Google Webmaster Tools - When will the links go away!?
-
About 9 months back we thought having an extremely reputable company build our client some local citations would be a good idea. You definitely know this citation company, but I'll leave names out. Regardless, it's our mistake to cut corners.
Google Webmaster Tools quickly picked up these new citations and added them to the links section.
One of these citation spawned a complete mess of about 60K+ links on their network of sites through ridiculous subdomains of every state in the country and so many other domain variations. We immediately went into remove mode and had the site's webmaster take down the bad links from their site.
This process took about a month for outreach. The bad links (60K+) have not been on the spam site for well over 6 months but GWT still shows them in the "links to your site" section. Majestic, Bing, and OSE only displayed the bad links for a brief time.
Why is webmaster tools still showing these links after 6+ months? We typically see GWT update about every 2 weeks, a month tops. Any ideas? Could a changed robots.txt on the bad site prevent Google from updating the links displayed in GWT?
We have submitted to disavow, but Google replied with "no manual penalty". We even blasted the bad site with Fiverr links, in hopes that Google would re-crawl them. No luck with anything we do. We have patiently waited for way too long.
The rankings for this site got crushed on Google after these citations. How do we fix this? Should we worry about this? Any advice would really help. Thanks so much in advance.
-
Hi Sha,
Thank you for your response. I know Google can take some time to update, but the amount of time we've waited for Google to re-crawl seems a bit extreme. I went ahead and emailed the webmaster of the origin site to see if they would consider re-working their robots.txt file.
I really appreciate your response and helpful direction.
Dario
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you so much for your very helpful response. The Chartelligence app is very interesting, thanks for that nugget too! The rankings drop is right around the Panda 3/14 algo update, according to the app. We did run the entire site through copyscape just about a month ago. Maybe we need to focus some more efforts here? However, I almost positive these citations did the most damage. We will keep digging.
Really enjoyed the side note also
Thank you,
Dario
-
Thanks Shah. Dario, listen to Shah. She knows way more about this topic than I do. Her comments will be helpful I am sure.
-
Hi Dario,
Just one thing to remember - links/domains submitted via the disavow tool will not disappear from your GWMT list as long as they still exist. Google simply discounts them when ranking your site, so you shouldn't spend time checking to see if they have dropped out of the list.
If they have absolutely been removed, then yes it is quite possible that googlebot has been unable to crawl the site of origin (but if there are hundreds of sites then they would all have to have the same roadblock in place) for none to be crawled.
Dana is quite right in saying that Webmaster tools is notorious for updating slowly (and incorrectly at times) and she is absolutely on the money in advising that you need to try to nail down the cause of the rankings drop so you know what you are dealing with.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
This is one of those situations where it seems like you've done everything right, but you still lose. It's something every SEO can Identify with I am sure.
Here are some things I would think about before deciding what to do next:
- Google Webmaster Tools "Links to Your Site" is notoriously slow, and has, even in recent months, been completely wrong for more than a month at a time. There was a period of about 6 weeks in the past year alone where it was reporting "0" links to many peoples' sites. Remember, it's a free tool, not without its own problems.
- Google let you know there's been no manual penalty....regardless, that doesn't mean of course that an algorithm change or Penguin refresh didn't chew up your site and spit it out. I'm sure you've already considered this.
- Do you know the approximate date that these 60,000 links showed up? I am thinking you can narrow it down pretty accurately. Try uploading that date into Chartelligence (it's a Chrome app) and then overlay that on your Google Analytics data. Does that date correspond with any significant changes in site metrics? Can you reasonably show causation?
My point on the last thought is: you want to be absolutely certain that it's those links that caused your rankings drop. You also want to know if that rankings drop significantly affected your site performance. It's very possible that it could have been something else, or a combination of several things that caused it, not just those links alone. If you can say, after considering all of the above, that you are 95% certain those links were the sole cause of the rankings problem, and the rankings drop is significantly impacting your site performance...then you will know more clearly how to proceed. I'm sorry it's not a better answer in terms of "do x" and you will "achieve y." But this is one of those situations when diagnosis can be difficult.
