Google Search Console Manual Penalty - How Long for Disavow Reconsideration?
How Long Does A Google Disavow Reconsideration Request Take?
TL;DR A Google disavow reconsideration request in my experience can take as little as 3 weeks to be notified of the all-clear [2015], to 8 months [2021-2022].
BBNTimes was the latter, I have full permission to publish this case study and the site owner won’t mind me sharing with you that the volume of toxic backlinks was the worst case scenario I have ever worked with in my career. There were over 720 referring domains, however a lot of domains had hundreds of URLs apiece which means the total of toxic backlinks were several thousand.
Bearing in mind this was in the era of reduced and delayed Google support timescales during the pandemic, maybe as time goes on a human ‘eyes on’ manual penalty may be shifted over to AI, therefore reducing the wait time from Manual Penalty > Disavow File > Reconsideration request> Resolved, both DA and rankings to be recovered and restored.
If you have NOT had a Google manual penalty it’s recommended not to create a disavow file and upload, however with tools such as SEMrush and AHREFs providing key information on the toxicity of backlinks, some Digital Marketers may feel that ‘no harm, no foul’ to disavow some probable culprit URLs if the red danger score is 90+ in their reporting systems.
White Label Agency Support - SEO Project Manager
Are you a Digital Agency owner looking for access to on-demand SEO expertise? A sole trader freelancer who offers flexibility, and the ability to scale capabilities up or down as business needs change?
Conducting an SEO audit – To have fresh eyes on your website for technical SEO improvements, content, and backlinks to pinpoint enhancement areas.
Promoting local services – Fresh fine-tuning Google My Business, establishing local citations, and monitoring regional client rankings.
On-Page SEO – Freelance writers adeptly craft engaging blog content to aim for Featured Snippets and rank YouTube videos in Google.
Managing link disavowals/migrations – Agencies seek freelancer project managers for smooth transitions or purging of extensive backlink profiles.
Technical SEO solutions – Freelancers tackle challenging technical snags, such as crawl and indexing issues.
Benchmarking Google Search Console – A transparent KPI whereby the client side are able to view traffic success.
Handling client influx – Agencies employ white label SEO freelancers to manage work volume surges effectively.
Offering niche or new skills – Freelancers supply expertise in areas an agency’s current team might not cover, like LLM Prompt Engineering.
Nina Payne is a seasoned SEO specialist, having run her SEO Lady agency for over 16 years. Nina’s respected for her contributions to the Video SEO tactic, and her initial ‘booster’ concept which guarantees clients get an ROI within 30 days.
This, coupled with her no-nonsense but highly personal, informal yet professional approach to client management sees her celebrate an average customer lifetime of XY years with her team at SEO Lady. Nina is equally comfortable consulting with agencies and brands alike on either SEO strategies and techniques or supporting them to build out their own SEO teams with hiring and training plans.
Toxic backlink source in an image – News website
In one odd instance, an image had the backlink embedded in it, and this image was the source of 40 different domains! This is the first time I’ve seen an instance of a bad back link coming from the coding of an image uploaded to the public domain. The obvious solution to me was to delete the image file from the server, which transpired to be the solution to this weird little issue.
The image was shared so often it was the only logical choice that I could see. The size of the BBN website is vast, so losing one image on an aged URL was not going to affect the overall Google Images ranking for the website.
Why should old images never usually be deleted from a website?
In October 2022, I was hired to problem solve an image related issue, an ecommerce website owner deleted a 5 year old image as a new photoshoot had taken place back in April. Unfortunately, as a result her web sales dramatically decreased as so much internet traffic was referred from Google Images for a very high competitive product of London. Because the URL was so old, the new URL of the same product was lost, and is not possible to replace due to the unique meta data contained in the original.
In this instance the client had retained the original copy on her hard drive, so was able to re-upload her old image alongside her latest product image in a blog post in a valiant effort for Google to rediscover the image file and take notice of the unique aged metadata that was scrubbed from online.
As long as the original image is re uploaded with the same dimensions and the same alt tag, the photograph meta data will tell search engines of the date of creation all those years ago. I promise to hold this thought and update you in a few month’s time to let you know whether this worked. At the time of writing, a backup of the website was not available to recover the image, it’s URL and associated meta data, efforts are currently being made to ask the hosting company how far back their site backups are held in their servers. Fingers crossed!
A client contacted me on People Per Hour in a proper panic, he suspected the worst case scenario had happened and he needed a Google Disavow. He had tried DIY SEO but wasted his time.
