Client participated in Link farm.
-
Our client participated in link exchange activity between 2008-2009. The service they used was http://link2me.com/
Its an obvious link farm scheme and their drop in traffic/rankings correlates to panda release early this year.
The site does have tons of unique content, their are no technical SEO issues. They DO have great inbound links from some very authoritative sites (ie: peta.org)
They do not rank even for unique strings taken directly from their content. Rankings for some very n long tail terms are virtually non existant.
So the question were trying to figure out is, did the domain get hit with a penalty bc of past link farm participation, if so how can we correct?
-- killing the account with link2me has already been done
Could the domain NOT be penalized, and since all those external links were penalized did our site lose authority?
-
Thanks for the clarification Keri.
Always helps.
-
A quick clarification. The private questions are private, and always stay that way. SEOmoz Associates that answer the questions are under NDA and we don't share the details of those questions. Period.
Public questions and responses are now viewable and indexed right away (there had been a two week waiting period for the responses to be public, but that has changed), though only Pro members can ask and answer questions.
I hope this helps! Do feel free to ask this question in private with more details if you would like. You can create a new question and leave this one here for additional community input if you would like.
-
Lee,
With a client like this where you are reticent to share the domain, the answers will be a bit less authoritative. But, if you think you were hit with a penalty, you should go through each page to insure no further issues exists ( I would check those long tail KW pages to see if there is duplicate content, and that there is no hidden code, etc.) If you have tons of useless links in the footer I would take them out, etc.
Once that is all done and SEO is tight, submit to Google for reconsideration. But, be sure you have a clean site: It would be painful to submit and then get shot down.
If it is a big issue and you need to be circumspect due to the site being a client site, I would use a private question to SEOmoz for assist. This way you can choose if it is kept private or is seen two weeks later. If you have used your private question, you get another one each month.
Hope this helps,
-
Dear Lee,
According to the link farm I can't really agree with you that they became useless and doesn't drive any result. Of course you need to know which link farms to use and how to use. Following this we can't exclude the presence of any penalties on the domain name which effect on growth of the particular keywords. Usual it takes from 6 month to 2 years for penalties to be removed in some case you need to contact with Google Support regarding this.
About domain authority, you can measure it only if you remember which number it has before changes (according for ex. to SEOmoz bar) and which number is now.
Also I need to say that if you are using link farms still you should do really stupid things there to get a penalty from Google. My feelings that it might be some problems with on-page optimization or the keyword competitions are high and links which you got for them are not enough. Try to measure competition and develop a strategy and be tolerant because after adjustments you can't see immediate effect.
Thanks,
Russel
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
-
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi Moz community, I am getting the "Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz for most of my pages and Google declared the max number as 100 internal links. However, most of my pages can't have internal links less than 100, since it is a commercial website and there are many categories that I have to show to my visitors by using the drop down navigation bar. Without counting the links in the navigation bar, the number of internal links is below 100. I am wondering if the navigation bar links affect the link juice and counted as internal links by Google. The Same question also applies to the links in the footer. Additionally, how about the products? I have hundreds of products in the category pages and even though I use pagination I still have many links in the category pages (probably more than 100 without even counting the navigation bar links). Does Google count the product links as internal links and how about the effect on the link juice? Here is the website if you want to take a look: http://www.goldstore.com.tr Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
Building a product clients will integrate into their sites: What is the best way to utilize my clients' unique domain names?
I'm designing a hosted product my clients will integrate into their websites, their end users would access it via my clients' customer-facing websites. It is a product my clients pay for which provides a service to their end users, who would have to login to my product via a link provided by my clients. Most clients would choose to incorporate this link prominently on their home page and site nav.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emzeegee
All clients will be in the same vertical market, so their sites will be keyword rich and related to my site.
Many may even be .org and ,edus The way I see it, there are three main ways I could set this up within the product.
I want to know which is most beneficial, or if I'm missing anything. 1: They set up a subdomain at their domain that serves content from my domain product.theirdomain.com would render content from mydomain.com's database.
product.theirdomain.com could have footer and/or other no-follow links to mydomain.com with target keywords The risk I see here is having hundreds of sites with the same target keyword linking back to my domain.
This may be the worst option, as I'm not sure about if the nofollow will help, because I know Google considers this kind of link to be a link scheme: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en 2: They link to a subdomain on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to product.mydomain.com/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. 3: They link to a subdirectory on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to mydomain.com/product/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. In all scenarios, my marketing content would be set up around mydomain.com both as static content and a blog directory, all with SEO attractive url slugs. I'm leaning towards option 3, but would like input!0 -
Is it safe to link my websites together?
Hi Everyone, I have 10 websites which are all of good standing and related. My visitors would benefit of knowing about the other websites but I don't want to trigger a google penalty by linking them all together. Ideally I'd also like to pass on importance through the links as well. How would you proceed in this situation? Advice would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
How to build authority links and how they look ?
Hi how to build authority links and how they look ? If you could give a few examples so that i can see how it looks. and i have 9 linking root domains which is really low. so what are linking root domains ? and what i need to about that ? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek991 -
Link Building Post Penguin?
I really am lost as to what to do these days.. The problem with my industry is the whole idea of link bait isn't very lucrative. There are no bloggers either, so guest blogging also isn't a very good option. Seems to me like the best thing I can do is just publish content! So, publish a lot of quality content? LOL, sounds like that's right up Google's alley. Where do you publish your content, and what would you say has shown the best results for you personally? We called an SEO company, Arteworks, a few days ago (Friday), and they really didn't go into any details about how they build links. We called them because I saw a post that you commented on, here, and it recommended a few companies at the bottom of the post. (Arteworks being one of them) Really, this is where I get so dang confused... The goal is to build links like the old days, except only use unique content, diversify your pages, and anchor text? Sound about right? Or, should I only create content on my site? Thanks in advance for your time and advice!! Sincerely, Tyler Abernethy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Linking to bad sites
Hi, I just have a quick question. Is it very negative to link to "bad" sites, such as online pharmacies, dating, adult sites, that sort of stuff? How much does linking to a "bad" site negatively affect a "good" site? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Is there an optimal ratio of external links to a page vs internal links originating at that page ?
I understand that multiple links fro a site dilute link juice. I also understand that external links to a specific page with relevant anchortext helps ranking. I wonder if there is an ideal ratioof tgese two items
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Apluswhs0