Negative Stuff - Post Edit
-
Is google to blame? I feel like something of this magnitude requires legal action but havent found anything online about what I can do legally, whether I should collaborate and if simply bringing all this to google's attention is enough.
Thanks
-
I would hire someone who really knows their stuff about Penguin and Panda.... and has lots of experience getting penalized sites restored in the SERPs. That person might know what can be done about your situation.
It might not cost as much as you think
-
I'll be honest. I run a legal site and it is large and one of the oldest online. Despite the fact that it would be an incredible shame for it to disappear and not be updated thanks to the miserable way Panda and Penguin are dealing with it, I don't think Google cares about this issue that concerns a minority of sites and that there is no avenue for us to practically do anything. Nor do I think people will revolt, despite the fact they like me and our honest and very helpful site a whole lot. This is because most will get something similar elsewhere, say "oh, that's really a shame what Google is doing to them" if they even realize what's going on (and they don't except a few people here) and go on their way.
Our junk competitors have caught up with us and surpassed us in some respects solely because we've been dealing with Google issues that should not exist since Panda 2.2. All the advice made no difference and still we're dealing with people saying what it "might" be but nobody sees any huge issue that would take down our site. It's incredibly painful but Google collects Adsense revenue whether it's us or someone else. Until they get hit in the pocket or someone else takes them on in the search engine business, you're better off focusing on fixing the problem - if it's at all possible - or just accepting that life isn't fair, this completely sucks and you'll have to find something else to do. How bad can it get? 18 years after our first true "website" Google has given all of our content a page rank of zero - yes zero. This has gone on for weeks. We'd get better results scraping our own content!
-
I can tell you (I have significant legal experience) that chances are you will need to spend huge sums of money trying to prove your slimy competitor libeled you. Libel cases are the most difficult to make and you will almost certainly need to put the money up front to fund your own lawsuit. So let's answer this question - how will you be able to identify who put up all those bad links to cause your negative SEO? Send information subpoenas to every site, hoping that they have IP address info for every bad link that was posted? This is why slimy companies will do this - very difficult if not impossible to prove and the money taking you down is worth the investment and price of doing business. It's tough and dirty. Perhaps best to worry just about keeping clean.
-
Regarding the issue of bounce - I will only say that IMHO Google may severely penalize you for what you let it see (Analytics, Adsense, etc.) I've always wondered whether having bots thrown at your site that would increase bounce rate would affect a site. Call it paranoia but my data seemed to indicate that the less Google knew the better this site did. Nobody would know how Google really takes into account except Google. Almost everything else is our speculation. Good luck, truly.
-
I'm suffering from a similar problem such as you. My first site was up back when people didn't know what a search engine was. There are a couple of things I'm noticing that give me cause for concern based upon SEO people researching my links and coming to the same (and wrong) conclusion.
Frequently these SEO experts would check backlinks, see domains that had pages that looked like extremely poor. Cheap looking design, missing images, sometimes with long blogrolls too, etc. They told me I was getting significantly downgraded because of these spam pages from my obvious link campaign. After review, I realized that all the links were legitimate (we didn't do a link campaign.) The sites they spotted had pages that probably weren't changed in at least a decade, similar to that geocities look. Blogrolls were really popular many years prior to anyone even knowing what a nofollow link is. I'm wondering whether I'm getting penalized by Google as a result of these because I can't find any reason for our severe penalty and you're suffering from the same.
One other item - those with the gold will make the rules and get content placed everywhere, obviously for a payment behind the scenes. Large SEO shops are selling these placements and there seems to be little the small to mid sized websites can do to maintain their position before the domino effect kicks in. I'm wondering whether you need to increase backlinks to at least remain in the game. Wishing you the best of luck.
-
When you are in a high volume area there is going to be a lot of scraping, spinning and mash-ups. Lots of sites get millions of links from this type of activity. It's not negative SEO... its just script kiddies flexing their skills.
So, before you point the finger at the "white knight" are you sure that you don't have a Panda problem caused by thin content or duplicate content. Are you sure that you are not bouncing visitors and that is the root of your problem?
