Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?
-
SEOMoz community,
If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board.
While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4)
While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site.
My question two the community are two-fold:
-
Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word?
-
The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site?
Thanks /Thomas
-
-
You could surely be penalized. If you really must link to them for some reason use nofollow at least
-
Thank you for the responses guys, it is very aligned with our plan.
Additional question that fits the context, are there any good "penalty checker" tools out there that would allow an easy way to pass by urls and it gives feedback if a site has likely received a penalty?
From our understanding, a serious penalty results in
- loss of page rank
- site being completely deindexed from Google
Are there any other signals?
Thanks /Thomas
-
I agree with you completely on items "a" and "c", but I disagree on item "b".
There are some pages such as your home page for which you cannot easily change the URL. Even if you could change the URL, you would create a 301 from the old page to the new page which would cause the bad external link to your site to follow to the new page along with your backlinks.
You simply cannot be penalized for the bad link to your site unless Google has reason to believe you paid for that link. If your site could be penalized for a bad site linking to you, then competitors would simply create "bad' sites and link to your site. There is simply nothing you can do about it.
-
It is absolutely possible, Google is very smart.
a) Remove your external links to any penalized sites.
b) If you have links from penalized sites pointing to internal pages on your site, let those pages 404 and make new URLs for them. If you have bad links pointing to your homepage that is much more time consuming because you'll need to reach out to all the webmasters and have them remove any bad links pointing to your homepage.
c) Submit reconsideration requests in webmaster tools, explain exactly what happened and what steps you're taking to remedy the situation. Include something new that you did in each letter so they see the progress you are making. Good luck! Don't buy or sell links!
-
If you link to a "bad" site, then you can definitely be penalized. A link is a "vote" for the site. You are vouching for them. There is clearly discretion involved, but you described your site as "heavily linking" to the penalized site so you are likely to be penalized for that act.
Any penalties can be passed along to a new site. Don't try to avoid the penalty by changing URLs and 301'ing to a new site.
You really need to view Google as a highly intelligent, highly experienced organization. Penalties are supposed to be very painful. The headache you are experiencing is supposed to convince you and others to ensure this issue never happens again. It's like "scared straight" is for people and the legal system.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Update? Anyone seeing a drastic change in rankings?
Hey everyone, Has anyone seen a drastic change in clients Google Rankings, we have one which has dropped from 9.5% visibility to 5.4% in one month.. It's extremely worrying as I have never seen a drop like this before since I've managed the account, in fact rankings have increased month on month since we took over the account. I've also looked at google, no penalty showing, I've started removing spammy sites who link to us and also added no follow to some of the links on the site which linked out to try and keep some link juice in the site. Anything else I can try / do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unbranded_Lee2 -
What are the ranking factors for "Google News"? How can we compete?
We have a few sport news websites that are picked up by Google News. Once in a blue moon, one of our articles ranks for a great keyword and shows in one of the 3 listings that Google News has in SERPS. Any tips on how we can we optimise more of our articles to compete in these 3 positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betnl0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Toxic Links; Their Existence and Their Impact..
We are constantly being asked about the existence of “toxic Links” and that they are damaging the sites of our clients. Apparently, this definition is being pushed down the throats of clients by other “Seo experts” trying to hijack our business. At this point in time, clients can easily be swayed as a reflex reaction to a drop in rankings. These so called “Seo experts” are clearly scaremongering for their own gain but I would be grateful for your opinion about whether automated, spun content from Seolinkvine and the like, where the English may not be perfect (I assume this is what is meant by “toxic Links”) can actually damage a client’s site. Is it not more constructive to concentrate resources on dilution of keywords from the anchor text rather than waste time on links that may no longer be as powerful, or do they actually have a negative effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dexter-2455780 -
OOPS!! My website links the most to me, I can't get it??
Today, I have checked Google webmaster tools to get answer of following question. Who links the most to my website? I was assumed that Google webmaster tools provide me list of external website where I have created my text links. But, I can't get it when see my own website links the most to me. (4652??) I checked my other websites which are integrated in Google webmaster tools. They also developed on same platform as well as same internal linking structure. But, I am not able to find out similar issue over there. That's why I am quite confuse with Vista Store. How can I solve it? Does it really matter? "Open Site Explorer is my favorite one and always using that to get it done. But, Google webmaster tools is also active & free so why should I not jump in to... 🙂 "
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Hello I have assembled a list of web-sites that have "Links" section that has a list of persons` favorite tools. Those pages have a link to my competitor. I know my tool is just as good if not better and want to request a link. I`m thinking of sending an email asking for a link and offering a small amount of money for it. Questions: A) How much should I offer? Should I offer anything at all B) Is there an email style that someone can suggest that has been tested and proven to work for this type of situtation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellopotap0