Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
-
Hi,
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page.We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH!
I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory).
We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links.
As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this.
We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions.
We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them.
-
First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow?
-
For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing?
-
For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do?
-
For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed).
-
How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do.
-
Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this).
-
What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect?
Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.
-
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks - BTW - I don't have 200 links in my footer - I have 200 pages on my site, with about 20 navigational links in the footer. -
#3. Yes, that's what I would do.
#5. I mean a link that is/was helping you algorithmicaly to a certain extent due to the authority that external page was able to accumulate.
#6. 200 links in your footer? I wouldn't put that in the non-crazy ridiculous category. You really only need footer links to help visitor navigation. A lot of people put them there to help with SEO but in most cases they're not really effective at that. I'd suggest getting rid of most of those.
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response.So for #3, you wouldn't mess with malicious sites - just go straight to a disavow?
For #5 - I'm glad it's not "that easy" then for people to tank one another. Can you clarify when you said "It's the links that cross a certain threshold of strength AND fit the mold of inorganic that trip the filter." I don't quite follow what you mean. Is this an example of if you haven't been doing any link cleaning for 5 years (like we have) we may have exceeded a certain number and now it will "bite us"?
For #6 - you say "Don't worry about anchor text within your own site, as long as it's not crazy ridiculous". Right now, we have 200+ pages on our site - which makes 200+ footer anchor text links - I can't imagine this could be an issue as we don't have a big site - do you agree? We did use a KWP in our footer really because it's descriptive of what our page was about and helping people understand - but i have since changed it to be safe.
Our biggest traffic drop was right on Sept 27/28 - we moved to 1/2 of the traffic we had prior to that - and I understand that was a Panda update. We do have some definite quality issues. I thought if you lined up your traffic drop to a Panda update that's how you could tell?
Thanks
-
MLM,
1. Per Google, just disavowing links isn't enough to make your reconsideration request successful, G also wants to see a good faith effort to get your toxic links removed whenever possible.
2. If a site no longer exists and the pages that contain links to your site not longer exist, it may take some time for them to disappear from the crawl indexes but you won't have to do anything about them--the links are non-existent.
3.For purposes of your reinclusion request, you should make note of the fact that the sites were marked as malicious and include those links in your disavow link file.
4. If you have reason to believe that the links on those foreign sites are inorganic you can still attempt to contact the webmaster with your removal request, and if no response, add them to your disavow link file.
5. Its my conjecture that effective negative SEO is likely to be as expensive as link building for your own site, which means that someone going out and buying a bunch of low quality links and pointing them at your site is not going to do anything. It's the links that cross a certain threshold of strength AND fit the mold of inorganic that trip the filter. Once tripped, however, the owner is stuck with cleaning up the whole mess.
6. Don't worry about anchor text within your own site, as long as it's not crazy ridiculous.
If it was my site, I'd be focusing on whether it was panda or not. A site with a penquin penalty may be salvageable but one with a panda penalty may not be. As far as your toxic links, don't forget you can move your linked-to content to new URLs and leave the old ones to 404--it's an option if you don't have bad ones pointing to your home page. 301ing to a new domain is generally considered to eventually redirect your penalty to the new domain as well, so I wouldn't go that route.
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
-
SEO Value for Visitor Comments on WordPress Blog
Hi all, I was wondering what SEO value, if any, there is from user comments on my WordPress blog. A lot of them seem to be from bots or incredibly generic. So I guess, aside from possibly adding to the 'trust' factor and the possibility of facilitating a potential relationship with another relevant website, is there any value here? I can't wait to hear from you all!
