: don't trust one tool when having a lot of bad links. removeem.com is only one source where you can find your links.

[TheCraig]

Indeed Pieter!  Additionally, removem showed us a LOT of links that "needed" to be removed, that didn't actually need to be removed.  It's important to know your backlinks if at all possible and know for yourself which ones are the spammy ones.  If we went on what removem told us we should remove, we would have removed WAY more links than we needed to.

Thanks for the response!

[TheCraig]

Thanks Paddy!  Yeah debated whether to post here or on youmoz... You are probably right.

Thanks for reading!

[PaddyDisplays]

considering this thread has only 36 views I think you should go ahead a post on youmoz, as I think its deservers more exposure ( maybe added pieter point and your warning about not to blindly follow removem)