Does Google differentiate between a site with spammy link building practices from a victim of a negative SEO attack?
-
I've be tasked with figuring out how to recover our rankings as we are likely being hurt by an algorithmic penalty. I have no idea if this was the workings of a previously hired SEO or the result of negative SEO, **how does Google differentiate between a site with bad/spammy link building practices from a victim of a negative SEO attack? **
-
Thanks for the replay Marc, that clears up my confusion.
I had chance to ask John Mueller (from Google) what to do about spammy backlinks and he automatically assumed I was up to no good. I've never bought a crappy link in my life. Previously hired SEOs and/or unscrupulous competition were likely the culprits. We can take accountability for ignorantly hiring shady link builders but apologizing for being a victim of negative SEO is flat out ludicrous.
-
In general Google doesn`t differentiate between them - if you get the chance or better take the chance to get in a dialog or direct contact with Google (f.ex. using the reconsideration request) they can get this information. But I doubt that they care about that. Unfortunately you have to do the same work in both cases: clean up the mess.
It
s imaginable that your chances to recover are much better if you
ve been a victim than an ex-black hat (website)
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
-
Wrong titles for site links of my website.
Hello, everyone. As you can see from the images attached, the site link of the About page has a Weird title " About About about". I have add proper meta description, but it still appears like this. This problem is killing me. What else i can do to solve this problem? Thanks Jason UJcRov1
Technical SEO | | jasonyeyeye0 -
SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
Technical SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Google Blogger Intergration, any SEO benefit?
I want to use google blogger for my website blog, we want to intergrate it into the existing website (which is why wordpress isn't ideal as there is no php) if the domain was www.blog.mysite.com will www.mysite.com still recieve the seo bonuses of having a blog? or does it have to be www.mysite.com/blog otherwise i have little use for a blog, what i also want to ask is how does it intergrate? i don't want the blog on my site to be like a 'window' into the google blog site as that defeats the purpose, i need the content to actually be on my site to ensure the seo benefits. Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | DanBrayfield0 -
How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.
Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google). Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total). These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings? Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them. Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google? Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
3,638 mystery inbound links from google.com
Hello, can anybody help me. I my webmaster tools, under "Links to your Site" and "Who links the most" It shows Google as the top inbound link source, with 3,669 out of 4,14, all these links are pointing to one sub page of content. Yet when I click on the source it only shows me one Google Plus page. My traffic hell by 60% when I first noticed these links. we have not been building unnatural links and we have not had any Manual link building warning. This is the site: iunlock.org Two questions:- I have deleted this one linked to page what else can I do to reverse this impact Does anybody know what has happened? See attached WWwnb1W.png
Technical SEO | | Jack4ireland0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
Google Webmaster Tools Reporting False Links
I was looking at Google Webmaster Tools and the amount of links that are reported in there are inaccurate. They reported over 50,000 links that created a huge spike in their link graph and I checked some of the links and they don't even have the link on their site. Can anyone help with this?
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0