Site received penalty, Traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour
-
Dear all
We received a penalty notice at webmaster tools 2 months ago, in that stated "your pages violate our quality guidelines" and "contain some inorganic links to your site". Ours is a Coupon website and tried to follow all quality guidelines given in webmaster central. Also we tried to identify and remove spam kind of links and still we are working on that. Suddenly from yesterday website traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour, but website main keyword SERPs are not changed much and still ranking at good positions. my question if any website is under manual penalty, it's traffic will be restricted by Google???. Every link we build manually and not gone for any paid links or reciprocal links. But the sites given some links as sitewide, example we tried to get a back link & submitted url at once only, but it was showing in webmaster Total links 468 and linked pages 1. Can any one please explain, how it can happen?. We are trying to remove these spam kind of links, but from directory owners response is a bit disappointing, kindly any one suggest that, will Google Disavow tool help in this regard and how much time it will take to nullify the links?.
Kindly help us..Thanking you all in advance
-
So do you think this had any impact as of sep 2013? Im curious to know if this method works at all or removal or modification of other links will still beat it. thanks
-
Thank you for the time & valuable advice.
Sir, If we stopped link building completely, what will be the impact on website ranking ability?. From last 2 months we already reduced link build-up speed and trying to get some quality back links.
We received manually penalty, due to the previous SEO work done by Free lancer & we received the submission report from him. Many of previous submissions targeted to get back link from Directories and the Linking anchor text is almost similar to the Title/keywords we targeted for ranking.
Kindly guide us to overcome this penalty, without or minimal traffic/ranking drop. Our website age is about 2years.
-
Yes Alan, on what we are working from last 2 months is diluting the link profile, mostly trying to link with 'brand name' 'click here' or 'read more'/view more kind of anchor texts.we checked with opensite explorer for the anchor text and found around 350 links are having keyword on the anchor text, by diluting the link profile we reduced the keyword based link profile to 1.4% of total back links. In this case can we go for reconsideration request, with out removing the back links. Thanking you in advance.
-
Alan pretty much summed it up. ONLY go for quality backlinks that happen naturally. If you link profile is over optimized for your keywords you could dilute it with other keywords such as 'click here' or 'read more'.
However, if this is a manual penalty, then you're going to need to get those links removed as best as you can and then submit a reconsideration request to Google.
-
My advice don't do any link building let them grow organically, and grab the occasional quality opportunity.
One of my sites was hurt by penguin update, I have been too busy to do anything about it. it had a lot of footer links from clients and a lot of forum signature links. I finally removed a lot of them and my site that used to dominate and had dropped off the radar came back to life this weekend almost as well as ever so their is light at the end of the tunnel.
Google does not stop traffic, only affects your ranking, you say that your main keywords have dropped only a little, but your long tail has probably dropped a lot.
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
-
Site DA and rank is not increasing
Hy, My site https://cocpureapk.com/ DA is Still 1. I am Publishing the content regularly, Site age is 6 months But Still DA and PA are 1 and rank is still not increasing.. Why its not increasing. Is there any way to increase DA and rank Of my site?
Link Building | | ikzayahot0 -
Spammer sites brining my DA score down
A disgruntled web developer registered my domain with a dozen spammer sites, so my score plummeted. Is there a way to get these removed?
Link Building | | generuble0 -
Www and non www site
We have 2 sites one with and one without www - http://forrestwilliamssolicitors.com/ The www site has no content and just re directs to the non www site. I have added some links to the site but stupidly have split them between the 2 sites so I am assuming that the links to the www site are a waste? There aren't many to be fair so I may be able to just simply go back to the link and change it but do I need to? Also could someone explain in simple terms what the difference between the 2 sites is and why we need both! Many thanks
Link Building | | stevewilliams0 -
Link on Every Wordpress Portion of My Site?
I have a website that is pretty popular with good SEO rankings. Part of the site is ran with Wordpress (homepage, articles and static content pages), another part is the forums using vBulletin (probably 75-80% of the pages on the site) and I also have a directory using another software. I have a new website and was going to add a link to it on my older site on the sidebar of Wordpress across all the Wordpress pages. Should I stay away from that or just put it on the homepage? The text is basically "Come check out the new {keyword} site at {SiteTitle}, by the founders of {OldSiteTitle}. I would have the keyword and sitetitle linked over to the new site. Would I be hurting either site by doing this or should it be looked at as a natural link as I do own both of the sites and want to let people know about the new site.
