No reply from Google despite reconsideration and hard work!
-
Hi everyone,
I hope someone can help.
The site www.danbro.co.uk suffered a manually penalty in April.
It had a number of poor quality sitewide blog links and the link profile looked (and still does despite a massive improvement) unnatural.
The work to over turn the penalty
Since then 80% of the spammy blog links have been taken down. the other 20% of sites simply do no respond to requests (these sites were documented).
The webmaster also has started building up more natural links as 95% of the anchor text could be classed as 'money keywords'.A low % of links included the brand name at all.
A number of requests have been sent ( i told the site manager this should have been avoided but hay-ho). The last request of which i assisted them with was sent last week. The reconsideration was extremely detailed and documented all link removals and links that were still live yet poor quality.
some questions
-
Its been a few months since the penalty - should a brand new site be launched?
-
If option '1' was to be implemented, is a 302 re-direct a feasible option as the site's content is vast? will this pass on the penalty?
-
in your opinion Is the websites link profile the root of this penalty?
-
If point '3' is true would you a) start a fresh site or b) continue working on balancing the link profile?
Any help or case studies would be tremendous
thanks in advance
-
-
Steve, sorry, I completely misread that original question, if it is a manual penalty, things are somewhat worse and recovery, in my experience is a whole lot harder. You will have to be absolutely fastidious in your approach and get rid of everything manipulative or start over.
Sorry buddy, skim reading whilst stuffing my face at lunch time!
-
Hey Steve, it is difficult, especially if you inherit these problems with a new client and there is just not a great deal of case study data out there.
You just need to be brutal in your clean up and attempt to remove anything that is obviously manipulative and as Robert mentioned above, if you have links from other sites that are clearly spam honeypots for Google then get them removed.
Best of luck
Marcus -
Hi Marcus,
thanks for your answer.
with regards to the 24th - The site was actually hit on the 12th April.
The link profile is deffinately alot better than 3 months ago however it still looks unnatural.
The only issue is where to allocate resources and time...
should time be spent making a more natural looking profile (google may not even respond or take notice) or is it easier 'burining the house down' and starting a fresh.
it is a difficult one.
thanks for your time - much appreciated
-
Arghh, looks worse than I thought. OpenSiteExplorer won't expand the linking sites for me at the moment but if it is this rotten, then a clean up is just not always practical let alone possible.
This is the client needs to be transparent and if they can't be, then you need to dig through the link profile to guide your hand.
If they are doing .edu and .gov link building then this is a true case of manipulation and as Robert says above, fixing it will likely be pretty difficult.
-
Steve,
I feel your pain, but....
Thinking about your situation, I went to the site and used OSE to see what your links look like. The first red flags I see came within 5 seconds of opening OSE and clicking on linking domains. You sell accounting software for contractors and, while that can be rather broad, the first couple of domains that stand out are links from NASA and the University of TX.
There were so many links from the NASA blog I did not bother looking for yours and assumed a lot of BS was there. For UT, I started scratching my head as the blog post was around a UT student visiting Germany. For your comment a "student" named Alex is gushing about Germany being efficient but, the name is actually a link to your home page.
So, what is Google seeing?
My guess is that if I can hit two really questionable links, one a .gov the other a .edu in the first few seconds and Google is really digging, you are going to have to work very hard to fix this. Otherwise you are going to have to reform your site by doing as you state above and rebuild.
My only incredulousness comes from you stating that Google does not respond. I would have thought they would have sent you the does not meet Google Quality Guidelines.....resubmit request for reconsideration... email.
Good Luck,
-
If you have done a lot of work and have a manual penalty then play it out a while longer and see what happens. If you simply don't get a response or the link profile is just too rotten to repair then it may be time to burn the house down and start again.
I have had a quick look at the link profile and have seen a lot worse. You have two main keywords targeted with thousands of links from only a handful of sites so if you have got rid of a lot of sitewides, it may be a lot more balanced. That is not taking
Your questions.
1. If it was on the 24th then the link profile is highly likely
2. I have to admit I am not sure about this one. In theory, it should not, but I would really want to cut all ties with the previous site so you may need to deindex all that content first. In reality, the 302 redirect is for content that has been moved temporarily and not for redirects that are temporary so this is not really the correct usage of the redirection.
Possibly a custom 404 with some links to the new site and a change of URL in webmaster tools may be a better option but I am unsure of any best practice here and you may have to ride out a bit of turbulence when first moving.
3. Yep, the date alone tells us that to a degree of certainty and it's further compounded by the use of the sitewides etc.
4. That's not a five minute answer and really depends on whether there are any natural and quality links or is it 99% junk? If the latter, then with the rumoured update to penguin getting more aggressive, then it could be time to move on.
What i would do is compare against other people in your niche. Look at some market leaders, figure out what a normal link profile looks like and determine how close you are to that.
Hope this helps
Marcus
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
-
Getting Google to index our sitemap
Hi, We have a sitemap on AWS that is retrievable via a url that looks like ours http://sitemap.shipindex.org/sitemap.xml. We have notified Google it exists and it found our 700k urls (we are a database of ship citations with unique urls). However, it will not index them. It has been weeks and nothing. The weird part is that it did do some of them before, it said so, about 26k. Then it said 0. Now that I have redone the sitemap, I can't get google to look at it and I have no idea why. This is really important to us, as we want not just general keywords to find our front page, but we also want specific ship names to show links to us in results. Does anyone have any clues as to how to get Google's attention and index our sitemap? Or even just crawl more of our site? It has done 35k pages crawling, but stopped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shipindex0 -
Missing Google verification
I just went to check my client sites in Google search console and noticed a whole bunch of them no longer 'verified'. They were all previously verified. Why would they suddenly change status to 'not verified'? Does this affect anything (eg. search analytics data flowing through to GA)? Does this mean I have to verify all over again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Google SERPs displaying Tracking Tags
Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me! Can you tell me why Google would be displaying the tracking URLs in the SERPs (screenshot - http://i.imgur.com/gbskD26.jpg)? I'm thinking it may have to do with the canonical URLs, but I'm not sure.. Thanks in advance! gbskD26.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mindstream_Media0 -
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Google search results
I have been doing some searches on google to see where my new site shows up, I started using the search words "graphic design firm st. louis" as a gauge, because my title is St. Louis Missouri Graphic Design Firm. I showed up on about page 5 to start , if I include the word "firm" and a few pages further back if I just search "graphic design st. louis", without the word firm. It seemed i was slowly moving up pages with both searches and then a few days ago I jumped to page 1 for search "graphic design firm st. louis" the thing is it doesnt show up at all now if i search "graphic design st. louis" without the word firm. what would cause the one search to jump so high while the other one dissapeared completely?? and what can i do? my keyword density is same for both , any ideas.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric69660 -
Google penalty or what???
Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem. How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite1 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Why will google not index my pages?
About 6 weeks ago we moved a subcategory out to becomne a main category using all the same content. We also removed 100's of old products and replaced these with new variation listings to remove duplicate content issues. The problem is google will not index 12 critcal pages and our ranking have slumped for the keywords in the categories. What can i do to entice google to index these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0