Google "Unnatural links" reconsideration request keeps failing

[Alex-Harford]

A colleague of mine has an issue with reconsideration requests after a manual page-specific link penalty on a client's website.

A few reconsideration requests have been made over the past year, pulling fresh backlink data from a number of sources. Google is rejecting the requests and still reporting links we haven't found. We've used tools from the following:

• Open Site Explorer
• Google WMT
• WebMeUp
• Link Research Tools (Detox)
• Majestic SEO
• ahrefs
• SISTRIX

Can anyone offer any further suggestions or are there any other backlink tools we could consider?

Cheers.

[GPainter]

You could look into running a link detox software to get a rough idea but be careful as it always over delivers on toxic links, it could be that you need to remove other links. Don't forget Google like to watch you squirm in your response say what you've done can even mention that your sorry and your business is suffering, give an example of an email you sent to webmasters etc.  just disavowing is not enough any more.

Just keep adding the links Google gives you and keep going it can take time and a massive amount of frustration, there are also some great resources  here on Moz of guides & how to's etc.

Best of luck and try not to get too frustrated (i know how so it can be)

[MarieHaynes]

This has happened to me a number of times.  I find it tends to happen on sites that have a long history of creating unnatural links.  It's like Google wants you to go to superhuman lengths to get the penalty lifted.

Often I will be able to find some clues from what type of example links I'm given.  For example, in one case I got a couple of russian forum profiles as example links and they weren't on any backlink checker.  But, I was able to do some Google searches for inurl:forum/user + keyword and find several more.  In another example we got scraped versions of press releases so I did a Google search for the text of our press releases in quotes and found more.

One other source that we used was Google Analytics referral data.  Anything that referred only 1 visit was checked and occasionally you'll find one there.

Another thing that you can do is really press your client for previous SEO reports.  I had one client resurrect an old hard drive to find some SEO reports that contained links that were made on all sorts of spammy sites.

I have had a couple of cases where we went back to Google and basically said, "Look...there are no more links that we can find.  That's all we can do" and they lifted the penalty.  I think in some cases they want to know that you're not holding back.

Keep at it though.  You'll eventually get it lifted!

[JaneCopland]

Some brilliant tips in here for finding toxic links that tools often don't bring up. it's worth noting that many backlink tools like Moz only crawl the parts of the internet that they feel are "important". When I worked at an agency that crawled its own backlinks (i.e. we had a tool that was similar to OSE and Ahrefs but was in-house), we did the same thing for our regular crawls. We'd do "deep crawls" that went far further only when necessary, usually due to inheriting a client with terrible spam links and needing to see the extent of the damage.

The model and method taken by commercial tools has benefits and detriments. Moz, Ahrefs etc. do a great job, but they do not update as regularly as Google because they don't have the same processing power or storage as Google does. Moz's OSE updates somewhere around once a month with the team working to make this as quick as possible. If OSE were to include every forum page on every subdomain on the entire internet, this would be slower. Going off of what we would do for our every-day tool that was similar in many ways to OSE and its friends, we took a very comprehensive snap-shot that included the entirety of what appears to "matter" on the web and a selection of the deeper parts of the public internet. We did not index or show every .blogspot.com page online.

For 99% of backlink analysis, this is fine and always will be. It's when you're faced with really bad spam that you need a more comprehensive view of what's out there. Majestic has a reputation of including more of this stuff in its reports, although you say you've already used it. The criticism of Majestic is that they often include stuff that was taken down a long time ago, or where pages have been offline for a long time.

For the times when you ned a deeper view, Marie's suggestions are fantastic if you don't have access to a tool that can crawl deeper.