(Total side note: It's funny, you know, people go to doctors all of the time who have difficulty accurately diagnosing ailments, and they are pretty tolerant of that. They'll even take prescription medication from a doctor who might even say outright they don't know what the problem is, so they are going to try treating the symptoms. Even so, medicine is a highly-respected profession. Conversely, SEOs attempting to make accurate diagnosis and treat the symptoms of a problem are often maligned as being nothing more than "crafty guessers" because no one really knows the Google algorithm. I've had stakeholders refuse to follow my suggestions because I couldn't say with 100% certainty that my diagnosis was correct because, as one continually says: "You don't know Google's algorithm, do you?" He's gone so far as to completely throw out anything an SEO, SEO company or anyone associated with an SEO site like Moz has to say. If it doesn't come from Google directly, he views it all as bunk. This was a bit of a sidebar, but I just wanted to express that it can be very difficult to get a client to accept a diagnosis that's an "educated guess." We have a long way to go in building up our profession to the point where stakeholders value and trust our expertise.)
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
-
Google is not indexing all URLs
My website have company and events profile from 200 countries. So it does have lots of URL. Earlier in August 2014, Google used to crawl 90% of URLs we submit. Thing goes wrong when we shifted from http to https. We lost traffic. But we are gaining it slowly. Main concern is that, It still does not indexed all submitted URLs. It have crawled merely 8% of all URLs submitted. site address is businessvibes.com Any help would be appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | irteam0 -
Google Analytics Code
We have a quick question about our Google Analytics code: We recently updated to a re-marketing Analytics code, and some of our traffic numbers seem to be off by a bit. I used the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension today, and noticed that it's finding our old Analytics code on our pages, but it's coming up as an error due to "no HTTP Response". I am attempting to remove this code from the website, but it is nowhere to be found in the HTML coding. Only the current one is there. So I'm wondering if this second Analytics code is effecting our traffic and reporting, even if the code is currently non-functional? and if it is, how could I go about removing it if it's not currently in our HTML? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | PlanetDISH0 -
Webmaster tools traffic on one keyword dropped through the floor - ideas?
Hi there, We design and sell our own product range in a narrow niche, and we are also stocked by Amazon and a lot of other big retailers in the UK. During the first two weeks of Dec 2012 the position of one of our main keywords, which was in google SERPs on page 1 (8 or 9), dropped to page 4. The keyword describes the niche we're in. The drop is shown in the webmaster tools traffic report for that keyword. But it's the only one of our keywords where this has happened, and furthermore it hasn't happened for variations of the keyword. And in Adwords our quality score for the keyword is 10 For example say we were making and selling shopping trolleys - our keyword "shopping trolleys" has dropped through the floor, but "shopping trolleys (on) wheels" is just fine. Can anyone shed any light on what's going on here? Losing this one keyword has cost us some good organic traffic. i1uxSlB.png
Reporting & Analytics | | w1ll1am0 -
Difference between site: search and Total Indexed in Google Webmaster Tools.
This morning I did a search on Google for my site using the site: operator. I noticed that the number of results returned was significantly different than the "Total indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools. What is the difference and is it normal to have two very different numbers here?
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0 -
Goal tracking in Google Analytics
Hi folks I read from various sources that if you setup goals in Google Analytics each of these goals can only be fulfilled once per visit. Also some sources suggesting that only one goal from each goal group can be fulfilled per visit. On our site we have a goal for external links since this provides value to partners. Some users do open an external link in a new tab, then come back to the main site. Any further goal completions would then not get tracked. Since we apply a result based payment model for our work this means we are literally loosing money. Anyone has official info from Google on this? Can it be configured? How long is a visit? Thanks a million and have a great day. Fredrik
Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify0 -
Why Webmaster tools shows different avg. positions?
Hi everyone, I am new to Seomoz, I loved this amazing SEO school 🙂 My questions is about webmaster tool. Webmaster tool shows that my site's avg. positions is 34 and its getting better every week. I even see some new queries, new avg. positions for that queries. That's great ! But when I search the avg position it is between 54 -60 and I don't see any new queries . Shouldnt we rely on what webmaster tells us about avg. positions? Thanks a lot
Reporting & Analytics | | EzgiGunyel-InfinPixels0 -
Google Analytics session update question
Hello, With reference to seomoz blog post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/panda-24-and-analytics-session-update-rolled-out-simultaneously#jtc151292 , i would like clarification about the following - User searches Google for "Product Name" and clicks on your AdWords advertisement. User leaves site and searches a few more times, click on competition and comparing prices and features. User ultimately decides to with your product, Googles "Your Brand + Product Name", clicks your organic listing, and buys the product. This whole process takes less than 30 minutes. "Your Brand + Product Name" will appear in your organic keyword report with 1 visit. My question is whether "Product Name" will also appear in organic keyword report with 1 visit if the visitor is not signed in. ( as search won't be encrypted ) Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20100