Google‘s John Mueller recently provided guidance on what a site owner should do for a successful link reconsideration requests.
During a webmaster hangout, someone asked John Mueller about two sample links that Google sent to his client. The issue that the individual had was that the sample links had nofollow tags.
“I found that one of the links carries nofollow tag… I don’t see how you can… send nofollow tag in a sample URL,” the question reads.
Mueller responded that if that’s indeed the case, then it must have been a mistake on Google’s part. “That could be something that went wrong on our side,” he said.
Then, the Google webmaster and trend analyst went on to explain what the next steps should be.
How to Handle Link Reconsideration Requests
According to Mueller, a link reconsideration request can come back as “not good enough.” But, that’s fine.
Rather than worry about that single non-follow link, Mueller suggests focusing on the bigger picture. You must explore the other things you’ve been doing to build links and clean it up, he says.
Mueller explained:
“Sometimes what can happen is that they will flag an issue and say, well, this is the kind of thing that you should be watching out for. It’s not like these are the two remaining links that you need to fix. But rather, here are some ideas of issues that you need to clean up.”
In other words, links that Google considers as spammy may not be an example of a bad link in a literal sense. Instead, they could be examples of issues that could lead to manual actions for links.
The “bigger picture” here, according to Mueller, is for publishers to focus on understanding what kind of links are problematic. With that information, they’ll know why their site received a link manual action and how to get out of it.
Watch the Webmaster Hangout here:
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