10,000 links in 2 minutes
-
Hey guys. A belated happy new year to everyone who reads this!
I had a strange experience yesterday with linking from a clients website footer.
Basically, the client currently has a serious duplicate content problem caused by a multiple language plug in. It has made Google believe that there are 10 different versions of the clients website online (one for each language). It is a real estate website and there are quite a few pages anyway, but with the error, I would suggest the page count is now around 10,000.
We are waiting for the developer who installed the plug in to repair the problem and without thinking it through really, yesterday, we made a text link to our home page in their footer.
Overnight, our rankings for the keyword we used for the text link have dropped from pos. 2 page 1 down to halfway down page 2.
Is this basically a sign that it is not good have this footer link from their site? I guess it is kind of like 10,000 weighted links being added in one day right?
For now we have removed the link, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Mark
-
Yeah this is really strange. We have now dropped out of site for all of our main keywords. Weirder still, is that for some of the keywords the contact page on our site is ranking above the target landing page.
The thing I have noticed about the new hosting is that we no longer show for 'pages from the UK' and also the site speed on analytics seems quite a bit slower.
Do you think this could have all been caused by adding that one link?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Our website is www.mysocialagency.com
-
A hosting change would not cause the drop. Especially given that is only one page. If there were a problem with hosting change, it would likely affect most or all.
If the plug in that was used is the problem, you won't need to change canonical.
-
Have the client use the cannonical tag so that the pages are not duplicated for every language! That would fix their problems as well as yours
-
You know actually Robert. We also changed the hosting of our website two days ago. Last time we did this, it made no difference at all and this time, it has made no difference to any other keyword phrases apart from the one that was the footer text link.
Do you find that swapping hosting sometimes causes drops? The new server should be faster.....
-
That is interesting. My gut says it likely did not impact you with a footer link to your page that quickly. Could have, but I am just not that convinced. Along with that, I will tell you that while early on we would link from client's footer to our site, we just don't do it anymore. One, footer links are of little value (and another reason I don't think that was the cause of the drop) and it is obvious if you host sites for clients that they are all on same server/C block.
I would go ahead with what you have done in removing the text link and see what happens over the next few days. Even if it pops right back up, it won't mean that was the cause. I have a site that was page one number 3 for a given quality keyword term that a month ago, dropped to page 5 number 9. Today (a month later) we are back at page one number 3. I cannot tell you why. (Google was SE).
Hope this helps
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
-
Deleting links
I've got 280 links on my wordpress blog site, apparently it's recommended to keep under 100 links. How would I know which links to get rid of and which links to keep?
Link Building | | gimes0 -
Is link exchange a reliable source to get back links?
I read a latest post on seomoz that _“Do not buy or exchange link with anyone who contacts you. This is completely against Google's policies and if they were to find out, you could be penalized." So I went through Google's ''Link Schemes'' and found that ''Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")'' can negatively impact a site's ranking . _ So is it the ''excessive'' link exchanging that can cause a negative impact? Exchanging links with good quality, cached sites (without excessive doing) can do good or bad? Can anyone please explain to me in detail?
Link Building | | semvibe0 -
Links I am not Building?
Hi All, I check webmaster multiple times on a daily basis, and I noticed some links that I have not worked on and look a bit spammy, is it possible for people to purposely pont bad links in my direction? If that is the case is there a way for me to remove them myself? Also the number of total backlinks are very different in Webmaster and my Open Site Explorer, is this normal? Thanks again !
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
No internal followed links
My site shows no internal followed links in OSE, but each page on my site has internal links, including to the domain itself - jonnyt.me. Any idea why this might be and how I could fix it?
Link Building | | jontarbuck0 -
Links in the Classifieds
We rent apartments. One way we use to find clients is to advertize these apartments in Classifieds. Generally, we use free ads. Sometimes, for very popular sites ( like Kijiji), we pay so our ads can be seen first. Could this be a problem with Google? Some sites send us clients, many of them never do. We keep putting ads there because of their PR. What is the worth of this kind of links? Thanks for your answers.
Link Building | | Caru0 -
Page links vs. domain links
Hello all, I am trying to find out how Google weighs page inbound links vs. domain inbound links. I have a domain with about 100,000 inbound links and am adding a new page to my domain which at this time has 0 links. I will be trying to outrank a competitors page that has 6,000 inbound links to the competitors page, but only has 26,000 inbound links to my competitors domain . Is there a formula or a way to know how Google values a page link vs. a domain link?
Link Building | | digitalops0 -
Build links through blogging?
Although my site is a wordpress site it presently has about as many static pages as blog posts. The site has a lot of directory links and is doing pretty good with a PR3 after about a year. When I first put the site up I had a well known blogging expert help me with the permalinks and a couple of other things and he said that with a blog there is no need to build links, it can all be done through natural link acquisition off of the blog posts. I was skeptical at the time because it seemed that a lawyer's site was something not a lot of people would be interested enough in to link to it. Now I am thinking about trying his stragegy, as 1 of my blog posts that I put up on a very topical subject immediately got about 15 backlinks. My questions are: Is it reasonable to try to build links just by posting frequent topical blog posts? If yes, should I have links in the blog posts to my home page, to internal pages, or both? \ Paul
Link Building | | diogenes0 -
External link
Hi guys! You must get many questions about external links... This is mine. If I get an external link with good authority ranking in google, but it is not relevant to the site (for example, my site is about marquees, but we could get links from schools, which are our main clients, or any type of client) Does that affect negatively somehow to the rankings? or there is good value on it even is not related? Thanks! Adriana
Link Building | | extrememarquees0