If you are getting hit by link spam your rankings drops are likely to occur on dates where lots of other people get hit by Pengin problems. Did you get an unnatural link warning in webmaster tools?
I hear your concerns but am not convinced that you have a link spammer hitting you.
What have you done to rule out the more likely situation that the problem is not caused by a saboteur?
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
-
An article we wrote was published on the Daily Business Review, we'd like to post it on our site. What is the proper way?
Part 1
Technical SEO | | peteboyd
We wrote an article and submitted it to the Daily Business Review. They published the article on their website. We want to also post the article on our website for our users but we want to make sure we are doing this properly. We don't want to be penalized for duplicating content. Is this the correct way to handle this scenario written below? We added a rel="canonical" to the blog post (on our website). The rel="canonical" is set to the Daily Business Review URL where the article was originally published. At the end of the blog post we wrote. "This article was originally posted on The Daily Business Review." and we link to the original post on the Daily Business Review. Should we be setting the blog post (on our website) to be a "noindex" or rel="canonical" ? Part 2 Our company was mentioned in a number of articles. We DID NOT write those articles, we were only mentioned. We have also posted those same articles on our website (verbatim from the original article). We want to show our users that we have been mentioned in highly credited articles. All of these articles were posted on our website and are set to be a "noindex". Is that the correct thing to do? Should we be using a rel="canonical" instead and pointing to the original article URL? Thanks in advance MOZ community for your assistance! We tried to do the leg work of our own research for the answers but couldn't find the exact same scenario that we are encountering**.**0 -
Will Adding Publish Date at end of Page Title for Blog posts Hurt SEO?
I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO? The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content
Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
Is there a way to EDIT the description that appears under my sitelinks?!
I know you can't add Sitelinks since Google does it automatically but is there a way to edit the description that appears on the sitelinks? It's not the same as the meta description I've written for my landing pages. The keyword where you can see the sitelinks is Digital Media Construction.
Technical SEO | | WebLocal0 -
Should I use a canonical tag or 301 with Wordpress posts?
Hi all, I'm trying to determine if canonical or 301 is a better way of handling an issue on my site. The Background I've got a Wordpress website where pages are in-depth reference articles and the posts are for short news blurbs. When I produce a new resource page, I also make a short post telling readers about the new resource. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plug in. Sometimes, Google will rank the 200 word post higher than the 2000 word resource page. I suspect that is because of the order in which they were crawled by Google, but I do not know for sure. The Question To make sure that the resource page is seen as the most important location on the site for the topic, should I use the canonical section in the Yoast plugin on the post to point to the page? Or should I wait, and after a few days (when the news blurb is off of the first page) just 301 the post to the page? Are there any link juice considerations when using the canonical option? Thanks for the help! Richard
Technical SEO | | RichardInFlorida0 -
Would posting content into these sites be a good boost related to authority?
Hi, Would posting content into these sites be a good boost related to authority? Press releases PRWebPRLeapArticlesthetechscoop.netthecampussocialite.comtechi.combusiness2community.commediaite.comexaminer.commakezine.comhuffingtonpost.comAll these site charge to post is it worth?Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons1 -
Facebook likes for a blog - are posts or root domain more important?
I've just added the facebook plugin for my wordpress blog. I've activated the like buttons on each post and I share the posts on facebook - so when someone likes it on facebook, it reflects on the blog post. In my blog sidebar I've added the Like widget. I can either put the URL for it as my blog root domain (not many likes yet) or my facebook page (lots of likes, so more impressive) I've been hearing about Likes etc counting towards SEO, so I'm wondering if anyone can tell me whether developing Likes for my blog root domain will have any significant benefit over the Likes I am getting for the individual posts?
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Should I add my blog posts to my sitemap.txt file?
This seems like it should be an obvious no, just because of the amount of work that would entail, and then remembering to do it every time I make a post, but since I couldn't find anything on Google about it and have never heard anyone mention it, I figured I'd ask.
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Related post script for non wordpress sites
Guys am looking for a related posts script or tool that can read my site map or and post related articles under each of my articles. There are plugins like yarrp, linkwithin but they are for wordpress. I need something i can you use with a normal html website.
Technical SEO | | Emeka0