Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
-
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing.
We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain.
We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014
Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered.
Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
-
A manual action is normally on links coming in not going out so you should be safe if you've cleaned your link profile etc.
-
Thanks for your reply
Do you think we're safe to change the 302 redirects to a 301 now that the penalty has been lifted from the old domain?
The hesitation is that the penalty may have been lifted because we made those old pages 302 but if there are good links we would like them pointing to the pages on the new domain
-
Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty.
Spot on, many people remove links etc. when removing a link and after removing say 25% of their portfolio are surprised to find they drop in rankings if you were to do it with out the penalty you would find a similar problem. After moving sites it is also normal to have a bit of a dip though if you did it back in March would expect to start to even up now assuming you redirected correctly and all the relevant pages etc.
Remember when creating links after a penalty your a bit more vulnerable to future penalties to try to play it safe!
Best of luck.
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
-
Should remove 404 page
Hello, I upload a new website with new web addresses and my current addresses don't work anymore. I don't want to do redirects. Should I just remove the old address from google index using their tool or let google do it on its own. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
WhoIs penalty
Does anyone know if it's possible to get a penalty on WHOIS data and a shared IP address? We had some bad SEO done (And at ranking demolished) on one of our company websites which has the same WHOIS data and is on the same IP address as another side which is just seems to have taken a knock. Is it possible Google could have associated both and penalised accordingly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Missing Suite Number on Google
I realized that we are missing a suite number. It is not on the website or the recently updated Google/Bing/Yahoo revisions I did. Should I go and fix? Or should I go and adjust old listings. Does a suite number matter in the NAP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Panda 3.7 recovery?
In June '12 we got a bunch of our keyword rankings wacked by Panda 3.7 and haven't recovered. This is really frustrating since we had been hit by the original Panda and spent months fixing our site so that we had recovered in December '11. I've read what I can find about this update to see if there is something specific about it that would have knocked us down again and can't find anything. Does anyone know of any specific issues that this update supposedly "fixed"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
How do i know if my domain has given penalty by Google and why?
I have problems with my website to google search results. Some of the important keywords frequently and sharply rankings vary a lot lately. For example; 07-14-2012 Term1 Position #12 07-20-2012 Term1 Position #38 07-24-2012 Term1 Position #10 07-26-2012 Term1 Position #40 I wonder what is the cause of this incident? Is there any Penalties? If there is then how do i know this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ersaky0 -
SEO Penalties for Splitting Page for Two Store Locations
Hello fellow SEO'ers! I have a question regarding the overall SEO implications of using a single page to describe the services/products offered at two different locations. The locations are in two different states/cities. I have tried to explain to the client that I working with that this is essentially splitting the page in two from a search ranking perspective. I have a feeling that Google sees this page as partially dedicated to one city, and partly to another... meaning that it won't rank as well as it could for either city. Is my thinking correct? Seems logical. The client has done this site-wide for every service/product that they offer in their facilities. I'm offering some title/description recommendations for the entire site right now, and I'm going back and forth with myself whether to include the city names in the titles and descriptions at all. Let me know what you smart folks think. I appreciate it. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theBREWROOM0 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0