SERPs recovery? When can I believe it?
-
Here's a happy story: Some of you folks with sharp memories may remember my questions and worry over the last 3+ months regarding our fall into the abyss on Google after great positions for over a decade (we've always been fine in Bing and Yahoo). And our company name URL was still #1 so no site-wide penalty.
Well......I've been working hard on fixing this in a smart way with all the ingredients I've been learning about. Thank you to SEOMozers for all the help!! There's still plenty to do, especially in the link earning department, but I've come really far from where I was in the Fall.
Anyway. I am here right now to report what may be true to life fantastic news. I was starting to suspect an improvement last week, but it proved to be wrong. Then, I saw another sign yesterday but couldn't trust it. Today, my latest SEOMoz report is showing me the following for the several keywords we lost position down to "not in the top 50" for.
keyword 1: up 44 points to #6keyword 2: no change still at #4
keyword 3: up 46 points to # 4
keyword 4: up 43 points to #7
keyword 5: up 46 points to #4
keyword 6: up 2 points to #2What I'm wondering is if this is real. ;o). I'm pinching myself. I realize that it could be one of those sliding readjustment things and we'll drop back down, but we are not a new site. It seems that even if that is the case, it still must illustrate something good. Some kind of elimination of possibilities for why the drop occurred in the first place. I did a few things in this past week that may have put it over the tipping point. One of which was signing up for adwords a week ago. I'm happy to give details if anyone is interested.
A few specific questions:
1. What might this be showing me?
2. We have about a 45% number of anchor text footer links in client sites (we're a web dev co) one or two of which are numbering in the hundreds have keywords in them and are continuing to generate more links due to ecomm and large databases. I was gearing up to remove them or get them moved out of the footer so there's only one, but now I'm afraid to touch anything. Most of the footer links are just our company name or "site design". Any suggestions? 3. any other bits of advice for this situation are appreciated. I don't want to blow it now!Thanks!
-
Hi Everett,
Thanks for your response. This situation has continued to develop since I posted my question.
Our positions for critical keywords has continued to improve dramatically with yet more improved rankings reported early this week and again yesterday. We're now #1 for 3 keywords, 2 for a couple and 4 for a few more. Increases for additional keywords also.
Positions in Bing and Yahoo have gone up and down by relatively small amounts, mostly down this week but still holding on page 1 for those I care about other than "Gina Fiedel" which dropped 5 for Bing and Yahoo this week down to #14 and up to #6 on Google.
Immediately after I first posted this question, we did change one of the more worrisome site-wide citation links to the name of our company only (removing the keywords from anchor text), but left it in the footer for the time being. -we didn't do more due to internal issues that aren't worth mentioning here or I'll start venting- although, as time has gone by and we're doing so well, I'm afraid to rock the boat even though I know the advice from Russ and Mash was otherwise and I'm kinda embarrassed we haven't gone after it thoroughly yet. I guess I also felt that spacing the removals might make sense. The positions did drop a tiny bit when we did that but bounced back and as I mentioned, are continuing to improve.
Now to answer your question directly, Everett: We never received any messages in GWT and had no proof of penalty-manual or otherwise, so we did not file a reinclusion request. Our company name continued to rank #1 throughout the whole thing. It was only a couple of keywords that were effected. I now feel it may have been a manual penalty for those keywords (see below).More info:
Just prior to the bounce back I found and got removed some inbound links that were really spammy with duplicated content in an article supposedly authored by an employee that never existed, a completely fictitiously named and imaginary person. (thank you http://www.linkdetox.com).I also believe I overused those keywords on our Home page and had obviously re-wrote that right away but further tweaked it just prior to the bounce back.
Probably most importantly is that I started a blog and have been adding thoughtful, quality content and engaging much more on social sites and promoting the blog posts on social sites.
I am happy you chose to respond to my question at this belated time because it's a whopping good reminder of Russ and Mash's (and now yours as well) advice......
Oh! And one more thing! We will not continue putting site-wide footer links on client sites when we launch them. We will NOT be perpetuating that mistake.
Thanks!
-
It sounds like a manual penalty may have expired. Did you ever file a reinclusion request and get the default "There are no manual penalties against your site" message?
Either way I'd be wary of building links from client footers, no matter what the anchor text is.
-
Thank you, Russ and Mash. I appreciate your advice.
Do you recommend that we do it in stages so hundreds and hundreds of links don't disappear at the same time?
