Numerous (20K+) inbound links from ONE site in short time period
-
I'm somewhat new to SEO, but from what I understand, slow link growth can provide better results than highly aggressive link building campaigns.
A site of mine was recently featured on a 90+ DA (55 PA) blog directory, and was featured for the entire state, therefore I received almost 20,000 inbound links from the site (from every company/listing in the state). The links have been mostly recorded (17,000) in Google webmaster tools (Yahoo Site Explorer claims around 23,000). However the site dropped 2 pages in rankings for numerous SEO related keywords since webmaster tools listed the links. Many of them are PA 50+, though a majority of the linking pages are PA 1. A few other inbound links were created from other root domains, roughly 8-10 or so in the past month.
The question is, would a large amount of links like this all of a sudden trigger some kind of "penalty" from search engines (Google, especially)? And, do the PA 1 pages take away from the quality of the 55 PA links?
-
Tons of sitewide links all at once can hurt a site that has very few incoming links, they get discounted anyway so the best thing to do is to get a homepage link only since the homepage is usually the highest PR page on a site, and well crawled by Google. Also, being linked to from a penalized or bad neighborhood can hurt you so you should vet your incoming links and remove any offending ones.
Too many links at once I do not believe is a factor, because Google is not going to penalized a site just because it goes viral, it is more about the TYPES of links and diversification of those links that can trigger a penalty.
-
This is a REALLY good answer. I wish I could give more than one thumbs up.
-
Hi Jonathon,
At this point you have done nothing untoward and obviously produced a site that was seen as valuable and shared in a purely natural way. If you were to start trying to influence people to remove your links, then you would actually be manipulating the link profile, which is what the search engines don't like!
Now that we know exactly how you came by the links, I would definitely follow the steps Ryan mentioned, starting with a reconsideration request.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
The reasonable possibilities are as follows:
-
the 20k inbound links triggered an algorithmic penalty
-
the other inbound links you mentioned triggered a penalty
-
there was another change related to your site which caused the ranking drop
-
the information you are providing is incomplete or inaccurate
We are all proceeding under the assumption the information you are providing is accurate so the first three possibilities are the only options I can think of. As Sha suggested, you should file a reconsideration request to confirm you have not been manually penalized. If that is not the case, then a review of your site to determine the potential source of any algorithmic penalties would be in order.
-
-
Thank you for the response!
About the anchors, they are all identical as far as I can see "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Articles". The link is to the category (instead of my root domain name).
The reason I ask is that, if I can have people "UN-favorite" the site, I could drop off the featured list if it will help my rankings return to normal. If that were to happen, though, will the inbound links "drop off" the lists?
Thanks for the reconsideration request link too, I didn't realize Google did that!
-
My domain name was registered in 2003. In the past, I had only gotten links from websites that I designed (started 2 years ago or so). I had roughly 20 root domains as of 1 month ago.
The listing directory is bloglines.com, which seems associated with merchant circle data (or is an affiliate). "They" picked the site as a favorite blog of Texas, and therefore the featured links. It is not paid.
I can't imagine it being fair that my rankings were negatively affected by it, though..
Any comment on the PA 1 vs PA 55 links? Is it the highest that counts since they're all from the same domain name?
-
Hi Jonathon,
I would agree with James (oh and Ryan too!) that the sudden addition of that number of links may alter your link profile in such a way as to signal to search engines that there may be some kind of manipulative link building practice going on.
Something that is likely to make this appear even more like a manipulative practice would be if the Lion's share of the anchor text used to create the links to your site is identical, for an exact match keyword term etc.
One thing we should clarify is that while this may be having a negative effect upon your rankings, it is not really a "penalty" as such. Basically, the algorithm is seeing a sudden and unnatural looking change in your link profile and adjusting your ranking as a result. If Google has manually applied a penalty for any reason, they are now informing webmasters through notifications in Google Webmaster Tools. Manual penalties usually only happen if you are doing something really overt like buying or selling links. As Ryan mentioned, if the directory is part of a paid link system, it would be an issue. In that case I would expect to find a message in Webmaster Tools.
If it were me I would leave it be for a while and see what happens.
First, provided the directory is not a problem, with 20,000 targeted referral links out there, your potential for increased conversion ready traffic is greatly enhanced anyway.
Second, I would expect that with a little time and maybe some more gradual and diverse links added to your link profile (and no more major spikes), your rankings will tend to come back anyway. If they don't begin to improve (or continue to worsen) within a month, I would bring it to Google's attention by filing a Reconsideration Request. This link is the latest from the Webspam Team on the current process.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I agree with James. If you add too many links too fast to an established site, you can incur a penalty.
What is the name of the directory? One possibility is you have used a pay directory and incurred a penalty.
