Google has launched an improved URL removal tool that will make it easier to request updates based on changes on other people’s websites. But there is actually another use for this tool: it can be used to aid in a website’s Google Penguin Recovery if your site has been hit by Google Penguin.
Recovering from Google Penguin is not an easy task by any means. In fact, it takes a very highly skilled technical SEO with a lot of search engine optimization experience in order to recover from Google Penguin properly without doing long-term damage to a website’s search engine rankings. The Google Penguin recovery process requires that you remove the “low quality” and unnatural links to your website. However, that is actually a lot easier said then done. Some sites have over 100,000 links pointing to their site. How are you going to gather all of those links (not one single tool out there will tell you about all the links, so you have to use multiple tools)? How are you going to sort through all of them and decide which links must go, which links must stay, and do that efficiently?
Once you’ve determined which links are truly unnatural and need to be removed, do you have a plan on actually getting those links removed? And, is it still okay to link out after Google Penguin?
Okay, so you have a list of bad, low quality, toxic, suspicious, and unnatural links to your site. I recommend contacting as many site owners as you can to get those links removed. Then, go ahead and prepare a disavow file (do you know how to properly do that?) and submit it to Google using their disavow tool.
But once you disavow your links, are you going to just sit back and wait for Google to process them and “cross your fingers” that it will work? There are actually things that you can do to make this whole process go a lot quicker.
What must happen is that Google’s crawlers need to crawl the pages that are low quality, unnatural links to your site. They need to recalculate all of those links. The problem is that if those links are low quality, chances are that those links are not going to be crawled very often. So, forcing them to actually get crawled might speed up the process of recovering from Google Penguin.
Using this new Google removal tool, you can speed up the whole process and potentially get your site’s rankings back to where they should be. As a part of your site’s Google Penguin Recovery, here’s what I would do:
– Identify the bad links
– Reach out to site owners to get those links removed.
– Document everything in a spreadsheet (urls, dates contacted, etc.)
– Prepare a disavow file.
– Upload the disavow file.
– Crawl all of the links yourself using a crawler. There are a lot of them out there, Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider and Integrity come to mind.
– Identify the links that have been removed or URLs that used to link to you that have been removed.
– Using Google’s new improved removal tool, submit those URLs (the ones that are gone now but were linking to you).
By telling Google about pages that were linking to you but that are now removed (they have 404 errors, etc.), you’re actually speeding up the process of recovering from Google Penguin. Google will crawl those URLs again and, most likely, will see that those links are gone and then reprocess or recalculate the link to your site.