Manual Actions tab advice on message

[pauledwards]

Ok so I have this message in manual actions (with no examples of links):

Manual Actions
Site-wide matches None
Partial matches Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links
    Reason    Affects
    Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.

I am not surprised by this as an agency a few years ago did mass aritcle submissions for the same anchor text, I have manually removed 119 or so domains in the last year and a half and 4 weeks ago i disavowed the last 40ish domains left. Obviously the back-link profile can be seen to have an unnatural anchor-text distribution still but not as bad.

In terms of rankings we lost some core terms on the homepage, not completely but most have gone from say page one to page 2/3/4 etc We are still getting good traffic to internal pages, so i am assuming action was taken to the homepage - where the mass of those links are pointing to.

Where do you guys recommend I go from here, shall i go ahead and click the reconsideration request? or wait longer for the disavow. I am still also trying to remove bad links.

Any advice much appreciated.

[TomRayner]

Hi Paul

If you're using the disavow tool, you can file a reconsideration request at the same time you submit the disavow file.  There's no need to wait there.  Not only will the manual reviewer spot the file in there, it will take a few days for someone to even start processing the manual reconsideration, so the disavow file will definitely have been processed by then.