Six Reconsiderations and Zero options left - Where do I go from here?

[BlueTent20]

I have a client that I'm trying to get reindexed after they did extensive link farming in the past through other companies. We've poured countless hours in and I've submitted 6 Disavows/Reconsiderations and watched every video from Google on the topic. The client has also invested a significant amount of money into our work.
We've used the following to try and find links:

-Google Webmaster Tools (Shows a limit of 1,000 domains)

-Bing Webmaster Tools

-Link Detox (paid)

-Google Analytics (Lifetime Referral Report)

-Open Site Explorer

All we've gotten is automated responses with 2 sample links. In the latest one, they only supplied 1 sample link, which was odd because it said 'sample URLs'.

Either way, we feel that we're out of options. Is it time to throw in the towel and inform the client, or are there other resources we can exhaust?

Where do we go from here?

Thanks!

[BlueTent20]

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

I know the end of the rope feeling, this is what I would do if I were in your situation.

I would use every link finding tool I could to find all of the links to their site, majestic, seo moz,ahrefs, everything. Then I would disavow anything that even remotely looks spammy. Next I would set up an adwords account and start advertising, maybe a few hundred dollars. I would let that go on for about a month or so, then I would contact the sales person that Google puts in charge of the account and see if they can do anything before you submit another reconsideration.

[BlueTent20]

I've already progressed in the process to the point where I've disavowed everything that basically isn't Facebook, Google, or hugely credible sites similar to those. They're already doing PPC at the moment to try and account for the near 100% loss in Organic traffic that Google is pummeling them with.

I imagine the PPC representative won't be able to help me with my penalty, but I'm down to give it a shot. Anything at this point really =/

[loopyal]

Are you saying that the site is completely deindexed, or that it is just poorly indexed?

Were there other issues, not just the bad links? - such as duplicate content.

Are there technical issues? Does "Fetch as googlebot" work OK?

What did the reconsideration responses say?

Now that you have disavowed, have you tried again to get the links removed?

When you asked for reconsideration, did you detail how you had requested the link removals?

[BlueTent20]

Links were the only issue, but their link profile was massive and poisonous to say the least, haha.

They haven't been completely deindexed, but they don't show up in any non-branded terms anymore. They aren't even ranked 1 for branded terms (their company name). Very, very poorly indexed.

Everything else works fine: fetch as Googlebot, etc. They've just decreased so heavily in the rankings that being deindexed would just about do the same thing at this point.

[loopyal]

Are their pages buried because they are seen as duplicates?

What happens if you take a chunk of text and search for a quoted copy of it?

Are they the only ones there or are they not there - and in the duplicate results?

And does WMT show a manual penalty?

[BlueTent20]

I probably should have clarified more: they have a manual penalty for link farming. They have a brand new site that doesn't have any duplicate content, sneaky redirects or anything else. It's purely link farming and nothing else at all.

The WMT penalty is shown as Unnatural Inbound Links - Impacts Links, which is a downgrade from their previous penalty, but they're still taking hits on what is now a completely destroyed organic keyword profile.

I've sent in 6 Reconsiderations and have used the tools I mentioned above to find links to no avail (except getting the penalty downgraded). I'm just looking for other ideas as far as where to go from here regarding the manual link penalty.

Basically: Should I keep trying to fight it or throw in the towel? And if I do keep trying to fight it, what do I do next since I've used every tool imaginable?

[loopyal]

It is only time to throw in the towel if your client doesn't care about the domain name and you don't care about any good links and you want to upset the good sites that linked to you.

You didn't say how you tried to clean up the bad links and you didn't say what you told google.

If you didn't try very hard to clean up and just disavowed, then my guess (which seems obvious after 6 attempts) is that the reconsideration team said "you made a mess, you can't be bothered to clean it up and now you want us to help you? No, you need to spend more time in hell."

So here is what I think you could do.

1. Go to all the same places you went, to find as many links as you can - there may be new ones now that those services didn't see before.

2. check to discover which ones are still in place.

3. If those bad links are NOT pointing to the home page, consider returning 404 or 410 for those pages and change the URL of them - DO NOT 301 redirect to the new page. This will lose the link juice and hopefully, it will be enough, but you should also at least try to get those links removed.

4. If those bad links point to the home page, you need to try much harder to get them removed.

5. You need to thoroughly document all of this.

6. Even if you get all the links removed and you 404 and then rename the pages, probably wait a month before doing another reconsideration, and just before you do it, try again to remove any you couldn't get before, and if that fails, disavow any you didn't disavow before.

7. request a reconsideration and document everything you did, so they can see the amount of effort you put in. Also, you need to tell them what bad links were added and when you stopped doing it, and that you won't do that again, and what your new strategy is - see the next paragraph.

As well as all of the above, immediately add new, high quality content that other people will want to link to, and hope that a competitor doesn't slam your new content with bad links.

If that fails, give up on the domain, unless it is a brand name, in which case, keep adding good content, forget search for now, and buy traffic. Go through 1-7 again in 3 months, 6 months.

[BlueTent20]

" If you didn't try very hard to clean up and just disavowed, then my guess (which seems obvious after 6 attempts) is that the reconsideration team said "you made a mess, you can't be bothered to clean it up and now you want us to help you? No, you need to spend more time in hell." "

I'm clearly not going to spend all of my time posting every thought-out reconsideration I wrote and every request for link removal I sent out on a MoZ message board. I find it a little strange that you'd take shots at our effort, being professionals and spending 50+ hours on it, and then reiterating all the basic steps taken during the process.

I asked for advice, not to have our efforts questioned and ridiculed. I'll just look elsewhere in hopes that another board is more helpful and will actually read the question so that I don't have to repeat myself multiple times.

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

Google's official policy is that you should try to have the links removed before disavowing. I'm assuming you've sent out some emails and tried to have some links taken down, but you haven't mentioned link removal yet - only disavow. I'm just making sure.

You say you disavowed links 6 times - did you combine those into a single file? Google will overwrite your previous disavow, so make sure you're combining the disavow lists.

Finally, if they were ranking well based on bad links, they can't expect to simply regain their former standing without those spammy links. The spot checkers on reconsideration are always a little arbitrary, so you just have to deal with that. Your only option is to decrease the odds that they'll find bad links by either increasing the proportion of good links or decreasing the bad links.