Google Disavow Upload and Reconsideration Time
Compiling a Disavow spreadsheet and uploading for Google Reconsideration, to lift the Manual Search Console Penalty, recover Google rankings and have the reconsideration approved.
2019 Manual Penalty Removed: in week 2
Google Rankings Recovery: 2 weeks, project duration: 4 weeks
Search Console Manual Warning Hacked Website Pages Redirection
OK, so I apologise for the low quality image of Google+ below, this was the brain splitting moment when I spotted that my client’s website was hacked back in 2014.
This was a complex and ongoing case whereby the Joomla! website was migrated to WordPress and all servers scrubbed clean.
Back in those days anything server related was way beyond my remit and I was asked by the client to interview and hire a superior technical SEO. I already knew Robb, he was old back then, he’s probably enjoying retirement by now.
A few weeks later and the worm was back, 6 months down the line a scorched earth technical approach solved the hacking – it was discovered that the worm was infected in Joomla, but during the migration the infected file was passed over too.
SEO Consultant Google+ Meta Page Titles Hacked Case Study 2014
Sleeper File: The hack didn’t trigger for 2 or 3 weeks, then it happened overnight.
The technical wizard who I was working with said it was a sleeper file which was time sensitive, so the day you spot the hacking is AFTER your website has been hacked 3 weeks previously! Super sneaky this one.
Do you have a general Google ranking question, or a complex website situation to resolve? Contact me today by completing the quick form above, or book in a quick telephone chat with me right now. My calendar is waiting for you.
Reasons for a Disavow
Hacked website: In some situations whereby a hacked website has been injected with a file to redirect all pages to an eCommerce, casino, pharacutical or even dating sites, a high percentage of these are not targeting you specifically. If you have a shared website password in another online login credentials this poor security leaves you open to bots doing this – without much help from human hands! Learn to live with 2FA (2 Factor Authorisation) on your website and also email accounts. This is very common and a disavow can weed out any new backlinks which have appeared as a result of this sneaky cyber attack. Change your passwords!
You have had an email from Google informing you that a manual penalty has been applied against your domain.
When you’re logged into Google Search Console there is a red flag warning telling you there has been a manual penalty action.
(Very rare) NSEO (Negative SEO) has been deployed at your domain for a reason. Maybe a competitor, maybe for other nefarious gains. Often you never see any primary evidence in most NSEO cases.
No Disavow Needed
My competitor keeps climbing in Google for our shared keywords so I’m worried they have done something to my website?
Solution: Pay an SEO Freelancer to do positive SEO work, rather than act on a fake negative or a popular misconception.
I have a new website, 6 months old, I’ve built some backlinks from online directories but I’m not ranking for my target search phrase. Then I read online that signing up to directories is bad SEO and I need a disavow?
Solution: Drop the DIY SEO and hire a Digital Marketing individual.
My Google rankings were OK last year, but I noticed my rankings had dropped last month and they haven’t recovered. I’ve been paying an overseas SEO company a few dollar$ a month they made me sign a 12 month contract
Solution: Hire an SEO Consultant in the United Kingdom (as opposed to overseas).
“I’ve just got a feeling in my little toe” .. paraphrasing of course.
How to get Backlinks
Ask!
BBNTimes was my first 2022 client success story of creating a ginormous spreadsheet file from a SEMRush Pro toxic backlink project. The manual inspection of thousands of URLs took around 16 hours of my time over 5 days. No sane person can do one task for two straight days, at least without wine or hazlenut icecream.
Following the delighful Google email, I contacted the client and we exchanged messages of joy and happiness, it was such a good feeling. This is a huge per of freelancing, when you solve a complex SEO problem where others have failed (freelancers, in-house, tech contributors) when I get that glowing Google Business Profile review, I always ask the client for a backlink. Most of the time I do get a backlink, on occasions there’s a jolly good reason why not, and that’s fine.
“Don’t ask, don’t get” as my Dad says.
2 Comments. Leave new
Firstly massive thank you to Nina Greaves for optimising my new You Tube channel and helping me to bring it up to date with this fab tutorial post!
I have now put all her recommendations in place and have seen my You Tube traffic increase which is FAB 🙂
Hi Emma thanks for taking the time to update us with the news of your YouTube channel – it’s good to know blog posts like this can help others.
I look forward to contributing to #BizRocks again in December 2014!
All the best
Nina