Manual Penalty Reconsideration Request Help

[AdamThompson]

No, I would not spend time on links/domains that no longer exist. (I've never heard of that being necessary.)

[Sandicliffe]

Thanks for your response, Adam.

Would you say the same for domains that are still live but no longer contain links to your site?

Thanks

[AdamThompson]

Yes, I would be very surprised if Google wanted you to do anything with links that no longer exist.

[gazzerman1]

Sorry I have to disagree,

There are many sites, specifically directory sites that list websites and as more sites get listed they push your link to page 3, 4, 5. It looks like the link does not exist but it does on another page.

Some sites are that are crappy also have poor connections/bandwidth etc... So they go up and down and overload all the time. Just because its down now does not mean its down later when Google crawls it.

When I did my now famous! link clean up these were both issues that came up when I got help from John Mueller at Google.

It sucks because its just a hell of a lot of work, but based on how long it takes for a penguin update to come about, I would make sure you get it right FIRST TIME or you could wait more than a year to see returns.

Feel free to ask me anything.

Best of luck

Gary

[Sandicliffe]

Thanks for your response Gary.

That does make sense and to be honest is something that worries me! I am putting faith into software here (ie. I haven't gone through every single domain manually and checked that the link is still live) which is telling me whether the link is still live or not. If Google's software tells them otherwise when they review my reconsideration request, then all my other efforts are most likely wasted. I take it from this that you would advise addressing the none active domains too?

Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes.

Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch.

cheers

Sam

[AdamThompson]

Actually, I agree with you. What you're describing are sites that look like the link has been deleted, but where the link actually still exists. My answer was regarding sites where the link actually has been deleted and doesn't exist.

[TheeDigital]

A good reconsideration request does three things:

1. Explains the exact quality issue on your site.
2. Describes the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue.
3. Documents the outcome of your efforts.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en

[gazzerman1]

So sorry for the delay getting back to you, its been a crazy week and didnt notice the response.

"Note that this is a manual penalty though, so fortunately no waiting for Penguin refreshes."

OK, just to let you know, once they lift the manual penalty, you still need to wait for a Penguin refresh. my penalty was lifted in May 2013 the vast majority of crap links had not been crawled and took a very long time for Google to do so. For the disavow file to take effect it needs to crawl each of those pages with your disavow file in mind and change them to a nofollow. Once a healthy amount is crawled you will then be in good standing when the Penguin algo is run. If Penguin runs before you have an acceptable level of healthiness you will not be released form Penguin and will have to wait for the next. So it took us until Oct 17th 2014  for us to finally get released. This was WITH John Muellers help!

My advice is don't be too picky with what you keep. Go through everything, mine was 20,000 Referring domains with 250k links! We had a 10 year history of business online and at one point also attacked with negative seo. So was a big job

"Providing I've given all possible evidence I can about the links being live or not to Google, do you think that disavowing all poor quality links that APPEAR to be no longer live is good enough in Google's eyes? Obviously for all links that are still live (as far as i can see) I have outreached to at least 3 times and disavowed if I can't get in touch."

Yes, create a report to show the work you have done, whats removed, who you have contacted, who did not respond. I did an Excel spreadsheet, one domain per line, with a few fields like, last contacted, date, removed etc..

There are lots of programmes out there that help with this now. Not so easy when your the first and there are no tools for it!

Also its best to do domain instead of links, how many links do you have pointing to your site?

[Sandicliffe]

Thanks for your response Richard.

This is however an extremely generic response to quite a specific question. I didn't ask what a reconsideration request does!

[Sandicliffe]

Thanks again for your response Gary.

With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not.

In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so.

So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains.

The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably).

So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming.

Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this?

Sam