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
-
Buying a disused website and using their content - penalty risk?
Hi all, I'm in the process of setting up a new website. I have found various old websites covering a similar topic and I'm interested in purchasing two of these websites for their content as it is very good, despite those sites struggling to make ends meet. One of these websites is still live, the other one hasn't been live for 2 years. Let's say I bought these websites for their content, then used that content on my new domain and made sure the two websites where this content came from were offline, would I run a risk of getting penalised? Does Google hold onto content from a website even if it is now offline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Duplicate content created by website Calendar - A Penalty?
A colleague of mine asked me a question about duplicate content coming from their event calendar. I don't think this will affect them negatively, but I would love some feedback and thoughts. ThanksOne of my clients, LifeTech Academy, is using my RavenTools software. Raventools has reported a HUGE amount of duplicate content (4.4K instances).The duplicate content all revolves around their calendar and repeating events (http://lifetechacademy.org/events/)The question is this - will this impact their SEO efforts in a negative way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill_K0 -
Site recovery after manual penalty, disavow, SSL, Mobile update = but dropped again in May
I have a site that has had a few problems over the last year. We had a manual penalty in late 2013 for bad links, some from guest blogs and some from spammy sites. Reconsideration requests had me disavow almost all of the incoming links. Later in 2014, the site was hit with link injection malware and had another manual penalty. That was cleared up and manual penalty removed in Jan 2015. During this time the site was moved to SSL, but there were some redirect problems. By Feb 2015 everything was cleared up and a an updated disavow list was added. The site recovered in March and did great. A mobile version was added in April. About May 1st rankings dropped again. Traffic is about 40% off it's March levels. Recently I read that a new disavow file will supersede an old one, and if all of the original domains and URLs aren't included in the new disavow file they will no longer be disavowed. Is this true? If so, is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update? Can I correct this by disavowing all the previously disavowed domains and URLs? Any advice for determining why the site is performing poorly again? We have well written content, regular blogs, nothing that seems like it should violate the Google guidelines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robertjw0 -
Remove Google penalty or make a new website, Which is better??
My local website was hit by google and I have done all steps to remove the penalty, But it's still not ranked. So it is better to make a new website with new content and start working on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Given the new image mismatch penalty, is watermarking considered "cloaking"?
Google has released a new penalty called "Image mismatch". Which actually penalizes sites that show images to Google than are not the same as the ones offered to users when accessing the site. Although I agree with those sites that the image is completely different that the one shown in image search, lately I've seen lots of big sites using some king of watermark or layer that reads something like "To see the high quality of this image, click here" in order to "force" the user to visit the site hosting the image. Considering the latest changes to Google's image search, which made lots of sites lose their "image search traffic", are these techniques considered part of the new penalty Google is applying? Or does it only apply to the first scenario when the image is completely different? You can read more on this new penalty here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Google Penalty or Not?
One of my sites I work with got this message: http://www.mysite: Unnatural inbound linksJune 27, 2013 Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to mysite.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. But, when I got to manual actions it says: Manual Actions No manual webspam actions found. -- So which is it??? I have been doing link removal, but now I am confused if I need to do a reconsideration request or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
What's the news on sitwide nofollow links and anchor text penalties
Is it possible to be penalized for sitewide nofollow links because of anchor text penalties, even if you use branded anchor text?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0