Hummingbird Advice
-
We are looking for actionable insights about how to recover from hummingbird. I read the post that suggested checking the Google Webmaster Tools "Manual Action" tab for a notice about unnatural links. I did this and there was no notice. So what other steps can we take to troubleshoot?
-
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguintool/ offers a cool overlay of your organic traffic.. and offers a good insight to see how you were effected by each known update.
Now from recovering. This will cost you money but you can recover in less then 2 weeks in my experience but its going to cost you about $600 in just tools plus about 300 or so in link removals.
http://www.linkresearchtools.com/products-overview/ - you need the superhero plan. Looking here they have a October sale which saves you a little over 100 bucks. Cool so there is 400 bucks. Next: http://www.rmoov.com/ go get this for a month. Its a 100 bucks. Now what you want to do is go through and run their detox tool. Get the ones that are not indexed and the toxic ones.
Open up both excel spreadsheets and copy the pages that are linking to you. Open a new excel sheet remove duplicate rows or if you want to do it quick you can just use http://textmechanic.com/Remove-Duplicate-Lines.html
Next you take your list of URLs and run that through rmoov. Next it will do its thing go through the campaign settings and check Add Report Back Link to Webmaster Email & FlipFlop Emails. FlipFlop Emails basically sends one time to one email for that domain if it found more then one - it will send next time to that one.
Once it finds all the contact information what you want to do next is go through and enter the campaign. There is a Show Problems checkbox. See what ones are missing contact info. Some of these are going to be tough to find so you will have to delete some of them but; please.. take your time and try to find out who it is. Sometimes its just as doing a whois again.. and you will see that they have a name or another domain you can google to dig deeper.
Now what you're going to want to do is go through each one of these and make sure there are no bad links here.. just make a triple spot check and qualify them. Sometimes the most I had to remove 4 or 5 but Im glad I did. Sometimes you will find that the links it found was just a different view of the same link. So you can just go there and clean it up.
Next what you want to do is send out the campaign email. What this basically does is sends out a email every single day to these guys until they remove it. I found that sometimes the webmaster doesnt even reply but just deletes them and if it goes though and sees that its a deadlink, win. You will get people asking from 3 bucks to 25.. I found that saying: if I disavow you - it doesnt help One guy just raised the price. Just pay them. I found a lot of people who have these directory networks and he found 1000s of directory links he could remove. That can get costly - I just make a note ( rmoov has a good note taker for each site ) and if they want 3000 bucks, screw them, disavow and thanks for the list.
After you run that for a week. Take the clean disavow and upload that. Next - run that campaign again and while thats running you can submit your notes in your reconsideration requests. I talked to so and so, I paid this and this is when. I even add paypal transaction ids. The next thing you can do is when your replying to the web masters is use the note system in rmoov, and when they remove it, and you check, click the link thats in the email which reports back to rmoov that its removed.
Now - I see that once you submit your reconsideration request it takes about 8 business days to get back. Everytime I do this ( more then once ) I get a email saying the manual action has been revoked.
Now that you have a list of what links you removed. Right? Now Im sure you have a link indexing service or a tool that does it.. run that to the ones thats been removed. Im not sure how much this step helps but we all know that the disavow list that you have it takes some time for google-bot to run through this and recheck and do what it does. So to speed up a speedy recovery, I do that.
At the end of the day, end your subscription with rmoov and just let it run for the rest of the month and you may get people mad and they just remove the links so you stop emailing them. So keep a eye on the email and you can get some more wins from it.
This got a little too long. Im sorry. When you do something so many times its easy to talk about.
-
Hi Lara
This isn't a Hummingbird issue. From the sound of it, you may have been hit by Penguin 2.1.
To start with you may find it helpful to read this article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/penguin-2-1-changed-since-2-0-recover/72977/
Peter
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
-
How to unrank your content by following expert advice [rant]
Hi, As you can probably see from the title, a massive rant is coming up. I must admit I no longer understand SEO and I just wanted to see if you have any ideas what might be wrong. So, I read this blog post on MOZ https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-factor - where the chap is improving ranking of content that is already ranking reasonably well. I've got two bits of news for you. The good news is - yes, you can change your articles' ranking in an afternoon. Bad news - your articles drop out of Top 100. I'll give you a bit more details hoping you can spot what's wrong. Disclaimer - I'm not calling out BS, I'm sure the blogger is a genuine person and he's probably has had success implementing this. The site is in a narrow but popular ecommerce niche where the Top 20 results are taken by various retailers who have simply copy/pasted product descriptions from the manufacturer's websites. The link profile strength is varied and I'm not making this up. The Top 20 sites range from DA:4 to DA:56. When I saw this I said to myself, it should be fairly easy to rank because surely the backlinks ranking factor weight is not as heavy in this niche as it is in other niches. My site is DA:18 which is much better than DA:4. So, even if I make my pages tiny tiny bit better than this DA:4 site, I should outrank it, right? Well, I managed to outrank it with really crap content. So, I got to rank two high-traffic keywords in #8 or #9 with very little effort. And I wish I stayed there because what followed just completely ruined my rankings. I won't repeat what was written in the blog. If you're interested, go and read it, but I used it as a blueprint and bingo, indeed Google changed my ranking in just a couple of hours. Wait, I lost more than 90 positions!!!! I'm now outside Top100. Now even irrelevant sites in Chinese and Russian are in front of me. They don't even sell the products. No, they're even in different niches altogether but they still outrank me. I now know exactly what Alice in Wonderland felt like. I want out please!!!!
