Google Reconsideration Request - Most Efficient Process

[jeremymgp]

Hi,

I'm working on a Google reconsideration request for a site with a longstanding penalty.

Here's what I did:

Round 1

• Downloaded a CSV of all the domains and all the pages linking to the site. Went through the lot manually and sorted them into three types: Disavow Domain, Disavow Page, Keep

- All low-quality domains were disavowed, all pages from places like blogspot with low-quality links on certain blogs were disavowed. Submitted disavow file, then sent a detailed reconsideration request including a link to the disavow file.

Reconsideration request was not successful. Google gave two examples of links I should remove, bizarrely the examples they gave were already disavowed, which seemd a bit odd. So I took this to mean Google Webmaster Tools and disavow files were in themselves not enough. The links I kept were largely from PRWeb syndication which seems legit.

Round 2
Here's what I'm doing now. Any ideas for how the below process can be improved to get the maximum chance of a successful request, please let me know.

• Get all linking pages from Webmaster Tools as before and also MajesticSEO's Historic Index. This gave me around three times more domains to remove. The additionnal domains from Majestic that weren't in Webmaster tools I just put them all in the disavow file.
• Conduct a manual link removal email campaign. I've got around 2500 domains to go through, so how can I best do this. My process at the moment is:
     - Use software to get email addresses from whois records
     - send them an email
     - make a spreadsheet of responses
     - include link to spreadsheet in Google Docs as well as link to new disavow file

Should I research each site manually to get email addresses? It does seem rather a waste of an offshorer's time, from what I've seen some people use offshorers and others have used software tools successfully. The other thing is sending the emails, how can I do this? Any smtp email campaign site won't let me use their service because the emails are not opt-in, they classify it as spam. Does anyone know a solution to send 2500 emails legitimately from a webmail account for example? I'm having to send bulk emails to get rid of spam links.

Finally most of the offending links have keyword anchor text from spun articles, I've deleted all the sites except EzineArticles. Would you delete this too, it's an awful site but client is hung up on it. ExineArticle links may have some value, on the other hand it's more of the same keyword-rich anchor text articles. Keep or disavow the individual pages?

Finally, anything else I've missed? Anything to add? Thanks for all your help

[MarieHaynes]

I personally do everything manually.  I think that the link removal tools can work great for some sites, but your best chance at identifying the bad links and keeping the good ones is to look at them manually.  2500 domains is a lot, but not impossible.  I'm currently working on an account of about that size and it will take me about 10-14 days to go through as many.  Once you get going you will recognize patterns and it will go faster.

I used to get emails on my own but I have just hired someone to do this for me.  I find that the automated tools miss a lot of them.  I was considering hiring from o-desk or mechanical turk, but in my situation, because my business is expanding and most of what I do is penalty removal, it's worth my while to hire and train someone to do this for me.

btw...if you've got 2500 domains, you won't have 2500 emails.  Many will be offline or nofollowed or perhaps even natural.

Ezine Articles links definitely need to be removed if they are followed links.  Often times those links are nofollowed, but if you have a high enough account level there then they are followed and need to go.

A few other points:

-Yes you're right.  It's not enough to just disavow.  Google's going to want to see evidence that you've tried hard to remove links.

-Lately I have only be using links from WMT and not other sources like Majestic and ahrefs.  That may cut down on the number of domains you have to deal with.  So far it is working for me.

Hope that helps!