Anchor text penalties and indexed links

[Blink-SEO]

Hi! I'm working on a site that got hit by a manual penalty some time ago. I got that removed, cleaned up a bunch of links and disavowed the rest. That was about six months ago.

Rankings improved, but the big money terms still aren't doing great. I recently ran a Searchmetrics anchor text report though, and it said that direct match anchors still made up the largest part of the overall portfolio.

However, when I started looking at individual links with direct anchors, nearly every one had been removed or disavowed. My question is, could an anchor text penalty be in place because these removed links have not been reindexed? If so, what are my options? We've waited for this to happen naturally, but it hasn't occurred after quite a few months. I could ping them - could this have any impact?

Thanks!

[dynamyt100]

Have you tried manually submitting a few of the links to see what their 'status' is in webmasters? I find this topic so vague as there is nowhere to actually get a solid answer from Google. It would be great if there was a facility to test these exact kind of issues.

[Blink-SEO]

Hi! Do you mean the submit URL feature? That doesn't give that status, I'm afraid. I have added a handful though - it's just that we cleaned up over 800. It's a massive job!

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, this can be a time-consuming and mostly manual process. If the link was actually removed, you can check the cached page directly through Google search, which may be the best bet. With disavow, though, you're really just left with Google saying "Yep, we got it." Six months should be plenty for disavow.

When you say it's manual, how did you verify this? Was it a message in Google Webmaster Tools? In the absolute worst-case scenario, you could have a combo manual/algorithmic penalty. If it was Penguin, you're still stuck waiting for a refresh.

More likely, the changes did take, but Google doesn't think it's quite enough yet. Have you filed for reconsideration? When you did, did you lay out all of the link removal steps you took (the more details, the better, in most cases)?

[Blink-SEO]

Thanks Pete! The penalty was manual, with a message in WMT. It was more than six months ago too. I guess this means either the work wasn't good enough or we are waiting on a manual refresh. We'll carry on cleaning up then - it's all we can do!

[Dr-Pete]

Did you file for reconsideration after the work? If so, did you get any kind of useful response, or was it just the default "Thanks for playing!" message.

[Blink-SEO]

Here's what we got:

Reconsideration request for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/: Manual spam action revoked

Dear Webmaster of http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/,

We have processed the reconsideration request from a site owner for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/ and removed the actions previously applied to your site. Our review of your site indicates the violations of our quality guidelines have been resolved.

You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view the actions currently applied to your site. It may take some time before recent updates to your site's status are reflected on this page and in our search results.

While there are no manual actions on your site, there may be other issues that could affect your site's ranking or how it appears in the search results. Google determines the order of search results using more than 200 different signals. Some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users. Your site's ranking could also change based on any detected security issues. We suggest checking the Security Issues page to see if we have detected hacking on your site.

If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see our Help Centre for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of search results for our users.

Yours sincerely,
The Google Search Quality Team