Confusing penalties
-
Dear Mozzers,
I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page.
Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to:
- eliminate duplicate content
- improve site structure
- optimize internal links
- build legitimate do-follows
- add some keyword density
- fix titles and H tags
Essentially just the basics, right?
But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites.
At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it?
Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition.
Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution?
Advice is really appreciated!
-
You guys are amazing. Thanks for the quick and thorough feedback!
-
On the whole, I agree with what Will Quick says.
I do believe that even in niches that others are using comment spam, you CAN outrank them with quality work (I have done it, in fact)... and in the end, you will have a stronger backlink profile that should outlast the spam guys when G- updates roll out in the future (as they always do!).
That said, I strongly agree with Will, in that a sudden change in the style of backlink profile can in fact cause an issue and ranking drop - especially in the mid-long term.
Basically you have just suffered from 1 or 2 things, or both (in my opinion anyway!).
Number 1: You may well be suffering from an inbound link filter/penalty due to the spam. This can be due to spammy links, or over use of a given anchor text (what % of inbound links to the page that was ranking, and also to the domain, use the exact match anchor?). This could be an issue EITHER becuase of the spam links, OR because of over-optimisation of a set keyword (has the ranking suffered for other pages/keyterms???
Number 2: The link velocity to the domain as a whole, and also to the page(s) in question, has probably just taken a MASSIVE drop (by the sounds of it). Such a drastic change in itself can cause issues and ranking drops (in my opinion!). At least in the short to mid term
- That said, continued, high quality SEO work 'should' re-gain you those positions, and build a better foundation for the future (safer with future big G updates).
Now, to fix Number 1, above, may take time. I feel that you need to pull off reports of the current anchor text usage to the domain, and to specific pages, and try to ensure that nothing is too 'over the top'. Try to get some nice brand links to water down any high anchor text usages (to page/domain).
To fix Number 2 may be trickier. You could either:
A) Use spam for a while, and decrease it steadily, whilst increasing the quality work (I do NOT recommend this, but that is just because it is not how I like to work, I feel it pollutes the web).
B) Ride it out! - Gain steady, high quality links via press releases, blogger outreach, articles, web 2.0 work, social media baiting. Also consider an increase in PPC in the interim, to keep the $£ coming in! Done right, this should help to regain positions.
C) Do 'B)', above, but also try to be creative in 'simulating' the sort of link velocity that the spammers, perhps some decent infographics with brand links in the embed code, social media baiting, press release syndication, and at a push, mass article submission (with decent quality articles) is still less spammy than blog comments! (although not ideal for long term tactics, it may help to simulate the link velocity). Basically check the amount of extra unique linking domains that the spam work gained the site, and try to get at least somewhere near that level using non-spam tactics, and slowly reduce the amount to a more realistic monthly amount, but with higher quality work.
I think that you should be open with the client, and tell them that although they may suffer now, it is probably much better to do this now than to wait until they get penalised.
This way, they just need to come up with an intelligent strategy to recover, whereas if they kept up with the spam work, they may well end up in real hot water!
**That is just my opinion anyway, and it is without knowing the exact situation, so should be taken as general opinion, not a well researched tactic! **
brevityworks, best of luck!
-
i'm with Ryan, you are more then likly getting the wrap for the last SEO's spam.
comment spam would not get you to page one for any keyword worth having.
-
Hey Brevity,
This may or may not be the answer you're looking for but, from my experience, it's the right answer.
Don't think of links in terms of good and bad quality. Whilst there certainly is a difference between a good and a bad link, the first thing you should be looking at is the link profiles of your biggest competitors in the same niche / vertical.
A good way to find these sites is with SEMrush if you don't know them already.
Look at the kind of links your competitors are getting and how the page / domain authority of these links is distributed in their link profile. Eg 90% of their links are on pages with 0-10 page authority, 5% 10-20 page authority 5% over 20.
Now, from my experience, Google doesn't have a model of a "good" link profile, only what's standard in that niche. If everyone else is buying shitty comment spam then you have to do that too. Fight fire with fire. On top of this you optimise the balls off your site and build up more of these high quality links ON TOP of the other links.
I certainly wouldn't just turn off a Linkbuilding method that has already proven it works for your site.
Once this starts getting results slowly wean them off this spam. Think of it like gradually cutting off a smack addict's heroin supply, haha. Obviously comment spam isn't something you want to rely on forever, but its too late now if the ball's already in motion. You just have to slow that baby down first.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I just needed some reassurance and they wanted a second opinion.
My fear is that their ranking on that keyword was hyper inflated because of the insane amount of comment spam (2 yrs worth) and now that the spam is either dissipating or being penalized, the normal duplicate content penalties are kicking in.
Aarrgghhh...cleanup is always harder than starting from scratch.
-
It could be that the comment spam is now being punished, coincidentally after you stopped it. Run the keyword grading tool on your pages to make sure your on-site is as good as it could be, and continue building legitimate links. I would never suggest using black-hat techniques like buying comment spam.
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
-
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
Dynamic Content Boxes: how to use them without get Duplicate Content Penalty?
Hi everybody, I am starting a project with a travelling website which has some standard category pages like Last Minute, Offers, Destinations, Vacations, Fly + Hotel. Every category has inside a lot of destinations with relative landing pages which will be like: Last Minute New York, Last Minute Paris, Offers New York, Offers Paris, etc. My question is: I am trying to simplify my job thinking about writing some dynamic content boxes for Last Minute, Offers and the other categories, changing only the destination city (Rome, Paris, New York, etc) repeated X types in X different combinations inside the content box. In this way I would simplify a lot my content writing for the principal generic landing pages of each category but I'm worried about getting penalized for Duplicate Content. Do you think my solution could work? If not, what is your suggestion? Is there a rule for categorize a content as duplicate (for example number of same words in a row, ...)? Thanks in advance for your help! A.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OptimizedGroup0 -
Subtle On-site Factors That Could Cause a Penalty
It looks like we have the same penalties on more than one ecommerce site. What subtle on-site factors can contribute to non-manual penalty, specifically rankings slowly going down for all short tail keywords? And what does it take to pull yourself out of these penalties?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Seeking Top Notch Marketing Company with experience in growing sites post manual penalty
Does anyone know of a company who has direct experience with growing websites AFTER a manual link penalty has been lifted? Any referrals would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Help required as difficulty removing Google algorithmic penalty
I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty. Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | postagestamp0 -
Content box (on page content) and titles Google over-optimization penalty?
We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0