Position Drop - Anchor Text Penalty
-
Hi - About a month ago we dropped out of all out top position ranking and now can be found around page 600 on Google for all those keywords. I feel this is because our SEO company over used or money keywords as anchor text - Could this be correct?
-
Sep 28 was the date of the EMD update but I'm wondering if your drop was actually Sep 27. There was a big Panda update on that day. The biggest culprit for Panda is content that is duplicated on other sites on the web or pages with thin content. But, Panda has nothing to do with overuse of keywords.
If you feel that this was because of overuse of keyword anchor text and the drop was not on October 5 then have a look at your webmaster tools to see if you've got an unnatural links penalty.
-
No we dropped on the 28th Sept...
-
Did your traffic drop happen on October 5? That was the latest Penguin update. A quick look at your backlink profile shows that it doesn't look natural at all...you've got 59 domains pointing to you with links containing your main anchor text and the next links all contain keyword anchor text as well:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.help-my-mobility.co.uk
Your tenth most popular anchor is your url. A natural site profile would have it's url or brand name as the top link.
Unfortunately if this is Penguin recovery will be difficult if not impossible.
-
Are you aware of links such as http://palomacosta.objectis.net/Qualidade/Members/phylishastings/fat-japanese-girl that are pointing to your site?
-
I think you can answer your own question by asking yourself this:
"Were you aggressively seeking links in ways that Google may deem inappropriate? Were you collected vast amounts of links with the same anchor texts in an unnatural way?"
If the answer to these questions is yes, then you may very well have been penalized.
After all, Google has warned against using this practice many times.
-
-
Share the URL and we can take a look.
-
Hi
It seems strange all the pages are now roughly sitting in the same positions - wondered if there is a penalty drop which has be applied....
-
Without knowing what your site is and doing analysis, it's hard for us to say.
It could be a factor. It could also be due to other algorithm changes.
If you've dropped in position that much, doubtful it's due to competitors being aggressive in their strategies.
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
-
Started linkbuilding, traffic drops
So I have a couple 3 year old projects I left intact for the last 2 years. Lately I tried to revigorate them. I started to build links to pages that used to be in Google top ten, but the more links I build, the more I lose out on traffic. The main keywords stay around the same position, I suppose the loss in appearances and traffic that can be seen in webmaster tools is mainly due to long tails I do not check the rankings for. I want to ask you guys if anybody have experienced similar data? I suppose it might be due to the exact anchor tags that I have used 3 years ago, so I already started removing those to see if it has a positive effect. I wanted to ask you, maybe somebody has experienced the same and already knows the reason and a solution for this phenomenon?
Link Building | | snetface0 -
Manual penalty & long tail
Hi guys, one of our websites has received a partial manual penalty from Google, visible in our webmaster tools panel. That website was SEO-ed poorly via external agency, using very old-fashioned, spammy solutions. We have X keywords that are filtered (drops in rankings such as 2 -> 48), and X keywords that our website still ranks well for (stays top 3, etc). Question: after we remove all the traces of SEO implemented by previous SEO manager (so we remove some bad stuff from the web, and disavow the rest of bad stuff through webmaster tools), we expect drops in positions for keywords that were previously filtered (because not many links, if any, remains). How will that process affect our previously not-filtered main and long tail phrases? We wonder if there's a point in removing that manual penalty. Our website still receives solid portion of organic traffic, because Google didn't penalized all of our phrases supported by bad SEO. Any tips or suggestions as to what path should we take from here? Mind you, this is an e-commerce website. We fear that removing the penalty will result in removing most of the existing organic traffic, and our sales will suffer tremendously.
Link Building | | superseopl0 -
Google Penalty
Hello thereIt has just been confirmed that my site is suffering for a Google Penality. The odd thing is that it is just for my set of key keywords and not the whole site. It seems in 2010 that a rouge SEO company I used sent loads of spammy links but I have lots of other good links too. What is your advice moving forward? Will it drop over time? Do I set up a new site (this has been established over 10 years) or try and get better quality links to compensate for the spam ones? Thanks so much! Kindest regards Victoria
Link Building | | vcasebourne0 -
Anchor text in blog boilerplate
At the end of our company blog posts, we have a short paragraph about our main service using anchor text linking to the homepage. I read somewhere (but can't for the life of me find it again) that this method can lead to Google ranking these blog posts lower than if they weren't there. Is there any correlation between internal linking using boilerplate anchor text and lower ranking for those internal pages? I understand that this isn't a top priority as Google is placing less value on anchor text, but don't want to do anything that could potentially hurt, either. Thanks.
Link Building | | brandonRT0 -
Have you had 3 to 5 Google penalties lifted?
I've tried three times and have been unsuccessful. Is there any specific strategy or technique that has worked for you? Anyways, I'd like to speak with you if you have successfully had 3 to 5 penalties lifted. So please reach out to me. Thanks Dominic
Link Building | | amorbis0 -
Google Penalty
Hey there, I am working with a site who recently received an email from Google that they have been penalized. Since I have only been working with this site for a couple of weeks I know it's from past SEO work. I tried to pull back links for them and they have 1.5 million of them and every one I look at is a good quality site. I did notice one thing that stood out and I need your opinion. They have a blog in which they run about 3 ad banners and about 4 other links site wide creating several thousand links with the same anchor text and seems to be a bit spammy on the page. However, the blog is owned by them... and the amount of same anchor text links is a very small percentage of their 1.5 million links. Can you offer a different way for me to attempt to find these bad links? Could their blog by itself cause the issue? Please share your thoughts with me about this.
Link Building | | PageOnePowerGang0 -
Links under Rich Snippet Text?
I was curious how certain sites have links under their rich snippet texts? is it from google authorship? iaNqX.jpg
Link Building | | Modbargains0 -
External Anchor text page to target?
I have onpage optimised 4 pages on my website example.com/services/chosenkeyword-1 example.com/services/chosenkeyword-2 example.com/services/chosenkeyword-3 example.com/services/chosenkeyword-4 Should I built links with various anchor text to my home page or the exact internal page as above? Cheers.
Link Building | | Socialdude0