Our official Google verified company name is: Fat Eyes Web Development. But that clearly includes a keyword phrase "web development". and just putting our shortened company name "Fat Eyes" doesn't tell the user why that link is there- what do you think about that? Is the full name ok? Or the shortened name? Or should we put "site: Fat Eyes"? Or "site design: Fat Eyes" to distinguish what the heck Fat Eyes is?
I am also not quite sure if you are both saying that the link definitely should NOT appear in the footer even if it only says "Fat Eyes" with no other leading unlinked text and no other anchor text.
Thanks again!
Gina
-
I agree with Russ. We made the same mistake last year and left the site wide footer links alone and later paid the price for it.
Please do remove those side wide footer links right away!
-
Don't be afraid. Go ahead and change them. They should be citations only (ie: the name of your company) and there should only be 1. I think it would be OK for it to be in the footer, just like you would cite a source in a real academic paper.
You may very well see some temporary rankings decreases when you do this, but it is far safer in the long run. Don't let it come back to bite you when the next Penguin rolls out.
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
-
Can affiliate links affect DA?
Hey guys, over the past two months my DA has gone down from 17 to 12, and I have no dura what could have caused it. I started putting in some Amazon affiliate links in my posts - could that be the reason why? Also, I have about 30 backlinks from a blog with a spam score of 11% - could this also be affecting it in any way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmyAed0 -
Can H1 and Meta title be exactly the same ?
I've heard from some SEO's that H1 and Meta Title shouldn't be exactly the same, why ? Both of them describe what is ON the page right ? Why is it Spammy? Is it ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tintanus2 -
Can you use the image description for IMG ALT?
ello ello! We're running an ecommerce site with thousands of products. None of the product pages have an IMG ALT. We're been thinking about an IMG ALT rule to apply to all product page images. Every image currently has a detailed caption so the thought was, why don't we use the description as the IMG ALT? It's perfect as it explains the image. Now the thing is, the length of the description, some of them come to 150 - 200 characters with spaces. Do you think this is too much? Also, would having a caption and the IMG ALT be the same cause issues? Have you guys employed any rules for IMG ALT in a bulk way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Can I just delete pages to get rid of bad back-links to those pages?
I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters). We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality. Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question.. b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it? Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033 I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s... Thanks so much!!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zingseo0 -
Can I be penalized for offering incentives for links and social followers?
A competitor of mine is using contest/loyalty software like ContestBurner or PunchTab to generate social followers and links. This has been very successful, and over the past several months his rankings have improved. Does anyone know if Google is "OK" with this type of program? I'm trying to decide if I should start one myself.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dfeemster1 -
Penguine Recovery
Our site, www.autodealerchat.com got hit hard by Google's recent Penguin update (also known as the over-optimization update). For our main set of keywords including: auto dealer chat dealer chat car dealer chat automotive chat We lost placement across the board most notably on automotive chat where we were third and are today non-existent. If you look at our site, we were following former best practices and SEOMoz recommendations. If you look at our backlinks, we were playing the white hat game like everyone else. SEOMoz tools indicated that we were tops in terms of Domain Authority, etc. according to the old rules. Everything changed on April 25th. Going forward, what are some of the things that we can do to regain some of that lost ground? Thanks in advance for the insights.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | contactatonce0 -
Why Proved Spammers are on 1st Google SERP's Results
This question is related exclusively to few proved spammers who have gained 1st Google search results for specific terms in the Greek market, targeting Greek audience. Why he looks spammer and very suspicious? For instance, the site epipla-sofa.gr, sofa.gr, fasthosting.gr and greekinternetmarketing.com look suspicious regarding their building link activities: 1. suspicious spiky link growth 2. several links from unrelated content (unrelated blog posts forom other markets, paid links, hidden links) 3. excessive amount of suspicious link placements (forum profiles, blog posts, footer and sidebar links) 4. Greek anchor text with the keyword within articles written in foreign languages (total spam) 5. Unnatural anchor text distribution (too many repetitions) So the main question is: Why Google is unable to recognize/trace some of these (or even all) obvious spamming tactics and still these spammy sites as shwon below reside on the 1st Google.gr SERPs. Examples of spam sites according to their link building history: www.greekinternetmarketing.com www.epipla-sofa.gr www.fasthosting.gr www.sofa.gr All their links look very similar. They use probably software to build links, or even hack authority sites and leave hidden links (really dont know how they could do that). Could you please explain or share similar issues? Have you ever found any similar cases in your industry, and how did you tackle it? We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter. Regards, George
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Clickwisegr0 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Melia0