Manual Penalty Question
-
Hello dear MoZ community,
I have already communicated this problem before but now it reaches to a level I have to make some hard decisions and would like your help.
One of our new accounts (1 month old) got a manual penalty notification few weeks ago from Google for unnatural link building. I went through the whole process, did link detox and analysis and indeed there were lots of blog networks existing purely for cross linking. I removed these and the links got decreased dramatically. The company had around 250,000 links and truth be told if I go by the book only 700-800 of them are really worth and provide value. They will end up with roughly 15000 -20000 left which I acknowledge are a lot but some are coming from web 2 properties such as blogger, wordpress etc.
Because the penalty was in some of the pages and not the whole web site I removed the ones that I identified were harming the web site, brought the anchor text down to normal levels and filed a very detailed reconsideration request and disavow file.
I do not have a response so far by webmasters but here is where my concerns begin:
- Should I go for a new domain? losing 230.000 links ? How can there even be a "reconsideration" request for a web site with 85% of its link profile being cross linking to self owned directories and web 2 properties?
- If I go for a new domain should I redirect?
- Should I keep the domain, keep cleaning and adding new quality links so I take it with a fresh new approach?
Thanks everyone in advance!
-
Thanks for taking the time to reply Michael, much appreciated!
-
My answer to this would depend on how tightly controlled your spammy links are. If you're pretty sure you can get 98% of them with your disavow list, then I'd keep the domain. If, on the other hand, you know that a bot ran posting comments on thousands and thousands of little blogs, it's very unlikely that you will be able to find most of those blogs and disavow them, and Google is just going to keep finding more and declining your reinclusion request.
FYI typically I've seen turnaround from a reinclusion request of about a week to 10 days.
If you do decide to go for a new domain, do NOT redirect, as you run a big risk of getting the penalty transferred. Instead, contact the webmasters for all of the good, strong links, and ask for them to update their links to point to your new domain. Yes, many of them will ignore you, but in terms of link-building, you're likely to have more success per hour of your time asking those sites who already link to your existing domain.
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
-
Backlink Question
I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4. According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed. Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is? Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Palmbourne0 -
80% of traffic lost over night, Google Penalty?
Hi all.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hemjakt
I have a website called Hemjakt (http://www.hemjakt.se/) which is a search engine for real estate currently only available on the Swedish market. The application crawl real estate websites and collect all estates on a single searchable application. The site has been released for a few months and have seen a steady growth since release, increasing by 20% weekly up to ~900 visitors per day. 3 days ago, over night, I lost 80% of my traffic. Instead of 900 visitors per day I'm at ~100 visitors per day and when I search for long, specific queries such as "Åsgatan 15, Villa 12 rum i Alsike, Knivsta" ( <adress><house type=""><rooms><area> <city>), I'm now only found on the fifth page. I suspect that I have become a subject of a Google Penalty. How to get out of this mess?</city></rooms></house></adress> Just like all search engines or applications, I do crawl other websites and scrape their content. My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value by giving them the possibility to compare houses, get ton of more data to compare pricing and history, giving them extra functionalities that source site do not offer and so on. My analytics data show good user engagement. Here is one example of a Source page and a page at my site:
Source: http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964
My Site: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/ So: How do I actually confirm that this is the reason I lost my traffic? When I search for my branded query, I still get result. Also I'm still indexed by Google. If I am penalized. I'm not attempting to do anything Black Hat and I really believe that the app gives a lot of value to the users. What tweaks or suggestions do you have to changes of the application, to be able to continue running the service in a way that Google is fine with?0 -
Partial Manual penalty to a URL
Hi Mozers, I have a website which has got a partial manual penalty on a specific url. That url is of no use to the website now and is going to be taken off in 3 months time as the website is going to be completely redesigned. Till then I dont wont to live with the partial manual penalty for this url. I have few things in mind to tackle this: 1. take out the url from the website now (as the new redesign will take 3 months) 2. take out internal links pointing to this url in question 3. file for reconsideration with google stating we have taken off the url and have not generated any backlinks and the backlinks are organic. (no backlinking activity has been done on this website or the url) Please let me know if this works or i will have to get the backlinks removed then the disavow then the reconsideration. Looking forward for ur response 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
URL Shortners Question
Does anyone know if there are any URL shortners that track when googlebot visits them? I want to know when googlebot visits a shortened link that does NOT got to a URL I control. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Seeking Top Notch Marketing Company with experience in growing sites post manual penalty
Does anyone know of a company who has direct experience with growing websites AFTER a manual link penalty has been lifted? Any referrals would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
2 Questions about 301 Redirects
So I have a couple of questions about 301 redirects: Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301? I've done 20+ domain 301s in the last year and have yet to see it happen, but the other day I read a an article (or maybe it was a QA post?) that suggested doing 302s to avoid transferring penalties. Has anyone seen any authoritative information regarding this? I 301'd a domain in February that another SEO firm had built a lot of spammy links and I began building contextual links for it at a very slow rate (like 10 or so a month). Within a month, my domain authority was a 26 on the new domain and my inbound links were non existent. By month 2, my links were 70k and domain authority was 34. By month 3, down to 25k inbound links and domain authority of 29, where it has settled for the last 3 months despite some really high quality links. My question (don't worry it's coming), is does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped? I'm assuming the 301 links kicked in and then only about 45% ended up 'sticking'?? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrianJGomez0 -
Ethical question about setting up a local business directory...
I've just launched a local business directory that allows the small businesses in my local area to get noticed by a very targeted audience. People such as self-employed builders, painters and decorators and the like. As well as helping them out, they'll be helping me out by testing the waters of local keywords and seeing just how difficult and how much traffic they'll get. Kind of like spreading myself across 100's of keywords without the need for domains etc. All the links on there are nofollow, but what are the ethics behind letting my clients have a dofollow link from it? I wouldn't use this directory as a marketing tool for my self and my business, but if I acquired a client from my website or other source, but they would benefit from a dofollow link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
I am still confused about anchor text and penalties
As I understand in order to rank well for the page in google, the page/site has to have a lot of back links that have an anchor text with the keywords that you want to rank for. At the same time if google finds that your anchor text contains kewords that are in your title or h1 tag, it may penalize your site. So what do i do to rank well for my chosen keywords. Lets say I am only interested in keywords San Francisco widget and Oakland widget The title of my webpage says San Francisco | Oakland widget The anchor text that I usually pick is either San Francisco widget or Oakland widget. I also have plenty of links that have anchor text like "website" or "click here" What should I use for my anchor text in my backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirMax0