Unnatural Links Warning Disappeared from Search Console Account

[pajamalady]

Hello all,

In 2013 I had an Unnatural Links Warning message in my GWT account. I believe that it was a result of the work of an old SEO company. When I received the warning I was working with an SEO. He helped me clean up some links. He also uploaded a disavow file for me. He did not file a reconsideration request. He told me that it was not necessary at the time. The message disappeared from my account.

A few months ago a similar message appeared in the manual accounts section of my account. I gathered inbound links from GWT, Majestic, etc. I went through them myself and tried to contact lots and lots of webmasters. I got many links cleaned up. I spent several months on this project.

I just logged into my Search Console account this afternoon and clicked through everything and guess what... that manual penalty message is gone. So... what does that mean?

I assume that I should still upload the disavow file for the sites that did not respond to me that are spammy. Should I still try to file a reconsideration request even though there doesn't seem to be a manual penalty?

How should I proceed? Thanks.

Melissa

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Melissa,

Penalties do actually just expire, but it isn't like there is a set time period for this, so if you have no mention in Webmaster Tools of any penalty, then you really don't have one. You won't be given the option to try and do a reconsideration request either. I am pretty sure it was John Mueller that confirmed this.

I would still go through and disavow sites that have not got back to you though, just as best practice and to do a little damage mitigation. You may find that the penalty comes back at some point in the future if you don't.

-Andy

[BradsDeals]

This is correct, I've seen the same thing happen and it's true that penalties do sometimes just expire. And as Andy says, it doesn't mean that all that auditing work you did was for naught. You can still upload a disavow file, and you've been excused from the ritual of begging for Google's forgiveness

[pajamalady]

I am actually going to keep doing a little more cleaning and then upload the disavow. Hopefully this will do the trick.

Thanks for your responses.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Melissa,

All manual penalties do expire. But just to be sure...is it just the message that disappeared, or did the entire manual action disappear? To know, go to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions. Do you see "no manual webspam actions" there? If so, then most likely the penalty expired.

I wrote more about this here:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2345875/did-your-manual-penalty-disappear-it-probably-expired

If your manual action expired, then the good news is that you don't need to try contacting each site owner to get links removed. Remove the unnatural link that are in your control (if any) and disavow the rest on the domain level. Most sites that get unnatural links penalties also have issues with penguin algorithmically, so you definitely want to make sure your link profile is clean.

[pajamalady]

Your article pretty much sums of my situation.

The warning that I saw a couple of months ago was a "partial match manual penalty", but it is gone now.

I want to see if I can get a few more things to come do or add the no follow and then I will go ahead with the disavow.

Thanks for your response.