-
Hi,
If your website is very new and suddenly you add 20,000 pages of links it can have a impact on search engines, I have seen this on new websites in the past, hence why I do not try and gather a huge amount of links in a very short period of time.
But the thing is if you have a website which already has a huge amount of links 500,000 for example and you have 20k pages added then it will not really have a impact.
Kind Regards,
James.
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
-
Why are bit.ly and ow.ly links showing up as Inbound Links?
Hello! I noticed this question was asked a while back (around 2013 i think), but I still don't quite understand why I'm seeing these shortened URLs come up as Inbound Links? Can someone please explain? Thanks,
Link Building | | txwildcard
Carlos0 -
Should I disavow spammy links that are showing in Open Site Explorer but not showing in Google Webmaster Tools?
Howdy Mozzers, After carrying out a backlink audit for a client, Open Site Explorer shows a range of outrageously spammy links for guys wanting a bit of assistance in the bedroom area, and so on. Hopping over to Google Webmaster Tools, there is no reported trace of said spammy links (for either of the www/non-www versions of the site). There are also no manual webspam actions found on the www/non-www Google Webmaster Tools accounts for this website. So my question is: do I carry out a pre-emptive strike and go down the disavow process of requesting removal from the spammy sites, and then submit a disavow request to Google after allowing a suitable period of time for the junky/compromised website to (not) respond? Or do I just leave it alone? Thanks in advance for your wise words of wisdom and pearls of clarity.
Link Building | | wh-seo0 -
Site wide back links
Hi, One of our sites has a site-wide link from another site. So, Google sees 6700 pages from that site link to one of our pages. Is that something to be concerned about? The other site is http://www.daum.net/ We also have 2000 pages that blogspot.com links to us from. Both these sites have high domain authority, so I would hope all those links score well. But I certainly don't want to be penalized for links that appear spammy. Thank you in advance.
Link Building | | seotis0 -
Spammy Links in MOZ but when I go to the external link I can't find a link to us
I was going to try to contact webmasters to see if they would remove some of our spammy links. I see alot of them in MOZ but when you go to the site our anchor text is not there. Is this good? How often does MOZ refresh external links. Please see: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.totalvac.com None of the links for the anchor text <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="vacuum cleaner parts vacuum parts vacuum bags vacuum cleaner bags" data-id="46391436859">vacuum cleaner parts vacuum part...</a> in MOZ exist? We got hit extremely hard by Penguin in May
Link Building | | totalvac0 -
Footer Back Links Question "Site by built by"
Hi all I design and develop websites for clients within the UK. With each website I build, I always add a link to the footer of the website which links back to my website. I have always used the link anchor text "Site By Jump" but then decided to try to use the link anchor text to our benefit by changing the links across all of our portfolio of sites to be: "Graphic Design by Jump"
Link Building | | yousayjump
or
"Web Design by Jump" In the hope that this helped us rank better for those keyword phrases. Now something occurred to me the day. Most of the websites I build have no relevance to the content on our website. For example, I could build a website for Baby Food and add a backlink to our homepage which doesn't even mention the words "baby food". In some cases, the websites can have thousands of pages, each with this footer link appearing at the bottom of each page. My question is, could these backlinks potentially be seen as black hat or spam to a search engine? I.e. thousands of backlinks from websites that have no relevance in terms of content all linking back to my homepage? Thank you for reading and any advice would be greatly appreciated.0 -
Article submissions for link building- what sites do you still use?
Hey Everyone, Long-time SEO'er first time poster here. I've been doing SEO for around 5 years but since starting my company The Search Ninjas last year I've been so bogged down with client work that I feel like I'm starting to fall behind on what's still effective from a link building perspective since all of my clients are local businesses and since we've been focusing so much attention on Google Places. My question is- are there any general article sites that you still use for SEO since the Panda update last year (that you firmly believe still offer "juice"), or do you mainly focus on niche sites and guest-blogging? I'm looking for ideas regarding how to find content submission opportunities for clients for link building purposes. I'm familiar with Ontolo and the Whitespark Link Prospecting Tool in terms of ways to find opportunities (and of course cherrypicking competitors' links using OSE and SEOSpyglass), any other recommendations? Best, George ps clients are in legal niche for the most part if that helps you out, but this is mainly me looking for everyone's general opinion.
Link Building | | georgetsn1 -
Creating new url structure for inbound links
In an effort to make is easier for our clients to link to content on our site we intend on creating a simpler url structure for them: site.com/1234 will 301 to site.com/xyz/abc/1234-this-is-where-we-want-you Is there a danger of creating new 301's just for this purpose, the goal here is to make it easier for clients to link to content and thus garner more inbound links.
Link Building | | antiquesearcher0