Questions
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Got Google Warning But No Penalty - Should I Ask for Reconsideration?
Stephane - in my opinion, you're right to be confused. This question demonstrates PERFECTLY the stupidity Google has perpetrated with this latest round of unnatural link notifications. Up until now, Google has clearly stated that if you get one of these warnings, your rankings are going to be impacted and you must take action. I know - I was in the room at SMX Advanced in June when Matt Cutts stated exactly that. Now Cutts and Google are backpedaling and saying "actually, just because you received the warning, doesn't mean we are actually going to take any action - you may or may not need to do something about it. and you have no way of knowing unless and until your rankings tank" I've always respected Matt a great deal, but this last round of notifications and his explanation of it (for better transparency) are absolute bullshit and rather than clarification, have just horribly muddied the already murky waters. For what it's worth, here's what I would recommend go ahead and clean up any obviously spammy links you may have acquired, assuming there are any (but don't panic & go overboard) keep careful documentation of your clean up efforts do NOT submit a reconsideration request - at this point there's nothing to reconsider as your rankings haven't been affected make sure you're tracking your organic search traffic volume and rankings carefully so you can spot any drops as soon as they happen continue to try to acquire good-quality, varied, natural links from other good websites (to help offset any questionable links) if you see any significant rankings drops, then submit your reconsideration request with the documentation of the link cleanup work you've done (and including the links you haven't been able to clean up because they're outside your control.) The link warning won't go away because it's just a message that's been sent and can't (to my knowledge) be recalled, but if you do in fact have spammy links and clean them up, you "shouldn't" see any future effects on your rankings - but you'll have no way of knowing. You'll just have to sit and wait to see. Paul
Link Building | | ThompsonPaul0 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
That seems alright Stephane. Well, to be true Google Webmaster does report on duplicate titles and descriptions that have been already fixed via a canonical tag, 301 redirect or a noindex tag. In this case, you need not be worried on the duplicates as this is well taken care of. Another step of making this clear to Google would be to resubmit the XML sitemap. Probably, Google has not revisited your dynamic page after reporting those duplicates and with the submission of the XML sitemap it will probably do so. Cheers,
Technical SEO Issues | | RanjeetP1 -
Got a warning from Google but rankings still ok.. what to expect?
I think you should probably figure out what's setting off the red flags and fix it. They like to give warnings first if it's not a huge issues.. but they could drop the hammer on you at any time. Best, -Jason
Link Building | | JFritton0 -
Can a sitewide backlink with exact anchor text penalize my website?
Thank you for your response. In the meantime, I chose to email the webmaster so that he can have the link removed. I've got thousands of natural links to my website and near 1000 pages of unique, useful content so hopefully removing that link won't cause any major change since I wasn't ranking for that keyword anyway.
Link Building | | sbrault740