Common Reasons Why Reconsideration Requests Fail

Overturning an unnatural links penalty can be difficult. There’s an odd mixture of fear and excitement that comes with waiting for Google’s response, after filing for your first reconsideration. “Manual Spam Action Revoked” is definitely the answer to root for, but many are doomed with the dreadful “Links to your site violate Google’s quality guidelines,” (still) which only means more work and ground to cover in order to lift the penalty.

Unfortunately for those who can’t seem to get out of the link-spam rut, the search engine giant doesn’t give further direction or explanation to help you understand why the request for reconsideration was denied. You are lucky if you are given examples of unnatural links to take care of, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, you will receive no explanation as to why your request failed. Based on best practices and standards offered by Google, here are likely reasons why your consideration request didn’t come through for your website:

  • You did not address enough unnatural links. A careful audit of your site is a must, to make sure that you can remove as many unnatural, unnecessary, and substandard/bad links from your profile as possible. It’s not enough for you to go only after the worst links. What Google wants to see is you, identifying and recognizing close to 100% of your unnatural links.
  • A non-compelling reconsideration request. When writing your request, don’t write too long. But explain enough to convince the company’s web spam team that you’ve been working hard to remove as many natural links as you can, and will continue to work on the quality of links to your site, moving forward.
  • Wrong disavow file format. In the past, there is no telling whether the disavow file you have submitted would work or fail due to a syntax error. Today, however, an error message cautions you so you can fix problems before re-submitting.