Micro Site Penalty?
-
I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz.
After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper.
Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH!
Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns. Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites!
As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO.
Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this!
- server-side 301 redirect for the micro site?
- Delete the micro site (drastic measure)
- Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7
- other options?
The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.
-
Cheers, yea certainly unintentional from my client.
I will include a Google docs spread sheet showing the actions taken to remove these links and probably a link to this discussion!
With a rather humble and embarrassed apology!
oh well my first penalty in a 100 sites or so.
Thanks for your help!
have a great day!
-
Hi Eric
The manual action appearing in the site is not a bad sign to have at all - it shows that it was not algorithmic action and so now that you've identified the problem you should be able to get it removed ASAP.
Yes, I would remove all the links and then in your reconsideration request mention exactly what you have here. The manipulative links were unbeknownst to you, you've identified them all, removed them all (and cite the URLs where they have been removed) and you should be good to go.
To me it looks like these were made in genuine error and not meant to manipulate rankings; you should mention that. It's not everyday where they get reconsiderations where 100% of the bad links will be removed, as in your case, so it should be pretty positive.
These requests typically take 5-7 days, but I have seen them take up to 2 weeks, just an FYI.
-
Cheers Tim I suspected this was a result of this "Unnatural links to your site" and appreciate the reinforcement.
Ranking improvements were solid before unnatural links were put in place but I agree it is a combination of the two.
This just popped up in "Manual Actions" in Webmaster Tools
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.
I will get all the links removed to show best intent then click "Request A Review" hopefully this will speed up the process?
This was out of my control but certainly reinforces my view "Links are earned not bought!"
-
Hi Eric
To me, it looks like you've identified the problem. In the technical sense, it looks like your website is suffering from a over-optimisation/Penguin penalty.
If you look at the links pointing to your product pages, there are a number of unnatural signals. Virtually all of the links come from shademakers.com (unnatural), they all have commercial or targeted anchor text (unnatural) and they are all dofollow, thus passing SEO equity.
The fastest way to remedy this in my eyes would be to remove the links. You could 301 redirect, but I believe removing the links on shademakers.com looks more like a conscious effort to stop this manipulative linking (as it stops any link equity being passed altogether, which is more what the Google algorithm will want to see).
It's worth noting here that, since this is likely an algorithmic penalty, it may take a while for the removal of these links to be seen and reconsidered by that part of the algorithm (and there's nothing unfortunately you can do to accelerate this). Similarly, those links were likely to be the cause of the big jump in rankings (in tandem with your on-site SEO), so in order to see top 3 rankings again you may need to earn high quality and relevant links to those pages with healthier anchor texts. The third scenario is a sort of combination of the two - the bad links have been devalued but no negative action on your site has been taken by the algorithm - in which case you just need to earn high quality links in order to recover the rankings.
I would remove the links completely and try to earn better links. Once rankings start to pick up, you may want to link from the shademakers.com site again (if it's getting any relevant traffic), but if you do so I would almost certainly use branded or non-keyword rich anchor texts and also use no-follow links - to show that you're not trying to pass PageRank or any SEO link equity, but just want to link to a relevant site.
Hope this helps.
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 migration/ CMS/domain site structure change-no access to search console
Hi everyone, We are migrating an old site under a bigger umbrella (our main domain). As mentioned in the title, We'll perform CMS migration, domain change, and site structure change. Now, the major problem is that we can't get into google search console for the old site. The site still has old GA code, so google search console verification using this method is not possible, also there is no way developers will be able to add GTM or edit DNS setting (not to bother you with the reason why). Now, my dilemma is : 1. Do we need access to old search console to notify Google about the domain name change or this could be done from our main site (old site will become a part of) search console 2. We are setting up 301 redirects from old to the new domain (not perfect 1:1 redirect ). Once migration is done does anything else needs to be done with the old domain (it will become obsolete)? 3.The main site, Site-map... Should I create a new sitemap with newly added pages or update the current one. 4. if you have anything else please add:) Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin0 -
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site
The scenario We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site. They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings. They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall. I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority. My thoughts Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages. Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site. ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible. Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen. Am I going about this the right way? Thanks in advance. Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smrs-digital0 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0