Google Penalty
-
Hello thereIt has just been confirmed that my site is suffering for a Google Penality. The odd thing is that it is just for my set of key keywords and not the whole site.
It seems in 2010 that a rouge SEO company I used sent loads of spammy links but I have lots of other good links too.
What is your advice moving forward? Will it drop over time? Do I set up a new site (this has been established over 10 years) or try and get better quality links to compensate for the spam ones?
Thanks so much! Kindest regards
Victoria
-
I agree with Gary, you should definitely go through all your links and be really ruthless in terms of which are the poor quality links. Anything that is on an article or directory website you can probably get rid of (apart from directories like Yahoo, DMOZ etc) and submit your disavow file to Google.
If it is only your target keywords that have dropped then you have been lucky to escape a site-wide penalty but there is a good chance that this will be on its way so if you can clean up your profile sooner rather than later, it should help.
-
Do you have a Manual Penalty? How have you confirmed you have the penalty? Is there an option to send a reconsideration request in Web Master Tools?
Removing those links is always the best thing to do. However I would start by putting them all in a disavow file first so that Google can start to ignore them as dofollow links. Meanwhile you can start to remove them.
However if you have a Manual penalty, you will have a lot more work to do. Let me know and I will guide you.
-
You can remove the "spammy" links but make sure they are in fact spammy as removing all low end links can also hurt your rankings and may not have been doing you any hard in the first place. You can also as you mentioned build some good links and help counteract it.
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 isn't recognizing links to my site. help
I recently changed my domain name and i see on moz that NOTHING is linking to my current domain (even though I have changed all of my links to go to my current domain name). My domain authority remains higher with my old domain name. I do have my old domain linking to my current site. Should I worry about this? How can i get google to recognize the link changes?
Link Building | | milesnixon0 -
More guest blogging penalties coming?
Does anyone foresee any future guest blogging penalties coming from google if the guest blogs are high quality blogs? I'm wondering if a future google update is going to hit even more sites that have used guest blogging as guest blogging continues to grow. I like guest blogging to drive traffic to my site but am scared to used it for fear of future updates in the algorithm. Thanks mozzers!
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Links from PRWeb press release violate Google's quality guidelines?
My site has had a manual action performed on it by Google indicating that I have inbound links that fall outside of their quality guidelines. I did my own research, found what I thought was the issue, had the links removed and requested reconsideration. Google's response surprised me in that they highlighted two specific pages with links that were the direct result of valid press releases and a publisher picking up our release off a wire service. Has anyone else seen this occur? Anyone had a case successfully reconsidered? I realize that I don't need to do anything at all as the manual action is in effect and will stay that way, discounting those links, but I would rather a) not have any manual action against my site and b) know for the future so this doesn't happen again. Also, is this applicable for guest blog posts, which effectively create the same type of backlinks? Thanks
Link Building | | barberm1 -
Google Disavow File Update
Is there any specific format to update the Disavow file? Also if I submitted the file a months ago, and need to update it now... should I leave the old 'excluded domains' or should I remove them? Lets say this is what I have: How would you update it? #explanation from to Google went here... and ended here.
Link Building | | dhidalgo1
"domain:exampledomainalreadysubmitted1.com"
"domain:exampledomainalreadysubmitted2.com"
"domain:exampledomainalreadysubmitted3.com" Thanks for your input0 -
Will Ecademy closure affect websites google ranking
Hi, i think i must be the only one that did not know about Ecademy sale, well almost. In the past week I have had a number of people contact me who are angry that they did not receive an email about ecademy business network being sold off. These people are more than angry about their monthly payments leaving their bank acounts and not having access to the new site which is here www.sunzu.com/ Although a lot of people are angry of the handling of this, an important question i would like to ask is, with ecademy no longer being around, does this mean that all the hard work of people writing articles on ecademy and gaining link juice, will all this link juice vanish look forward to hearing your thoughts
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What can i do about link threaths like these? What does Google do abt these?
I asked for links removal and it turned into a threat now see below. Can i do anything abt these? Can google protect us from these? Where can i let google know - my site is already penalized and only showing up for my brand in google 😞 I have deleted the email threads from here - contact me if you want me to send those so you can see them
Link Building | | CMTM0 -
Got a warning from Google but rankings still ok.. what to expect?
Yesterday I got THE warning from Google: "Dear site owner or webmaster of http://..., We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. " It seems all my rankings are intact though. Some keywords got higher rankings, other dropped a little bit (-1, -2) but nothing unusual. My question is, since I got this warning, should I expect some sort of penalty soon? I see other webmasters who got their websites de-indexed after getting this warning so I'm quite concerned.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Good/Bad Backlinks - Penalties
Just a quick question from someone that is extremely new to this: If "G" penalizes sites for bad backlinks (low quality, spammy) then why are people not building these types of links towards the competitors that are currently outranking them? Or are they? and if they are, is it beneficial? (are your competitors dropping in rankings?) Seems like a fair question.... Any insight is appreciated
Link Building | | Prime850