Killed by penguin 3
-
So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site.
We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove.
Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way.
How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO?
Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business.
Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP
-
Thanks for the responses.
Looks like bit of a tough road ahead, but long term will be much for the better in cleaning up the (off)site.
The disavow exercise has been interesting in getting to review links in placed. There have been some strange links placed and very difficult to contact some websites to get them removed, but will try.
All the very best
-
-
Google is a bit secretive and hasn't let a lot slip out yet. My best guess would be when they next do an update if you have removed all the bad links you have the potential to increase, but this would be if Google thought you had cleaned up your bad links.
-
I use some software called ahrefs to get the full list of back links - even WMTs doesnt allow you to download the full list'
-
You could in theory have a link from a DA of 10 and be a great link, DA isn't really a great indicator - you could also have a link from a DA of 70+ and be a bad link. Check out these great articles:
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
But basically links need to be organic and natural, so if you have lots that are from forum signatures / comments, on websites outside your niche. If you sell garden furniture and have a lot of links sites about shoes for example, the odd one could be seen as relevant, but in general these aren't natural. You basically need to go to every page that is link to you and see if the link is relevant on the page, does it look natural and add value - or does it seem like it was just added in for the sake of a link.
- For disavow you simply upload a file, please keep this master file when uploaded as if you ever want to update this you need to include all previous bad links, as they don't keep an historical record and just use the latest file.
You only need to show evidence if you have a penalty in WMTs and are trying to have it removed.
-
-
In response to #1, unfortunately the answer is its impossible to know. We've had campaigns where disavowing links brought near immediate results, but we've also seen some that took months to correct.
As for #3, its more of a judgement call than a hard line on DA. As with all SEO, if there is good quality content on the page, then its a fine link to keep. If it looks borderline, probably better off disavowing it (better safe than sorry).
-
Thanks for getting back to us, really usefull and leads to several questions (sorry)
-
Your response implies will we only recover once links are removed/disavowed and the next update is in place. is this correct of do we see results once we have fixed the rot.
-
How do we get a FULL link list, even Open site explorer does not seem to do a full list.
-
How do we know which links affect us, i.e. is domain authority of the linking page relevant, if so what level would be acceptable. Most are above 25 DA that show in open site and would think this is OK?
-
Not having to disavow anything before, by showing evidence does that mean passing copies of email. How long after requesting to remove a link do we go and look to disavow in webmaster. getting links added can take upto 6 months so getting rid of them I am sure could take longer without fully knowing they are going to remove them anyway.
-
-
Hi
Good news - you can recover, the bad news - you have a lot of hard work to do, and when you will recover I don't know, Google hasn't yet confirmed how frequently the updates will roll.
First of all. Do a FULL link analysis and what ever links look unnatural and fake - disavow them straight away.
If you have a penalty you must show evidence you have tried to contact the webmaster's to get the links removed. Try to contact as many as possible and then do a disavow - the sooner the better.
Unfortunately, all you can do is hard work. Even if you did purely white hat going forward (and most sites I would say do Grey hat in my honest opinion, sending products out for review and a link, in my eyes is grey hat - but I digress), you still wouldn't recover.
The site is basically now on sinking sand any and good building you put on top is going to sink and be a waste of time, until you have sorted out the foundations (i.e. removed the bad links).
Sorry to say, this client is going to be taking up quite a bit of your time in the coming weeks, but you can be the good agency. Sit down with them and clearly explain everything what is wrong, what the previous agency / in house teams have done wrong and how your going to fix it. Then explain once you have fixed the issues, you are going to be good and do white hat techniques so that they never get penalised again - potential client for life. Put in the effort now and they will keep coming back.
Hope this is helpful.
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
-
Is this traffic drop do to cutting backlinks or Penguin 2.0 (Graphs attached)
I've attached both graphs of the traffic drop. Our website rankings have been steadily declining since May of 2013. We have mostly return customers or our drop would have been much more severe. There's never been any warnings in GWT We cut a bunch (but not all) of our paid links in May of 2013. We didn't have a manual penalty or anything, we just wanted to see what happened if we moved towards being white hat. When our rankings plumited, we quit cutting links. We currently have about 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was May 22, 2013 In looking at these graphs, was it our cutting links that caused the traffic drop, or was it Penguin 2.0? I'm looking for people who have experience in diagnosing a "Unique Visits" Google analytics graph for Penguin and have experience with what happens when you cut links. It looks like, in viewing the graphs, that May 23 was more the day that the big drop happened, but you guys have more experience with this than me. Thank you. ga.png ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links 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. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!
I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having. I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY. What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS. My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail. At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name. I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time. i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords. So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May. I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail. I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation. Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
My site www.sriindustries.com dropped to back page penguin 2.1
My website penguin 2.1 dropped back to page 5 and beyond, can you help me to come out from this ? My head is breaking, also I would like to know how to be on top for local business search (maps)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | synchronyinfo0 -
Vetting Link Opportunties that are Penguin Safe
I am looking to go after sites that are, and will never be, affected by Penguin/Panda updates. Is there a tool or a general rule of thumb on how to avoid such sites? Is there a method anyone is currently using to get good natural links post Penguin 2.0?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
Impressions in Google SERP has declined from 3500 to 1600 after 5-25-2012\. Is it Penguin?
It's about the website http://www.apartments-houseboats-amsterdam.com/ The visitors had declined from 270 to 150 visitors per day. Is this caused by the Google update Penguin? If so what can I do to solve the problem? Thank you for your time and effort,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | letsbuilditnl0 -
Penguin Update or URL Error - Rankings Tank
I just redid my site from Godaddy Quick Shopping Cart to Drupal. The site is much cleaner now. I transferred all the content. Now my site dropped from being in the top ten on almost every key word we were targeting to 35+. I "aliased" the urls so that they were the same as the Godaddy site. However when I look at our search results I notice that our URLs have extra wording at the end like this: ?categoryid=1 or some other number. Could this be the reason that our rankings tanked? Previously on the godaddy site the results didnt show this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chronicle0