When you do blogging, you can feel how much passion is attached with your website and what your website means for you. As I am blogging for around more than three years, this is normal that a lot of emotion is attached with my blog. When something bad happens to my blog, it hurts me a lot. But unfortunately, something unexpected happened to me and with my blog. On this February, 2014, I was going back to my country after my graduation and I was in a cheering mode. I had an 18 hours transit break and I was staying in a Hotel in Kunming, China. When I had checked my email, I had found that one of the regular reader of my blog had sent one email and the email says that my website page rank had dropped suddenly from PR4 to PR0. It was like a shock for me and then I tried to find out why this happened to my blog. Just after that I had checked another email and it says like below:
Then I have understood that Google has penalized my website. Then I tried to find main reason behind this. The main reason behind the penalization is a lot of guest post with dofollow links in the articles.
I was accepting a lot of guest posts from MyBlogGuest WordPress Plugin, MyBlogGuest forums and also through email. The articles were good there is no doubt about that but I was putting a lot of dofollow links in the articles which was the cause of this crash!
As I was on a vacation, I did not get any chance to work on those for a long time which is around a month. After coming back from my vacation I also got busy with my job and other things. I was not getting enough time to fix the issue. I just tried removing all the dofollow links from the author bio and requested for a reconsideration request. But Google replied me after a couple of weeks that I am still violating their guidelines. Then I have decided that I really need to work hard to fix the issue. Then I have done a bit of research about how to get my lost pride back. I have checked a video from Google by Matt Cutts which was really helpful for me. The video which helped me a lot and if your website also got penalized by Google, you can also check the video.
In the above video, it was clearly stated that I need to remove all the links which are not natural or I need to make all the links no-follow ( just put rel=nofollow example: <a href=http://example.com rel=nofollow>example </a>) then I will have to apply for reconsideration. It is also mentioned in the email that I need to explain which steps I have taken and also will have promise that I will not do such kind of activities in my website which will be against Google policies.
The good thing was that if I work hard to regain the reputation of my website, I can get back the reputation. But the bad thing is that I need to spend a lot of time.
Things that I have done to Regain My Website Reputation:
- I started checking each and every post of my website one by one to remove unnecessary do-follow backlinks. After working for around one month, I was able to remove all the do-follow backlinks from my website and also made some links no-follow which I have thought, removing that link will be a loss for that article.
- I have stopped accepting guest post with dofollow links and rejected those article which are not at least 800+ words long.
- Changed my guest post guideline and made it a bit strict. Rejected all the articles which were not informative and are not unique 100%
This time my reconsideration request was successful and I have got my reputation back. My website is again PR4 now!
Then I have requested for a reconsideration and this time I have got a reply from Google just after 1 week and they notified me that my reconsideration request was successful.
Important Points While Writing a Reconsideration Request:
This is very important that you write your reconsideration request with specific points so that it does not seem to the Google team that this is just an anonymous request. Try to focus on the below things:
- Specify how many dofollow links you have removed from your site.
- Specify how many dofollow links are been made nofollow.
- Specify that you have changed your guest post guidelines if you have guest post option.
- Promise that you will not allow irrelevant dofollow link again.
- Try to explain the points and steps that you have done to make your blog more standard and decent.
- Try to convince that how much serious you are about your blog.
