Is my SEO consultant doing blackhat tactic?
-
Hi, Can someone tell me what my SEO consultant is doing? I have engaged a SEO company in Singapore for my site: Http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg The thing is for the 1st 2 months, it is ranking well but for the next 4 months it is out of google. I noticed my links are on some strange article site. Is he doing blackhat tactic, I have been paying monthly for many months now with no result. Shall I continue to pay and how can I recover?
-
Thank you so much for your help Sandip.
God bless you!
-
It appears that your website has got penalized by Google Penguin update [link penalty]
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-3-15802.htmlBut as Google Search quality team has already made it clear that there is no manual action taken on your website, I can safely assume that your website has got penalized by algo shuffle.
_So, there is no point in sending reconsideration request to Google. Try to get all the unnatural and spammy links removed. Send link removal request to those crappy websites. If you have log in access of those sites, you can do that as well. If you have removed most of them, you then can use Google Webmaster Tools Disavow Link option. _
_And about reliable seo company. Whoever is saying that you can top ranking in two months or so for $100, is trying to fleece you. _
-
Hi Sandip,
We have sent reconsider mail to Google but they replied:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality TeamMy ranking dropped since 6th Oct 2012.
I have emailed my SEO consultant and request to stop the service.Anyone has got good ethical SEO company to recommend?
-
Well the quality of the links is pathetic and I would not surprise if your website get penalized by Google for unnatural link building. Tell me one thing, don't your existing SEO company send you monthly report of what they are doing? What I fear is that they are building links with exact matched anchor texts and this is under Google's radar for quite sometime.
If not, you should ask them to send all the details immediately. You need to get all these links down.
Check your webmaster tools account and let us know if you get any message there. Also let us know when the ranking drop.
-
Yes, i believed so.
I am just afraid i would be wasting my time adding fresh new articles on that website.I am still paying him every month.
Can anyone advice what i could do next?
-
Those links definitely look like they could be in blackhat territory. It looks like either paid links or possibly some kind of blog network. The links are also all exact match anchor text. Do you know when your traffic took a hit? You may have been hit by the Penguin algorithm.
-
Hi chanel27,
I just checked to see if your site is indexed in Google and it is. The easy way to check this yourself is to go to Google and in the search bar type site:http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg When I do that I get 17 results. If your site had been removed from Google there would be zero results for that query.
Now, when I take a look at your link profile in ahrefs.com I see that your link profile is making good progress. I can't see the same kind of historical progress in other tools, but I did check some of the article submission sites that your SEO seems to be using to see if perhaps they had been de-indexed by Google, and they haven't been.
Is your site new? Sometimes, when a new site comes out of the gate, it experiences a bit of an artificial bump in ranking before settiling into a lower position.
I don't see any evidence of black hat SEO here. Although, I would caution you from relying on artificial blogging and submitting to article directories and expecting that to produce results. To some extent, this can still work, but if it's working now, it very may well not be working in a few months. I would have a frank discussion with your SEO consultant and tell them you are concerned about the quality, not the quantity of your backlinks. Also, think about complimentary businesses whom might make good possible link partners for you, make a list of them and give them to your SEO.
From what I can see, your SEO is doing a competent job. Hope that's reassuring!
