Penguin Recovery Problem - Weird
-
I had an old URL and the link profile of this URL wasn't good - I had been using article syndication and Penguin threw me to the wolves.
I decided to start over with a new URL and build a new natural link profile. I specifically did NOT do a 301 redirect to the new URL and did not make any request to Google to transfer domain as I didn't want old site being associated to the new one. To redirect our old users, I put a link on the old URL index page (nofollowed) that say that we have moved.
I was very surprised to find that in GWT all the links of the old URL have now been associated to the new URL....why is that? I started over to have a clean natural profile and follow Google guidelines.Has anyone heard of this before? All I can guess is that Google itself "decided" to do its own pseudo-301, since the site was the same, page for page.This has Major implications for anyone attempting a "clean start" to recover from Penguin.
-
Nakul -
Re: "other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new?"
No - no red flags. My "new" site has only been live for about a week and is already reached page 2 or 3 of google serp for my main keywords.
But since I know those backlinks cause my old site to go from #2-3 of page 1 to past page 20, I freaked when I saw them following me.
or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?
No - I crashed on April 24 and never recovered, even though I removed all the pages that had been syndicated and asked Google for reconsideration, they said there was no manual penalty.
-
Thanks for your thoughts, Marie.
** And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.**
I am confident that they are very often wrong.
-
I personally think it is just a WMT glitch. When the link is shown in WMT it says, "Via this intermediate link..." and the intermediate link is the original page.
However, according again to Dejan SEO, if you copy a site's page and your site has a higher PageRank, you can actually outrank the original page. Here is the article on how they did this (with permission) for Rand Fishkin's blog and other pages:
http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/
That makes me think that it's possible that link juice is granted to the more authoritative of the two sites. And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.
While I still think that these links would not cause Penguin to affect a site, I wouldn't chance it!
-
**Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site. **
Oh.... do you think somebody could grab an article from your website, post it on theirs and kidnap your linkjuice?
-
Those pages can still be in the cache. That was my theory as to what was going on with the previous site. When we used the url removal tool (not the disavow tool by the way) to remove them from the cache this seemed to solve the problem.
-
Considering what's done is done and the point that your old domain is penalized, can you possibly do/try any of the following ?
1. Ignore the fact that those links are appearing in your backlink profile for the new domain. See whether this new website works/ranks.
2. If it doesn't (at all), can you possibly disavow those "article marketing" links for the old domain and do nothing at all for the new domain (since those links are not really linking to your new domain).
Coming back to point 1, what I'd like to ask is, other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?
-
Thanks Marie - I will try your suggestion.
I did a search using the regular operators to see if my old site was still indexed and Google returned a "we can't find it on this server-that's all we know" Sergent Shultz response, but knowing Google that does not necessarily mean pages are not still in their index.
-
I had this happen with a client I worked with. The client's previous site had a severe Penguin issue so he decided to start over. We did everything properly and did not do any redirects from the old site to the new. But we were surprised when suddenly the WMT console for the new site was showing all of the links that went to the old site!
What happened? It's complicated but it has to do with something that is described here by Dejan SEO: http://dejanseo.com.au/mind-blowing-hack/
Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site.
What I don't know is whether those links are carrying any link juice and also any penalty with them.
What we did was go back into the WMT console for the old site and use the url removal tool to remove every single url from the index AND the cache for the old site.
It took about 2 weeks for the links to disappear from WMT for the new site.
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
-
How to solve our duplicate content issue? (Possible Session ID problem)
Hi there, We've recently took on a new developer who has no experience in any technical SEO and we're currently redesigning our site www.mrnutcase.com. Our old developer was up to speed on his SEO and any technical issues we never really had to worry about. I'm using Moz as a tool to go through crawl errors on an ad-hoc basis. I've noticed just now that we're recording a huge amount of duplicate content errors ever since the redesign commenced (amongst other errors)! For example, the following page is duplicated 100s of times: https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-US/designer/?CaseID=1128599&CollageID=21&ProductValue=2293 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-US/designer/?CaseID=1128735&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3387 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/designer/?CaseID=1128510&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3364 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/designer/?CaseID=1128511&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3363 etc etc. Does anyone know how I should be dealing with this problem? And is this something that needs to be fixed urgently? This problem has never happened before so i'm hoping it's an easy enough fix. Look forward to your responses and greatly appreciate the help. Many thanks, Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Keyword rich internal linking - problem?
Had an interesting situation today.. We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links. For example.. 'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.' So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site. I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site.. I actually asked them why and this was their response. 'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.' Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Title tags with >70 characters but most important words at start. Is this really a problem?
Is there in fact any kind of negative impact having title tags longer than 70 characters, as long as I place the most important keywords at the start and make sure that title still is compelling when cut somewhere around 70 characters? Are the additional words after the 70 characters limit just ignored? May additional words dillute the strength of the first words or may they even be helpful ? Any experience or any studies you know about impact of longer title tags? Or any statement from google about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Anybody else seeing Penguin corrections?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
Over the past few days, I have noticed that a few of my pages that were hit by the Google Penguin update come back from the dead and return to the #1 spot for the main keywords. I still don't see any change for secondary keywords I used to rank for, but hey at least there is something. Has anybody else noticed this? NOTE: I did not make any changes to my pages. I had never done any black-hat (just greyish) so I took the advice of many and just waited.1 -
Penguin or something else?
Mid April my site www.musicliveuk.com lost almost all its rankings. I'm still non the wiser as to why and it seems a little earlier that the penguin update. I wonder if any of you guys could take a look and offer any suggestions as to what might have happened? I'm relatively new to SEO and have worked on my own site myself? If I've made some mistakes how do I fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How do you explain the problem with several re-directs to a client?
I have a client who has done a lot of link building, and just migrated his site from an old platform to a more seo friendly one, but now he is moving pages on the new site. Old Site --> (301 re-direct) --> New Site --> (301 re-direct) --> Changed Page -->(301 re-direct) Changed page again, etc All his changes are making a lot of etra work for me every month and I feel he is wasting a lot of link juice, How Would you explain to the client why they shouldn't be using several re-directs? What can I do to make sure that they keep as much link juice as possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1