Algorithm Updates | | GiantsCauseway0 -
Advice regarding latest Google Algo Update please, if possible...
Hi there I wonder if anyone can advise on this. Since the latest google update on 1st Sept or whenever it rolled out, we noticed an initial spike in hits on our site, which was great. However now we are noticing levels going back to where they were and less people visiting the site. It also seems to be very sporadic. So we have a period of say a couple of hours with no one on the site, then suddenly loads visiting. We have also noticed a big dip in enquiries, despite the site having roughly the same amount of visitors. All our stats on Moz, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Serpfox and various other rank trackers are showing that we have had an increase in visibility on our tracked keywords. There is a definite spike on all, but where is our traffic and where are our enquiries? Usually we are able to work out where the problem is when updates occur but with this we have no idea. We are utterly baffled. Is this normal? Is this just fluctuations and will settle down? Has anyone else noticed weird things happening? If anyone has any ideas or experience of this then would be most grateful for any advice. Feeling rather desperate at the moment. Many thanks in advance. Clojo
Algorithm Updates | | Clojobobo0 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Im I being hit by hummingbird?
Hello, Our website is a private equity firm database, privateequityfirms.com. We rank well for a number of private equity definitions and terms and have been increasing rank in those terms but unfortunately we have been losing ranking in our main keyword and url "private equity firms" .We have ranked as high as 3rd under wikipedia in recent months. The only real changes we have made are too the sitemap that is auto generated every time some thing is changed in the database. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? im i being hit by hummingbird. Thank you! MozAnalyticsPDF115_zpsddec64fa.png
Algorithm Updates | | Nicktaylor10 -
Simon Covell Divorce messed up my rankings, please advice?
Hi there, I was getting good ranking on some of the 'Divorce' related keywords but after Simon Covell name involved with divorce, I've just noticed that I am pushed back to page 4 today. Page 1 is one full of magazine and newspaper websites, i don't think i can compete with them. Shall I wait and hope that this news will be old and hopefully they won't rank or is there anything I can do bring back my rankings? It was one of our good converting keyword 😞 Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Rubix0 -
Duplicate content advice
Im looking for a little advice. My website has always done rather well on the search engines, although it have never ranked well for my top keywords on my main site as they are very competitive, although it does rank for lots of obscure keywords that contain my top keywords or my top keywords + City/Ares. We have over 1,600 pages on the main site most with unique content on, which is what i attribute to why we rank well for the obscure keywords. Content also changes daily on several main pages. Recently we have made some updates to the usability of the site which our users are liking (page views are up by 100%, time on site us up, bounce rate is down by 50%!).
Algorithm Updates | | jonny512379
However it looks like Google did not like the updates....... and has started to send us less visitors (down by around 25%, across several sites. the sites i did not update (kind of like my control) have been unaffected!). We went through the Panda and Penguin updates unaffected (visitors actually went up!). So i have joined SEOmoz (and loving it, just like McDonald's). I am now going trough all my sites and making changes to hopefully improve things above and beyond what we used to do. However out of the 1,600 pages, 386 are being flagged as duplicate content (within my own site), most/half of this is down to; We are a directory type site split into all major cities in the UK.
Cities that don't have listings on, or cities that have the same/similar listing on (as our users provide services to several cities) are been flagged as duplicate content.
Some of the duplicate content is due to dynamic pages that i can correct (i.e out.php?***** i will noindex these pages if thats the best way?) What i would like to know is; Is this duplicate content flags going to be causing me problems, keeping in mind that the Penguin update did not seem to affect us. If so what advise would people here offer?
I can not redirect the pages, as they are for individual cities (and are also dynamic = only one physical page but using URL rewriting). I can however remove links to cities with no listings, although Google already have these pages listed, so i doubt removing the links from my pages and site map will affect this. I am not sure if i can post my URL's here as the sites do have adult content on, although is not porn (we are an Escort Guide/Directory, with some partial nudity). I would love to hear opinions0 -
Been Penalized, Starting from Scratch, Need Advice
Good Morning, We've been penalized for unnatural links on the site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e After attempting to contact many of the sites with links pointing at our site, and getting no response, we decided to start from scratch on a new domain : http://goo.gl/XUH3f The first thing I did once the new domain was up was remove all of the unique content (text) from the original site and place it on the new site... I am still having a difficult time getting the new site to rank in the SERPS. Can you guys please provide pointers as to what steps should be taken to get the new domain, http://goo.gl/XUH3f a high ranking in the SERPS? Thanks!!
Algorithm Updates | | Prime850 -
My google ranking is coming up but not so much with yahoo and bing. Could someone give me some advice?
I know that no question is supposed to be a dumb questions so I am going to go for it... Our keyword ranking on google for one of our companies capitol collision is getting better all the time but the same can't be said for yahoo or bing. Could you please offer some advice on how to improve this as well? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | allstatetransmission0