Reconsideration Request Advice

A question for anybody with reconsideration request experience.

The Situation
I am working for a client that employed an SEO agency which did just ridiculous link-building. The site got a manual penalty from Google (Partial Match - "Unnatural links to your site - impacts links"). At the time they got the penalty, GWT had found over 750,000 links to the site. After a super-intensive link clean-up, we got 750,000 links down to a few hundred. Out of the few hundred remaining, we disavowed all the shitty ones.


The Problem
The problem is, GWT is showing this decrease in links extremely slowly. Currently it still shows over 230,000 links. It is going down at a rate of 2-3k per week, but at that rate we will have to wait years before it shows what is really going on.


The Question
My question is - should I wait for GWT to update and show the real number of remaining links before filing the request for reconsideration or should I file for reconsideration now? If I should wait, is there any way to speed up the process? Pinging the dead backlinks or something?


Thanks guys

You don't have to wait as long as you have removed the bad links. I also got a manual penalty which was revoked in less than 2 weeks after removing all the unnatural links to my site. I didn't wait for the backlinks number to update. In my case it was a small site with less than 500 backlinks, so I was able to take down all the links in one day. Then I submitted a reconsideration request the next day. All these happened within 2 days after the manual penalty was imposed on my site and the revocation of the penalty happened 1 week and several days later.

try to follow what he said and you will see

gdon9 said:

You don't have to wait as long as you have removed the bad links. I also got a manual penalty which was revoked in less than 2 weeks after removing all the unnatural links to my site. I didn't wait for the backlinks number to update. In my case it was a small site with less than 500 backlinks, so I was able to take down all the links in one day. Then I submitted a reconsideration request the next day. All these happened within 2 days after the manual penalty was imposed on my site and the revocation of the penalty happened 1 week and several days later.

Click to expand...

go with the reconsideration request. It worked also for me. They had revoked it for me in 3 weeks.

At 750.000 Unnatural links you should advise your client to wait 1 month at least - also - he should change the content in his website if not entirely for sure above 90%. Change all structure and then try to push it back. Negative SEO is one of the hardest action to be countered, especially if is attracting the attention of Google and they do human actions against the targeted website - I'm sure that this happened to your client - so ask him for patience and you ask yourself for a lot of work

For years people were under the illusion that negative seo is non-existent, but finally Google had to admit it, and then they expect US to remove these bad links, and use the disavow tool. Then just hope...

As long as you are removing the links then you should be OK with a reconsideration request. Webmaster tools is not in real time for many reasons. What you are seeing in webmaster tools for links isn't what Google is seeing.

If enough work was done file a reconsideration request. But with that many links you should use a link removal service I think. Please keep us posted though.