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?
-
Here's Matt Cutts on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Ka0fzyZbk
His answer is basically saying that in almost every case you could not be affected by the fact that there were other spammy sites sharing your hosting. He said that there are really rare cases whereby if one host has a crazy amount of spammy sites they may take action on all of these sites, but he made a point of saying that this is really rare.
So no, I'd be looking for some other cause for the rankings to drop.
-
Couple of things that i can think of that might have happen are -
1. Same IP address (1 signal to Google - its a big signal) as mentioned by you
2. Was the reason behind the penalty your backlinks profile? Chances are that you got same sort of backlinks for the other website too.
3. Signal 1 and 2 combined can give Google indication of 'notorious' activities conducted by the 'controller' (SEO company) of these websites (your websites)
Couple of things to ask -
1. Are these two websites in question from the same industry and serving the same market?
2. Do you have backlinks coming from same sources
3. Are there any other websites on the same IP address that have been penalized? I do know that websites on a c-block can be penalized.
4. Is there any direct relation between the two websites apart from shared IP address? ex - Links of each other on the website in partners, about us or contact us etc. pages?
-
It is possible though I have not heard of it before. Data easily scrapable by google. Where I have heard google made a penalty link is via WMT's. Could they also have also been connected via WMT's at some stage?
Hope that helps.
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 Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?
Hi there, I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue. Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page) After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later. I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate. There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as: Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links, There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound. Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover? Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbutler9120 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Worried about keyword stuffing penalty re: URLs
I've noticed a potential problem with a mult-location business (this is an example URL - not the actual name of the business) I sense this is OK: carsdepots.com/ashford/cars But then I noticed they've added cars to location part of URL in some instances (they have 6 locations in total and have done this with 5 of them): carsdepots.com/birmingham-cars/cars So we have cars in there 3 times (that's the maximum number of times in any URL but it looks a little spammy to me) I am tempted to remove yoga from the location names, or flatten the URL structure completely - your thoughts would be welcome, or perhaps I shouldn't even be worrying?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Rotating content = Google Penalty?
Hi all. We have an ecommerce site which features various product sections. In each section you might have 60 products each displayed neatly in pages of 10. We recently added functionality, so that if a product is out of stock, it will automatically drop that product to the back of the list and bring another in stock one forward. We're just worried that Google will view the same information, repeatedly rotating on the first page of 10 products (the page that ranks) and think we're in some way trying to trick Google into thinking the content is fresh? Does anyone have a throw on this? Is it likely to penalise us? Thank you!!! Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bnknowles10 -
Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links FROM My Site - Where?
Hi Mozzers, I've just received a manual penalty for one of my websites. The penalty is for 'unnatural links from my site which I find disturbing because I can't see that anything really wrong with it. The website is www.lighting-tips.co.uk - its a pretty new blog (only 6-7 posts) and whilst I've allowed guest posting I'm being very careful that the content is relevant and good quality. I'm only allowing 1 - 2 links and very few with proper anchor text so I'm wondering what has been done so wrong that I'm getting this manual penalty? Am I missing something here? Thanks in advance. Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronGro0 -
Google Penguin Penalty
Howdy Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request. I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up... In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott0 -
Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers, Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened? My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered. I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered. I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed. I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten. I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened. If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland! 🙂 Thanks, Shane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaneod0 -
Can anyone explain what the blog network penalties news is about please?
I have seen the latest news about Google penalizing blog networks and as a newbie starting out am wondering if my multi-site plans would constitute as a blog network. My question is, is having a couple of external blogs on keyword rich domains pointing back at my primary domain name considered to be a blog network of the kind that Google is penalizing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wallander0