Our question is regarding penalization by Google and the Disavow Tool.
This started when we lost ranking for some of our primary keywords after the Penguin update and a severe drop in website traffic.
After identifying it was a penalization by Google we started removing our unwanted backlinks. We reduced 60% of our backlinks by contacting websites and manually removing them. (We aggregated the backlink data from Google, Bing, Ahrefs, OSE and SEMRUSH)
We decided to Disavow the remaining unwanted backlinks. Below is our Disavow timeline table:
A strange point to notice in the below table, is the change in the number of backlinks.
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| 3-Jan | Google webmaster shows 112,317 Backlinks |
| 7-Jan | First Disavow List Sent |
| 7-Jan | Reconsideration Sent |
| 27-Jan | Google webmaster shows 38,678 backlinks |
| | No Improvements in ranking |
| 4-Feb | Second Disavow List Sent - (Does not include backlinks we disavow in the first list) |
| 5-Feb | Google webmaster shows 7,164 backlinks |
| 11-Feb | Google webmaster shows 1,892 backlinks |
| 12-Feb | Google webmaster shows 36,808 backlinks |
Does SEOMOZ has an explanation for the following:
How to recover from the penalization? We have tried to remove as many backlinks as possible and disavow as well.
What steps we must take to restore our ranking?
Why are the number of backlinks decreasing and increasing in Google webmaster? (Note: The websites that we sent for Disavow and reconsideration was removed from the Webmaster backlink list but are now included again)
We need assistance from the SEOMOZ team to help us recover from this penalization.
Thank You,
Susan Smith
