Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
-
Hi Everyone,
I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk
Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name.
Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc)
We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded.
Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!!
Any advice would be great
-
Yes - we removed many of the irrelevant ones and we also put no follows on the remaining ones.
-
Are those "useful links" really useful to users?
Or are they there as part of a link exchange?
-
Hello
I couldn't comment on if anyone has a positive repsonse as I have not had this issue but it may be worth just doing all you can in terms of cleaning up your inlinks and then carry on with whitehat techniques and content development whilst you see how bad the penalty is.
It's probably going to take Google a while to get around to your reconsideration request as there are a thousands of sites affected by this (and google aren't exactly going to dedicate massive amounts of man hours to respond asap when the sites are being penalised for manipulating there guidelines)
How long ago did you put through the reconsideration request by the way?
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
-
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Nofollow for reciprocal links?
Hi, We have reciprocal links with our business partners. Their websites have been listed on our website with "nofollow" links and they link to our website with "nofollow" or "dofollow" links. Is this wrong having reciprocal links? And if they are our partners, "nofollow" or "dofollow" is better? I don't think there will be anymore link juice loss with dofollow links from our website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
My site just dropped significant!
Just noticed that my website onlinecasting.co.za just dropped 50+ places on basically all the keywords I'm following.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KasperGJ
I can also see, that today there almost havent been any new sign-ups so something happened.
I didnt change anything. On issue, which might have something to do with it, is that I own several "copies" of the same site, just in different countries (domains). I host the websites myself, and they are all on the same server. The text and design in the same in some of the countries except that "jobs" are unique for the country. I also have:
onlinecasting.ae (english)
onlinecasting.sg (english)
onlinecasting.mx
and more coming So, could that be the reason, that google somehow now decided, that it wont accept the "allmost same site"?0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Site dropping in rank even through there are more backlinks being added
Hello, One of my client's sites is ranking lower than he should. This happened when we took off backlinks (20 little blogs, several site-wide paid links. It really dropped the site, but it had to be done. Since then we've increased his # of root domains by 10% through white hat link building in his non-competitive niche, and rankings are still poor. I know that's not much in the way of added backlink value, but we're working on it. My question is, how have the recent (and coming) updates possibly effected us. We want to take the remaining problem areas off right away, but another drop in traffic is not a good idea. Even though the blogs (see below) have no backlinks of themselves, they cause drops when taken off) He still has -20 little blog backlinks w/ a quarter of them being exact match anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW
-1 sitewide paid link - an image, exact match alt tag anchor text
-1 non-site-wide paid links that is an image near the footer, exact match alt tag anchor text.
-3 links on a domain, this one looks fairly editorial, but there are a bunch of paid links on that page. Changing to non-exact-match anchor text
-2 links on two domains that look completely editorial with no other paid links on that page. non-exact-match anchor text -70 backlinks total with about 1/3 being problematic. How does this site look in regards to updates and when to take links off without tanking our site even more? Thanks.0 -
Penguin link removal what would you do?
Hi Over the last 4 months I have been trying to remove as many poor quality links as possible in the hope this will help us recover. I have come across some site's that the page our back-link is on has been de-indexed, goggle shows this when I look at the cached page... 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGNI_enGB482GB482&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fforom.eovirtual.com%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D84 was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins> If goggle is showing this message do I have to still try to remove the link, or is it a case goggle has already dismissed the link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
Sudden drop in rakings for a keyword.
Hi, A few weeks ago my homepage - http://www.linearsky.com dropped out of the rankings completely for a keyword I was promoting (web design staffordshire). I was thinking that one of the reasons could be a sudden link spike. The reason being is that I have been doing some development work (for a client) on one of my sub-domains. Now this is a Magento site with thousands of products, with my keyword rich link in the footer. From looking at the Google webmaster tools, it seams that alot of these pages got indexed accidently. Could this sudden link spike be enough to be penalised by Google? Apart from that the only borderline black hat stuff I have been doing is some reciprocal link swapping with a few websites in my niche - http://www.linearsky.com/misc/links.html I also bought a paid link on http://www.iwebtool.com/browser_details, (that I have now asked to be withdrawn) to see what kind of boost it would give me. I know this is unethical, but a number of page one competitors were also using this said link. Also it was only indexed for a few weeks. Could Google really pick this up so quickly? Any ideas of how to resolve this? Many Thanks Marcus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marcusuk-3041050 -
My Google PR is Decreasing HELP!
We have just started in on an SEO campaign after a year or so break from engaging in active SEO efforts. Our rankings and organic traffic seems to be increasing but we just dropped from a PR 5 to a PR 4 after being a PR 5 for probably a couple years. We are not doing anything black hat or sketchy and try hard to make sure all of our links are relevant and quality links. Does anyone know why this might have happened or if it is an indication of anything?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyNet0