Google Advice On When To Submit Reconsideration Request & How To Clean Your Link Profile

Google posted a new article today answering common questions about submitting reconsideration requests and managing your backlink profile.

Google Search Quality representatives, Kaspar Szymanski and Uli Lutz, co-authored the article, going through the more common questions on this topic.

Google says you should really only submit a reconsideration request when you receive a manual penalty but if you are unsure if you have a manual or algorithmic penalty, submitting the request “is fine,” Google said.

Other tips include:

• Only submit the reconsideration request after you take action to fix the issues with your site.
• Use Google’s “links to your site” report within Webmaster Tools to analyze bad links pointing to your site.
• Remove bad links by disavowing them, nofollowing them and having them completely removed.
• When submitting a reconsideration request, provide a detailed explanation of what you changed and why.
• Responses for reconsideration request can take a few days but may take much longer depending on the site and current workload.
• Googlers review each reconsideration request manually.

For more details, check out the article at the Google blog.

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