• seohunters9

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Ambiguous Response to Google Reconsideration Request

        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

        Technical SEO
        10
        17
        2579
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • Zachary_Russell
          Zachary_Russell last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • h2o2
            h2o2 last edited by

            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

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • ChrisHolgate
              ChrisHolgate last edited by

              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.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Zachary_Russell
                Zachary_Russell @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                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.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                • William.Lau
                  William.Lau @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                  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.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Zachary_Russell
                    Zachary_Russell @irvingw last edited by

                    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.

                    William.Lau Zachary_Russell 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • irvingw
                      irvingw last edited by

                      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.

                      Zachary_Russell 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • William.Lau
                        William.Lau last edited by

                        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.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • Marcus_Miller
                          Marcus_Miller last edited by

                          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.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-isnt-dead-but-you-need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/

                          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

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • BestOdds
                            BestOdds last edited by

                            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?

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • leatcristian
                              leatcristian @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                              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.

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Zachary_Russell
                                Zachary_Russell @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                                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.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • EvolveCreative
                                  EvolveCreative @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                                  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.

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • Zachary_Russell
                                    Zachary_Russell @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                                    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?

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • EGOL
                                      EGOL @Zachary_Russell last edited by

                                      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.

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                      • Zachary_Russell
                                        Zachary_Russell @EGOL last edited by

                                        So what should I do now?

                                        EGOL Zachary_Russell EvolveCreative leatcristian 5 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • EGOL
                                          EGOL last edited by

                                          "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.

                                          Zachary_Russell 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • 1 / 1
                                          • First post
                                            Last post

                                          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.

                                          • See all categories

                                          Related Questions

                                          • Moeen2233

                                            Why Google de-rank a website.

                                            Hi, I was inspecting a website which is covering the topic of best wheelbarrow of 2021, it is a new website and and starts ranking on google. But, after few days it got de-rank automatically and Moz is also not showing any result to that. I was wandering why this just happened and what should I do if I made my website and will not face this kind of situation?

                                            Technical SEO | | Moeen2233
                                            0
                                          • MainstreamMktg

                                            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 | | MainstreamMktg
                                            0
                                          • mshowells

                                            Fake Links indexing in google

                                            Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)

                                            Technical SEO | | mshowells
                                            0
                                          • Scott-Thomas

                                            CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google

                                            I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott

                                            Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas
                                            0
                                          • ozererim

                                            How do I get out of google bomb?

                                            Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,

                                            Technical SEO | | ozererim
                                            0
                                          • UnderRugSwept

                                            Google is indexing my directories

                                            I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)

                                            Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
                                            0
                                          • Gordian

                                            Does Google Bot accept Cookies

                                            I am working with a per page results refinement that stores a cookie on the users computer and then keeps that same per page as the user goes around the site. I was just wondering if that was true for Google bot or Bing bot as well. Will they keep the cookie or would they not be able to accept it. I just want to know as I dont want different urls created if they can keep the cookie. Thanks!

                                            Technical SEO | | Gordian
                                            0
                                          • nicole.healthline

                                            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.healthline
                                            0

                                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                          Start my free trial
                                          Products
                                          • Moz Pro
                                          • Moz Local
                                          • Moz API
                                          • Moz Data
                                          • STAT
                                          • Product Updates
                                          Moz Solutions
                                          • SMB Solutions
                                          • Agency Solutions
                                          • Enterprise Solutions
                                          • Digital Marketers
                                          Free SEO Tools
                                          • Domain Authority Checker
                                          • Link Explorer
                                          • Keyword Explorer
                                          • Competitive Research
                                          • Brand Authority Checker
                                          • Local Citation Checker
                                          • MozBar Extension
                                          • MozCast
                                          Resources
                                          • Blog
                                          • SEO Learning Center
                                          • Help Hub
                                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                          • How-to Guides
                                          • Moz Academy
                                          • API Docs
                                          About Moz
                                          • About
                                          • Team
                                          • Careers
                                          • Contact
                                          Why Moz
                                          • Case Studies
                                          • Testimonials
                                          Get Involved
                                          • Become an Affiliate
                                          • MozCon
                                          • Webinars
                                          • Practical Marketer Series
                                          • MozPod
                                          Connect with us

                                          Contact the Help team

                                          Join our newsletter
                                          Moz logo
                                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                          • Accessibility
                                          • Terms of Use
                                          • Privacy

                                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.