I’m posting this post for Stuart McHenry (my boss) who runs McKremie and provides Google penalty recovery service. He enjoys helping companies recover from their penalties and wants to pass a few tips along.
Most penalty removal companies don’t really care if they remove a good link or a bad one just as long as they get the penalty revoked. This is completely the wrong way to go about removals. If you earned a link natural you shouldn’t have to remove the links. In some cases this it really comes down to the perception of the Google employee reviewing your reconsideration request. But any good penalty removal company will want to preserve as many of the good links as possible.
Keep as detailed records as possible including names, email address, dates, times and screenshots of all the removal outreach emails you send. It can be really difficult to get someone to reply to a link removal request. Webmasters are getting inundated with these and often ignore them. It’s extremely important that you document in detail all the steps you have done to try and get the links removed.
This is the single biggest aspect of the penalty removal process. Analyzing each link should be done by an expert and not by a SEO tools program. We have tested many of the tools on the market and while some are decent we have not found a single tool that is 100% accurate. The best way to identify which links are bad should be done manually. Just because the link comes from a great domain doesn’t mean it’s not spammy.
When creating a disavow file we have seen many companies disavow the specific URL location of a link instead of the entire domain itself. Why is this important? Often times links aren’t on one specific page and can be moved from time to time to new locations. If you know you don’t want the link to count disavow the link at the domain level.
ie. Domain:bluewidgets.com
When you compile all the information for the reconsideration request do so in Google Docs. Google has mentioned several times they prefer this method as they aren’t afraid of virus and such coming from this source. One huge thing to remember is the share function and who can view the information. If it’s set to private your information will not be read so be sure to set the proper permissions to ensure whoever is reading your reconsideration request can actually view all the supporting documentation.
