Have my site been penalised ?
-
Hi,
I recently hired a link builder (who works for a digital marketing agency and wanted to earn some extra cash ) to do some link building for me on keyword Carpet Cleaner Hire
Basically , May my ranking for this work has moved from 29 up to 13 , then down to 500 + and now up to 67 ?.
It's been all over the place and I am worried that maybe google thinks its unnatural or to many links etc.
I looked at some of the work this chap did and there was a log of bookmarks done , apparently to increase social awareness and some articles on random forums I never heard of but the articles didn't look to good and in my eyes were a little spammy..
I don't have any messages in WMT saying I have been penalised or anything but I am naturally worried that this chap may have caused damaged and that I was manually penalised.
I have since asked him to stop immediately..
-
does this sound normal for the ranking to be all over the place in this manner when link building ?
-
How can I tell if I have been manually penalized in any way ?
-
What;s the general consensus ?.
-
Should I contact google or leave it and see what happens ?
-
Other keywords seems to be okay though.
Any advice much appreciated.
thanks
Sarah.
-
-
Would this kid be willing to log back on to the forums and remove his links? I guess contacting the moderators might work as well
-
That;s great thank you. Some great tips here.
-
Hi,
Many thanks for this. I guess you could be right, some of the lnks did looks a bit spammy.
Guess, I need to also fill out and send them the form to see what google says.
Am I correct in asuming the only way to remove the spammy links would be to write to the forum moderators etc asking for them to be removed.
Many thanks
Sarah
-
Google has been treaking their algo for a while now and sites have been shifting up and down. Some sites have been penalized without receiving a message so that can happen. Unnatural link building on low pr sites only in blogs or on link farms can definitely get you in hot water with google. My advice is to start generating great content for your site, videos help for seo, blogging is perfect, social media interactions are beneficial, and start developing a real high quality link profile. Yahoo Directory, Better Business Bureau, dmoz, BOTW, business.com, yelp, yellow pages, manta and other sites that are google friendly. If your other keywords are ok then it might just be the algo but still means your specified keyword needs work. hope this helps. Good luck.
-
With Googles new penguin algorithm, which is meant to filter webspam, it is very possible that you have been penalized for unnatural spammy links. There's a form Google has that you can fill out if you feel you have been mistakenly penalized and i dont think it would hurt to submit it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ
Be careful when hiring an SEO because Google is getting better and better at recognizing unnatural optimization and inexperienced SEO's often try to cut corners. Link building isn't easy and it relies on patience and hard work combined with great content that others want to link to. Heres a great article that you should read before moving forward http://searchengineland.com/link-building-means-earning-hard-links-not-easy-links-123767
I hope this has been helpful
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
-
Transfering Site from Http to HTTPS
Migrating all of our pages from HTTP to HTTPS. I am listing few of my concerns regarding the same: Currently, all HTTPS traffic to our Homepage and SEO page is 301 Redirected to HTTP equivalent. So, when we enable HTTPS on all our pages and 301 all HTTP traffic to HTTPS and stop current 301 Redirection to HTTP, will it still cause a loop during Google crawl due to old indexing? Will we move whole SEO facing site to HTTPS at once or will it be in phases? Which of the two approach is better keeping SEO in mind? what all SEO changes will be required on all pages.(eg. Canonical URLs on our website as well as affiliate websites), sitemaps etc.
Technical SEO | | RobinJA1 -
How to Switch My Site to HTTPS in GWT?
I recently bought an SSL certificate and moved my site over to HTTPS. Now how do I make the change in Google Webmaster Tools?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Google Site Search
I'm considering to implement google site search bar into my site.
Technical SEO | | JonsonSwartz
I think I probably choose the version without the ads (I'll pay for it). does anyone use Google Site Search and can tell if it's a good thing? does it affects in any way on seo? thank you0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Robots.txt & Mobile Site
Background - Our mobile site is on the same domain as our main site. We use a folder approach for our mobile site abc.com/m/home.html We are re-directing traffic to our mobile site vie device detection and re-direction exists for a handful of pages of our site ie most of our pages do not redirect the user to a mobile equivalent page. Issue – Our mobile pages are being indexed in desktop Google searches Input Required – How should we modify our robots.txt so that the desktop google index does not index our mobile pages/urls User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Disallow: /m User-agent: `YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2` Disallow: /m User-agent: `MSNBOT_Mobile` Disallow: /m Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Google having trouble accessing my site
Hi google is having problem accessing my site. each day it is bringing up access denied errors and when i have checked what this means i have the following Access denied errors In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons: Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.) Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories. Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.) The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results. Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site. Now i have contacted my hosting company who said there is not a problem but said to read the following page http://www.tmdhosting.com/kb/technical-questions/other/robots-txt-file-to-improve-the-way-search-bots-crawl/ i have read it and as far as i can see i have my file set up right which is listed below. they said if i still have problems then i need to contact google. can anyone please give me advice on what to do. the errors are responce code 403 User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/0 -
How can you get the right site links for your site?
Hello all, I have been trying to get Google to list relevant site links for my site when you type in our brand name, Loco2 or for when Loco2 comes up in a search result. Different things come up when you search Loco2 and Loco 2. We would like site links to look like how they do when you search Loco 2. However Loco2 is our brand name, NOT Loco 2. Does anyone know why Google is doing this and whether we can influence results? We have done as much as possible via Google webmaster, in terms of specifying the links we DO NOT want Google to list for Loco2. However, when you search "Loco2", results only show simple site links. Ideally what we want is: Loco2 to be recognised as the brand NOT Loco 2 The same results (substantial, identical) for Loco2 as for Loco 2 (think o2 and o 2) For the site links to reflect the main pages of our site (Times & Tickets, Engine Room forum etc.) Many thanks in advance! Anila
Technical SEO | | anilababla0 -
Site maintenance and crawling
Hey all, Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime. We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops. My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index). I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Technical SEO | | Daylan1