Dana
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
-
Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
Hey guys and gals, I am hiding elements with @media sizes on the mobile experience for this site. http://prepacademyschools.org/ My question is when hiding elements from mobile, will this have a negative effect on rankings for mobile and or desktop? Right now it is a hero banner and testimonial. My interest is because I feel responsive is now working against conversions when it comes to mobile because desktop typically has the same info several times where mobile it can be repetitive and only needed once. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel1 -
Disavow or not? Negative SEO
Since last November we have been receiving a lot of low quality backlinks from over 700 websites. It looks like one of our pages from our website has been copied with the links being kept as they are. I have left a link to an example of this here: https://goo.gl/eWQODJ Please note, all examples seem to be copied in the same way. We have also started seeing a decrease in the amount of organic traffic (Analytics Picture), As you can see the decrease is not yet so drastically high, but it is still a decrease and this is the third consecutive month we have seen this decrease. Do you think it is worth it to use Disavow tool for all of these bad link or not? uuuLt
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm1 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Negative SEO
How do identify if somebody is giving you negative links. If I look at who is linking my site I suddenly see an none related website linking to my site http://plastische-chirurgie-borsten.be/ URL is translated "plastic-surgery-breast" The site is full of links. Would this be an attempt to negative SEO? How can I see the effect of such links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nono_1974
Should I disavow this link? kind regards,0 -
SEO Hosting and many dummy blog, is it still works ?
Hi, I want to keep update with the latest trend of SEO,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theconversion
in one side, we know that google now more focus on-page rather than off-page,
the Question is, when we handle a big size of company, that we can't change easily,
the content inside the web, this will become a problem. do you have any suggestion about
this matters ? Second question, I still keep my SEO team to do this, 5 people, 1 people hold 7 .com website,
that hosted all in SEO hosting with different IP Class C, and 7 social network site. Everytime they
are posting a unique article and put link that targetting the money site. My Question is, is it still
work to do all of this ? so at the end of month, we have almost 70links that going to money site,
with composition of link, 50% exact match text, 30 partial match text, and 20% direct www. link today, it is still working, all the site that we optimize, going up to page 1. But I want to know about
the future, or at least in your country that more competitive rather than in my country (Indonesia),
what do you do for backlink that created from your farm. I also heard that, SEO Hosting is not use, the things that works is, when u posting an article, make
sure u post from unique IP address, not from same computer. Please give me enlightment, I truly open for discussion, thanks a lot0 -
SEO problems with PR Newswires
Just been investigating PR newswires for the first time (despite having worked in PR for over a decade!) One of my clients has asked my to send out a news release via a newswire of my choice. I will not be posting the news release on my client's website, to avoid the most obvious duplication issue. Has anyone had SEO probs from newswires though? I just saw one which offered: "Minimum guaranteed number of media websites on which your release is posted" alarm bells!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Vendor Descriptions for SEO... Troublesome?
Howdy! I have been tossing this idea around in my head over the weekend and I cannot decide which answer is correct, so here I am! We a retailer of products and is currently in the midst of redesigning our site-- not only design but also content. The issue that we are facing is with product descriptions from our vendors. We are able to access the product descriptions/specs from their websites and use them on ours, but my worry is that we will get tagged for duplicate content. Other retailers (as well as the vendors) are using this content as well, so I don't want this to have an adverse effect on our ranking. There are so many products that it would be a large feat to re-write unique content-- not to mention that the majority of the rhetoric would be extremely similar. What have you seen in your experiences in similar situations? Is it bad to use the descriptions? Or do we need to bite the bullet and do our best to re-write hundreds of product descriptions? Or is there a way to use the descriptions and tag it in a way that won't have Google penalize us? I originally thought that if we have enough other unique content on our site, that it shouldn't be as big of a deal, but then I realized how much of our site's structure is our actual products. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jpretz0 -
Best way to handle SEO error, linking from one site to another same IP
We committed an SEO sin and created a site with links back to our primary website. Although it does not matter, the site was not created for that purpose, it is actually "directory" with categorized links to thousands of culinary sites, and ours are some of the links. This occurred back in May 2010. Starting April 2011 we started seeing a large drop in page views. It dropped again in October 2011. At this point our traffic is down over 40% Although we don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it, we know it is best to remove the links. The question is, given its a bad practice what is the best fix? Should we redirect the 2nd domain to the main or just take it down? The 2nd domain does not have much page rank and I really don't think many if any back-links to it. Will it hurt us more to lose the 1600 or so back links? I would think keeping the links is a bad idea. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foodsleuth0