Panda and unnatural links caused ranking drop
-
Hi
I have been approached to do some SEO work for a site that has been hit badly by the latest panda update 3.3, they have also had a warning in their Google webmaster tools account saying they had unnatural looking links to their site, they received this in 26 Feb and that prompted them to stop working with their excising seo company and look for a new one.
Apparently their rankings for the keywords they were targeting have dropped dramatically, but it looks like just those they were actively building back links for, other phrases do not look affected.
Before I take them on I want to be clear that it is possible to help them reclaim their rankings?
I have checked the site and the on-page seo is good, the site build is good, just a few errors to fix but the links that have been built by the seo company are low quality with a lot of spun articles and the same anchor text so I see what the Google webmaster tools message is refuring to.
I do not think these links can be removed as there is no contact details on the sites I checked I have not checked all of them but a random sample does not show promise, they are from low authority domains.
So if I am to take them on as a client and help them to regain their previous rankings what is the best strategy? Obviously they want results yesterday and from our phone call they would rather someone else did the work than them, so my initial response of add some better quality content that others in your industry would link to as a reference did not go down well, to be fair I think it is a time issue there are only 3 people in the company and they are not technical at all.
Thanks for your help
Sean
-
Here are some simple first step that will at the very least fix any of the underlying issues that were addressed by Google.
1. Contact the past SEO Company directly, explain to them the warnings from Google and see if they will give you that info. You never know as it never hurts to try. Many SEO companies would like to keep there reputation even after being dismissed by a client.
2.What If that doesn't work? Contact the site owners per each site and explain to them that you have been hired to address SEO warning by Google caused by a prior seo company and you would like to resolve it by requesting them to delete the articles. This is actually a win/win because I don't know any website owner that really wants garbage on there site.
3. I don't see why there would not be an opportunity to increase there rankings again. I would be upfront with them and explain to them that its pretty much like starting from scratch and that past rankings are irreverent. Send them the release about the JCPENNY incident so they can familiarize themselves with the situation that they have encountered. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380306,00.asp
4. Once you've solved these issues, do what you do best and optimize there off-page SEO, since you said there on-page is pretty good.
You said they want results yesterday. Don't give in to there pressure by making any false promises. Just be straight forward. It's better to lose a client with a piece of mind then make them false promises that will end up haunting you later.
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
-
Surge in spammy links
Hi, Our website www.foodjet.com has recently seen a huge amount of spammy incoming links to non-exisiting URLS:
Technical SEO | | FoodJEtThey all target pages that lead to a 404 and which clearly do not exist on our website. Since they have started to appear our DA has plummeted. I have already disavowed some domains, but more re-appear just as fast. I have also checked if our site has been hacked, which does not seem to be the case. What am I missing? And/or what can I do?
0 -
Traffic Dropped, Rankings Unchanged | Impression and Click Drop %75
Hi all, Last Update was good for us; we got a quick %300 boost to one of our pages https://www.buyurken.com/gebelik-hesaplama-cetveli/. We have been waiting for the page to rank higher at the short tail keyword this month. However last Saturday, Our traffic dropped %78 instantly compared to previous day last week. Search Console Report says; Click: 1050 Impression: 2500 Pos: #1 Date: 26 Jan, 2020 Click: 1250 Impression: 2760 Pos: #1 Date: 28 Jan, 2020 Click: 1268 Impression: 2808 Pos: #1 .1 Date: 30 Jan, 2020 *****Click: 183 Impression: 707 Pos: #1 . 5 Date: 01 Feb, 2020 . !! ** What you'll realize, the impression and clicks dropped drastically but the avg. position nearly stay the same. Have anyone faced a situation like this. There are no Featured Snippets or Advertisement for this query "gebelik hesaplama 2020". NOTE: There's no server response time problem There's no technical issue for that page Pagespeed has been increased more than %50 at 26 January 2020 Avg. Page Visit time 3 mins+ Bounce is %85 however, this is a tool for pregnant; they just calculate and go back to search engine. Waiting for your responses, Regards, Have a nice week all Fatih Dilekci
Technical SEO | | fdilekcimoz20 -
Will Redirection of Unnatural Links to the New Domain will work?
Hi All, If a website www.mywebsite.com has received 100 unnatural links and because of that rankings are dropped. I want to follow the below strategy to protect my website from these 100 unnatural links. Please let me know if it will work: Buy a new domain www.newdomain.com with new whois record (Not related to www.mywebsite.com ) Do 301 redirection of all 100 unnatural links (Those are pointing to www.mywebsite.com) to www.newdomain (New domain) Do 302 redirection from www.newdomain (New domain) to www.mywebsite.com (Old Domain) After applying the above strategy, will google still consider those 100 unnatural links for Old domain??
Technical SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Website not ranking but the blog is!
I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Has Google Made Unnatural Link Building Easier?
I see lots of competitors and crappy sites ranking well for highly competitive keywords in the web hosting niche. After analysing their backlinks, I noticed that most of them had only 1 or 2 backlinks to the page they wanted to rank. The anchor text is usually a slight variation of the targeted keyword. Now suppose you are able to rank well for a handful of highly lucrative keywords using very few spammy links. That would mean that even if you got a Penguin penalty, cleaning up your link profile would take an hour at most. I really have no intentions of using this strategy but it's frustrating to see spammy competitors outranking you with crappy sites and a handful of backlinks. Your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
My Website Ranking is terribly drop
So sorry I really need your all help 😞 I'm really frustrated and stressed. For my website http://www.cma-academy.edu.sg , it has been ranking on Google 1st page (with the keywords "design course/design courses") for the past over 6 months and the traffic was really good... But it has been almost 2 months since the big drop... my ranking all is gone in just a week and now it's even not on the top 50.. While my competitors websites are stand stil. 😞 I seriously really want to cry because of this.. And I'm sure there is nothing much wrong with my SEO to be abandoned by Google like this and Google still index my webpage, but the crawling rate is so much slow than before.. I really need some help from the expert, especially from seomoz.. Please help me in this, I'm willing to answer any questions as well...
Technical SEO | | AngieDang0 -
Modifying urls cause broken links?
I want to modify my urls for the purpose of creating clean, informative urls that can be pasted directly for backlink purposes. Instead I have urls with long, garbled, strange characters. When I change the URL it breaks existing back links! Any way around this?
Technical SEO | | natearistotle0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1