Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ambiguous Response to Google Reconsideration Request
-
Hello,
On 9/11/12, we submitted a reconsideration request to Google for http://macpokeronline.com, at the time we received penalties from both penguin and manual removal. We have since worked on cleaning up our link profile, and got this response from Google:
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.macpokeronline.com/.
We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
I honestly don't even know how to take this, we always showed up #1 while doing a site search, so it is kind of irrelevant to us in this case.
Is this the reply of them accepting our request?
Thanks
Zach
-
For those wondering, Matt Cutts answers the question in this video; It basically means that your site is is a grey zone. Not completely clean nor completely useless. Unfortunately for http://macpokeronline.com, it seems that the issues are not that easy to resolve.http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/organic?url=MacPokerOnline.com&cc=US
-
We received exactly the same response following a recent reconsideration request after several failed attempts where they reiterated that we still had bad links. We continued removing questionable links over the following six weeks while I waited to see if they would follow it up with something a little more enlighten but unfortunately nothing was forthcoming.
As such I submitted another reconsideration request asking if they could possibly elaborate slightly and after just two days received exactly the same response again. As such I’m still a little puzzled.
-
You are correct, that's why I'm doing a huge linkbuilding campaign focusing on .edu TLDs. The .edus should help us recover from what we were losing before, especially since they are high quality domains, with a high DA.
-
Don't forget because you removed those links, those links that could have been helping you were the same ones you were being penalized for.
Thus if you remove those, you will not have as many links.
-
Irving,
Thank you for your response. I understand what your saying. MacPokerOnline.com isn't an online betting site, it's simply a site where users can get reviews and discount codes for online casinos, but specializing with Poker on the mac OS.
Please be aware that when you search google (in an incognito window) for "mac poker" (broad match), that our site is #1 there, with Google Authorship. We never lost rankings on our main pages, it is just for longtail phrases.
Just thought I'd let you guys know this.
-
This is a good sign because you didn't get the email that says they found it is still in violation. But it doesn't mean your site will automatically bounce back by any means it means they are considering it. Given that it's a online betting site and that sites like that are illegal in the US you're fighting an uphill battle.
Keep tracking your rankings and see if they are coming back. Keep looking at backlinks and on page areas of improvement. Make a new reconsideration request every two weeks stating specific areas of improvement that you have made showing very specific examples.
-
I'm laughing at some of the responses.
My suggestion is just send off another reconsideration request. And under explanation, tell them you were unsure what they previous reconsideration reply mean't. I'm sure that should work out and couldn't hurt.
Its not like they would say, hey we are indexing your site again but for the smart--- reply we will deindex your site or vice versa.
-
Hmm, it's a tough one, but it seems like they are saying you have no further problems else, they would certainly state that the site was still in violation.
The standard type of message you see if they still detect problems is more like this:
"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.site.com/,We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.site.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.**We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.**Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support."
Now, your message does not have that, but it is still very strangely worded so I would imagine you still have some kind of problems.
What I am seeing with a few clients I have picked up is a cluster of problems. So, they may have a manual penalty, then some penguin issues and some panda issues on top of that.
Additionally, whilst your manual penalty may have been lifted, you could still have a period where you will remain penalised in my experience but that penalty should, at some point, timeout.
But... depending on when you picked up this manual penalty, who knows what other penalties you have picked up in the meanwhile (panda / penguin etc).
Ultimately, it's impossible to give a generic answer here. You need to review the site attempt to identify any remaining algorithmic penalties which there are some fairly good guides available to do that now.
Here are some links that may help:
General content improvement
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
**Anchor text ratios **
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/
Penguin
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/ - complicated
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/ - a little simpler
Panda
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/beating-the-panda-diagnosing-and-rescuing-a-clients-traffic/
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/google-panda-problems-and-solutions/
I have had a quick dig in the link profile and it seems you have cleaned up a lot of what is reported in Open Site Explorer so maybe it is just a case of waiting things out a little longer and seeing if a Penguin refresh sorts things out a bit. It's hard to get a real guage of your link profile, anchor text, relevance of linking sites etc based on the current data returned by open site explorer but some general rules that are coming out of the research done by several sites (the microsites and anchor text articles above make for a good read)
- Have at least 50% of your links from topically relevant sites
- keep keyword anchors below 30%
- branded URL anchors should make up about 70% of your link profile
- Ensure that at least two of the top five anchors are branded (really, post penalty, aim for three +)
When you have got to those kind of conservative levels with your link profile then you can be a little more happy that you are going to be able to bounce back but again, it may take time.
It is a frustrating situation and any 'attempt' at sorting this out should be given 110% else you are really going to struggle. I am not really sure what another agency could do to help you at this point other than more of what you are doing and maybe a solid on site review but you are probably in the position where you just have to wait and see (however frustrating that may be).
Let me know how you get on!
Marcus
-
What if we were to increase the amount of "good/great" links that we having coming to the site? Wouldn't that assist in creating a more "natural" link profile?
-
You should focus on removing those nasty backlinks from the blog networks... or at least provide a list of them in your reconsideration request with appropriate explanation. Usually it would take around 1-2 years for these backlinks to evaporate by themselves, why? because there is no reason whatsoever to renew those de-indexed domains & also cover the hosting costs.
-
Okay. I'll see what I can do with that. We can't to PPC since were promoting gambling unfortunately. Maybe well wait it out a few weeks to see what happens. Our site isn't deindexed and we have seen an increase in traffic the past few weeks of 5-15% week over week. I think this is penguin penalties getting lifted as google detects more links we've removed.
-
Find someone who can make Google look bad in public for deindexing your site. That always seems to work.
All jokes aside, I'd just wait it out. See what Google says and go from there. Perhaps invest in Adwords for a while and then beg your account manager to look at your reconsideration request again.
-
I'm actually working in house for the owner of this website, a larger marketing firm screwed him over from a Penguin and link perspective. I live in Philadelphia and know some employees from Seer, do you think I should ask them if this would be something Seer could take on?
-
I don't know what you should do.
If this was my site I would either find a pro who knows how to redeem sin.... start working on sites in a different niche.... or.... go to Vegas and get a job as a dealer.
-
So what should I do now?
-
"We've now reviewed your site."
They are being weasels. They are saying "wait and see if we have forgiven you".
I think you are screwed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hide sitelinks from Google search results
Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide. I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | semcheck11 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
How long does it take for Google for deindexing pages?
Hi mozzers, We just launched a mobile website(parallel) and realized that it created many duplicate content with desktop URLs. I decided to add name="robots" content="No index, No follow" /> to the entire mobile site. My only concern is that I am still seeing the mobile site indexed when it's been almost a week I added these tags. Does anyone know how long it takes google to deindex your content? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why google index my IP URL
hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson
Technical SEO | | DarwinChinaSEO0