Algorithm Updates | | maxcarnage0 -
Shared Hosting - Bad for SEO? (exp. Godaddy)
There were a lot of questions and data on this a few years back and nothing terribly recent so i wanted to get the discussion going again and see if any new data has been published. Is hosting your website on a shared host like Godaddy or Network Solutions going to hurt your rankings because their holds a chance that you could be on the same IP as spammy websites? My gut feeling is no primarily because almost 90% of the worldwide web is on shared hosting but i do not have a lot of data to back it up. Id love to hear some feedback. Cheers - Kyle
Algorithm Updates | | kchandler0 -
Lost over 65% of organic visits since Sept - Please help
Hi all, I'm fairly new to SEOmoz, i am here because i dont seem to be getting any actuall help from my SEO company, so am trying to figure this out myself. I have done a quick analysis using google analytics and have gone from 13441 google organic visitors in Sept to 4527 google organic visitors in March. (see attached image GA Sept - March) Visitor numbers seems be to fairly stable in sept, oct, nov, and perhaps a slight decline in Dec, but then on Jan17th seems a big drop, and i have never recovered... (See images GA - Oct, GA - Nov, GA - Dec and GA - Jan ) I am at a bit of a loss, i have heard about google penalties, but there are no warnings in my webmaster tools about this, the only warning i ever got was a message on Dec 24th which read : http://XXX.co.uk/: Big traffic change for top URL Search results clicks for (my site) have decreased significantly. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates. However, if you have recently made significant changes to the content or configuration of your site, this change may be an indication that there are problems. This is not a penalty notice is it? its simply google telling me i have lost a lot of traffic? Strange thing is December's traffic was pretty much fine, so do not understand why i got this message, when the drop in traffic happened a month later. I've been racking my brain for months trying to fix every little possible issue i can find with my site (its not nice, when you do not actually know what google has decided it doesn't like about your site!) but nothing seems to be helping, i've been hiring content writter's as i found loads of websites have copied a lot of content, i also decided maybe the product descriptions are being classed as duplicate so again have got in content writter's to re-write hundreds of product descriptions (all this is costing me an arm and a leg)... Nada! Then today, when doing this google analysis (see image GA Sept - March) i noticed two sites, i have renamed them on the image to: XXX-1.co.uk & XXX-2.ecomm-search.com XXX-1.co.uk was a test server where i could play around with code on my website before i actually implement changes, usually i delete all the files after i use it... but it looks like i forgot to do that.... the site is a complete copy of my website (but obviously a version where you can not actually process an order) but all the pages still have canonical links back to the proper website... Just in case this was causing issues, i have 301 redirected the site back to my main site... Is this wise? or should i just delete the site? XXX-2.ecomm-search.com is a search company i was trialing as i wanted to improve the search functionality on my own site, however the search features are hosted on their site... I was told it has no bearing on SEO as its not indexed... however if google is seeing refferalls coming from that site, which is basically a duplicate of my search pages but with better functionality, could they be considering this a duplicate content issue? If anybody can give me any advice at all about above questions, or in general about what happened on Jan 17th (as i see from web search's many people were affected but i can not seem to find people who actually know what google did) i would be very grateful. Thanks James iNiKRDq jd6FJ3l RzaqTEy 8KCtykz 2m2OGvG
Algorithm Updates | | isntworkdull0 -
Local Vs National SEO Rankings
Hi Guys, I just had a quick question, is it truly possible to rank number one worldwide/nationally for a keyword phrase these days such as, Computer repair services. I'm not too concerned with the local serps that come up above the fold. I'm just more concerned, if Google is looking to serve more local results into the regular serps listing? I hope that makes sense thanks. Best, Peter
Algorithm Updates | | PeterRota0 -
Local SEO-How to handle multiple business at same address
I have a client who shares the same address and suite number with multiple business. What should be done to optimize their website and citations for local SEO? Is this a huge issue? What should we do so our rankings aren't affected. Will changes take a long time to take place? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | caeevans0 -
Help with local Seo?
Hi, I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally. I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country. For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states. Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others. They rank 3rd and im 8th. There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc. Still no joy. I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me. By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along. I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area. My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors! many many thanks for any responses John
Algorithm Updates | | totaldriveways0 -
How will SEO be impacted by Google's new Knowledge Graph?
With the recent announcement of Googles new Knowledge Graph, the SERP will be different. Will this present a new set of SEO best practices?
Algorithm Updates | | PerriCline0 -
Has Panda update made you lose your ranks but put them back again?
I noticed recently that one of the main sites I run dropped ranks quite heavily across the board. I then noticed that with very link building during the time that the ranks were down (about 1 month) that my ranks went back up again really quickly. All this with very little link building effort, and its the same link building campaign I've been running for a while. So I'm wondering has any been experiencing ranking flux between jan and feb? I know that people reckon if you fix some things your ranks can improve again, but I barley fixed anything on the site and yet it dropped some keywords from 1st page to 3rd page and then back to 3rd page; some keywords went back to original position some were lower but non were higher.
Algorithm Updates | | upick-1623910