Google Reconsideration

[JimSkychief]

Our site fell from grace last July and landed on page five of the Google search results for our primary keyword. For 6 months I tried a number of strategies with no results, including reconfiguring our site based on the SOEmoz on-page grading tool. More recently, after receiving your advice in a Q&A, I took down all of my paid links and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. Interestingly, 3 days later we popped up 20 spots. This left us on the top of page three. Better than page 5, but still not prime time! A few days ago (two weeks after our reconsideration request was submitted) I got a message back in my Webmaster Tools, that they had completed a review of our site - but oddly enough they provided no info on the outcome, positive or negative. And there has been no additional movement in the rankings since I received the message. Was the original 20 point jump the result of the reconsideration request, or just a coincidence? Or, is it possible that they did a review and the results will only occur later during some organic re-indexing process? What do you think?

[gfiorelli1]

Hi,

IMO the 20 point jump was the conseguence of cleaning the paid links. And the fact you are not anymore on first page is a conseguence of the correction too, because it represents the real position of your websites without that links and the juice they were passing.

Therefore, the only way to return to the original ranking is planning a new - licit - link building campaign.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Penalty can affect you in two ways:

1. Manual Penalty
2. Algorithmic Penalty (Automatic)

Reconsideration request is useful for the first one, not the second. This means that if you have been algorithmically penalised you will need to remove the source of the problem and the issue will self-resolve. The problem is that Google will not ever tell you what you did wrong. Aint that a bitch!

What may have happened in your case is two things:

1. Your penalty is lifted and your rankings are where they are as you lack good natural links.
2. You have removed manual penalty but the algorithmic one still lingers.

Options?

Clean up some more and wait a few weeks.

Contingency plan?

Dump the domain and move on if you can afford to do this from business point of view. Sometimes you can get away with 301 from A to B, however if you are a higher impact website you will not stay under a radar long.

Best of luck mate. I feel your pain.