Reconsideration Request

Recently I have been taking down links to other sites that are not in my niche. I have not seen any movement in webmaster tools as far as the site that are linked to my site. Am I better off waiting a little while and let me backlinks that i took down come off in webmaster tools? Or Do you think doing a reconsideration request?

If anyone can help me out with this I would appreciate it. Thank You.

I think the changes will be seen while next PR update, you should just wait for some time.

I'd wait some time to see if your rankings naturally correct themselves and use the reconsideration request as a last resort.

It's often difficult to tell if you have a penalty, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with linking to sites that are not in your niche if they are relevant in some way .

Also before you submit the request, if you wanted to post a link to your domain I'm sure others here could give you advice on how to clean things up.

Nit "while" but unfortunately some time later mate... All of the stats effects occur after the changes in PR. not simultaneously..

I have sites where i have taken them down 2 years ago and still show.

Google RULES the internet and noone can guide him/her ;) to do it in their way... GOOGLE WAY or HIGHWAY! ;) Briefly, do the needed corrections... and wait and see... Nothing else...

I actually have seen a decrease in the links that I manually took down but it took almost two months. Sometimes I do link exchanges with a site and it shows in webmaster tools as a backlink in the first week. However there is one site that I did a sitewide link exchange with and it still has not shown and its been almost two months.

Sitewide links are not always the best kind of link.

Here is one example why (not a complete reason but a portion).

Let's say you have a link pointing at a sportsbook site. A sitewide would show up on a bingo page, so now you have a bingo page pointing at a sports site, how close of a match is bingo content to football? (yes, it is better than a car dealer, but not better than a sports related or other sports betting site)

Also, a sitewide LOOKS to be done for seo or ranking purposes.

A sitewaide link can also "look" to be a paid link or exchanged link, whereas a link from a bingo page pointing to another bingo page at least "appears" to be pertinent and on topic like it might have been placed there for the benefit of the visitor.

Just additional points to consider.

Rick
Universal4

It makes sense, but can be tough for instance if I have sports betting site and have links to a Atlanta Braves site. But not all pages are for gambling but some are for Braves history there is no relevance.

I have messed up with this, I thought as long as the site is in the gambling niche it fits. On another note, have any of you guys used the disavow tool yet?

Yea, but having links to and from the Braves pages fits the niche, as long as the pages interlinked are at least about baseball.

Rick
Universal4

I haven't heart too many success stories on recovering from Googles Penguin update via Re0consideration request forms. You did the right thing by removing those links you felt could bring you down. Be aggressive in removing those links. After you feel you've removed enough of them ,wait about 10-15 days. After that time period make a reconsideration request. Be sure to be explicit in telling them what you did wrong on your site. If you bought links, admit it. If you blog spammed, then admit it. Be concise in your report. After submitting you Re-inclusion request you will have to wait some time to get an answer. When I got my response, they told be that there were no manual penalties. Great.. :(

I filed one last week. I watched youtube videos and read a few blogs on what they want to be specific about. I wrote about 4 paragraphs and told them I had links on adult sites and have been taking them down but it is not showing in webmaster tools. They actually got back to me within a week, they said there were no manual penalties but too look at html errors and they gave me a link to google guidelines.

I fixed the html errors, but there are some adult sites i have links on that I cannot control. I used an seo guy from fiverr and it worked well for a little but ended up hurting my site in the long run. Needless to say, I do my own SEO now. Since I dont have control over the other links, should I use the disavow tool?

When making a reconsideration request please include each and every description about your request in the notes area.