Links Removed from Site but not Google Webmaster Tools

[kchandler]

I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days.

After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed.

Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website?

Thank you in advance,
Kyle

[SEOAndy]

do the links still show in OSE and majestic?

GWT can take 6 months to show a drop of links in my experience, and sometimes longer - it basically will only show it once its revisited the site to makesure the page or link doesn't exist. This means if you are one of say a million links on the page it will take a long time to get reindexed because its huge and likely to be low value - but that link wont disappear until its been reindexed or disavow has been accepted for that page.

Have you spotted any dropping links at all?

[kchandler]

Thanks for the response Andy!

Yes we have seen a decent amount of links get removed, close to 600. However none from this blog network that was the largest culprit. It was just driving me crazy that we got them removed but Google is still showing them there if i do a query of site:blog.com + "brand name"

I just wish there was a way to make Google recrawl that blog indepth rather than waiting, which on that point, what happened to Google cached pages?

[SEOAndy]

cache is in the little drop down to the right of the url in searches (usually).

Theres no way to force google to go and reindex the page in full, if its been 6 months and they are still definitely the cause of problems disavow them - whilst not the ideal solution at this point in time it can work. but i advise only doing it if it definitely that site or set of sites causing you issues. you may find google is ignoring those links now but the index just hasnt been updated. Also there is no telling how out of date sections of GWT are.

[kchandler]

Gotcha, i already disavowed their entire domain do you think it would be more effective disavowing each URL that they have listed in GWT?

[david.smith.segarra]

Hey Kyle,

I've not read through all the answers here so apologies if this has already been mentioned but have you used Googles Disavow?

Google says "If you believe your site's ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"

Am pretty sure that as long as you have removed all unnatural links and you have added them through Disavow they will eventually be removed from GWT... they can take sometime unfortunately..

Hope this helps

[Doc_Sheldon]

Kyle, if you have done a domain level disavow, there's no need to do another URL by URL.
We are seeing disavow take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to take effect. Wish I could offer better news, but it looks like you're in a hurry-up-and-wait mode.