Link Building | | USACarry0 -
Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?
I'm working with a site owner who recently hired an SEO to work on just one particular type of keyword. It seems like the more work the SEO did, the lower the keyword gradually dropped. Granted, the "work" is pretty low quality - anchor texted bookmarks, comments and low quality articles. We're doing an experiment where we are going to disavow those links and see if the previous rankings return. Another site that I am consulting with has a lot of good natural links and then some anchor texted links, but from decent sources - some guest posts (on good sites - not a spammy site that exists only for guest posts) and some places where decent websites have agreed to link to the site. The anchor texted links do not make up very much of the overall anchor text. There is good diversity and lots of brand and url anchored links. It seems like the more the SEO does for this site, the more the rankings drop. And it's not all about anchor text. The SEO placed a link in a relevant directory, using the url as anchor...rankings dropped a little. They obtained an expired domain with relevant and very natural links and 301'd it to the new domain...rankings dropped several places. And so on. Occasionally the rankings will pop up a little, but overall it's a downward spiral. Check out this post by Gary Taylor. He did an experiment where he took an established site that was ranking well and threw some spammy links at it. To quote the article, 'every day goes by my ranking for the term “domains” is getting harder to maintain.' He recently tweeted that he has been removing and disavowing links and the rankings are returning. I was looking at searches for real estate related terms in different cities. In some cities, the top sites are ones that have ZERO obvious SEO done to them. There are sites ranking on page 3 that have been SEO'd, and not all of them have poor SEO. Many are what I would consider really well done. Some of the sites ranking on page 1 have under 10 links. There was one with 2 followed links and they were not from super authoritative sites! To complicate matters though, if you look at searches like "Toronto Real Estate Agents" some of the top sites have lots of keyword anchor texted links. Perhaps this should be a blog post rather than a Q&A, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts. My personal thought is that Google's main goal with Penguin and the unnatural links warnings is to make it so that not only is it not profitable to try to manipulate the SERPS, but that every time you try to do so, you potentially do your rankings harm. I used to say that Penguin could only affect a site on the date of a Penguin refresh, but I am thinking now that Google has managed to roll Penguin into the algorithm to some extent so that it can demote the majority of any work that smells of SEO. Thoughts?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Blog. vs /Blog
I need to be able to explain to a client the difference from an SEO perspective between Blog. vs /Blog. www.website.com/Blog vs Blog.website.com The client wants to know which one will help there website with SEO. I belive both will but /Blog will more. I'm looking for a tangible answer only centered around this subject. Thanks,
Link Building | | cfield_splashmedia.com0 -
Guest posts on sites you buy advertising with?
What are your thoughts about the following scenarios. Scenario 1: You purchased a banner ad on a site for $50. Then you notice that the site accepts guest posts and you contribute a guest article which has a followed link. Scenario 2: You pitch a guest post to a blog and they say sure but first pay us $50. You say, I can't pay for links but how about I buy an ad spot for $50 instead in appreciation of you reviewing by submission. Scenario 3: You pitch a guest post to a blog and they say sure but it will cost $50 to be published. You say sure and pay them. Which of these would go against Google's guidelines and be considered a paid link? It seems like they are all buying links to a different degree, but they would all be indistinguishable to Google.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs1 -
Interesting link to a competitors site
I recently found a very interesting link to two of my competitors sites. The companies are number 2 and 3 in Google for my targeted keywords (for some reason Wikipedia is number 1) and are both linked from the home page of this site. I don't want to leave a link for linkers site because I don't want them to be able to see that I'm snooping on them but, here is the scenerio: The site that they are linked from is a .org site. It is basically our targeted keywords in a .org. Something like bluewidgets.org. At the very bottom of the home page are some tabs, you click the first tab and it opens about 20 new tabs, when you click any of those 20 tabs it displays some text at the bottom of the page. This text is of no value to visitors, it is obvious to me what is happening here. Both companies are linked with targeted keywords in the anchor and title text. I'm wondering if I should also pursue a link from this page. I know there is value in a .org link but this site seems to be built to link to those two sites. Anybody else ever run into anything like I'm describing. Should I post a link to this site?
Link Building | | TRICORSystems0