Please help on this penalized site!
-
OK, this is slowly frying my brain and would like some clarification from someone in the know, we have posted multiple reconsideration requests the regular "site violates googles quality guidelines" .."look for unnatural links etc" email back in March 2012,
I came aboard the business in August 2012 to overcome bad SEO companies work. So far i have filled several disavow requests by domain and cleared over 90% of our backlink profile which where all directory, multiple forum spam links etc from WMT, OSE and Ahrefs and compiled this to the disavow tool, as well as sending a google docs shared file in our reconsideration request of all the links we have been able to remove and the disavow tool, since most where built in 2009/2010 a lot where impossible to remove.
We managed to shift about 12 - 15% of our backlink profile by working very very hard too remove them. The only links that where left where quality links and forum posts created by genuine users and relevant non spam links As well as this we now have a high quality link profile which has also counteracted a lot of the bad "seo" work done by these previous companies, i have explained this fully in our reconsideration request as well as a massive apology on behalf of the work those companies did, and we are STILL getting generic "site violates" messages, so far we have spent in excess of 150 hours to get this penalty removed and so far Google hasn't even batted an eyelid.
We have worked SO hard to combat this issue it almost feels almost very personal, if Google read the reconsideration request they would see how much work we have done too remove this issue. If anyone can give any updates or help on anything we have missed i would appreciate it, i feel like we have covered every base!!
Chris
-
Ha, okay, got it!
Go after some long tail content and start adding some value to the site and you should have a broader scope and some pages that will rank on their own merit. Gives you something constructive to do and some possible link targets!
-
Absolutely, our rankings have been static since i started so i hope we will see some results soonish will keep you posted.
Chris
Ps - Peter owns the business and set our Moz account up! i do the work! hah
-
Hey Chris (peter? sorry)
Yeah, will be interesting, every case is unique I figure but certainly, if you get rid of the problems you can at least concentrate on moving forwards.
Keep me posted.
-
thanks Marcus, we have whilst trying to remove the bad replace with good and get white hat all the way, so my biggest worry now is too see how much recovery actually happens, the general consensus seems to be anywhere between 10 - 90 days!
Chris
-
Hey Peter, that's great news, keep us posted on how that works out from a traffic perspective and would love a poke around in your analytics once the dust has settled.
Cheers,
Marcus
-
Just an update Marcus - this morning we got our "manual spam penalty revoked" notice so lets see if rankings return.
-
so far copyscape/plagspotter has shown nothing, website has been changed since the warning came in and a lot of content was changed. i feel that one issue might be down to the enjin.com list of forums that run one forum but span hundreds of websites with different layouts (horrid spam that wasnt actually created by bad seo's!) ive been asking for ages to get this removed and its all been filed into our disavow. Like i said i think 90%+ of our backlinks across WMT/ahrefs/OSE have been requested to disavow.
None of our blog content has been duplicated but this is new and didnt exist when the unnatural warning was issued, its just so frustrating how i feel we have covered every angle and you find most of your working life becoming a minion to the google algorithmn!
-
Hi Brian, will definately look at this thanks, i know that our duplicate issues across the site are slim and other onpage things - massive increase in site loading times etc etc are going well, thanks
-
Hi Marcus, i agree, sure, in detail:
-
built high quality natural link profile with varied anchor text since Aug
-
provided a text document of removed links (about 12 - 15% of WMT/OSE/Ahrefs link profile) in recon request
-
provided a list of every directory and bad looking forum links, irrelevant websites in disavow tool by domain:
-
made a simple text copy on google docs of disavow in recon request.
-
apologised on behalf of work done by previous companies
-
promised all future work will be compliant to webmaster standards.
I have ran several audits since working with Palicomp, everything from canonicalisation to crawl errors to dupe content and ive found a small amount of source code duplicates (down to cubecarts awful cms) but not much else
-
-
Hey Chris
Often, it would seem they want to see a continued effort on your part to clean up and the link profile still looks pretty stinky in OSE. That said, I appreciate, it's almost impossible to get many links removed so you can only do so much.
It may be that you just have to keep trying, keep cleaning up, keep emailing, send letters, make phonecalls etc and just show even more willing before they will let you out of penalty jail.
Have you had a professional audit done with regards to the problems on the site? Have you looked at duplication etc?
Can you detail what you have done in your reconsideration requests?
Marcus
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
-
Can anyone help me diagnose an indexing/sitemap issue on a large e-commerce site?
Hey guys. Wondering if someone can help diagnose a problem for me. Here's our site: https://www.flagandbanner.com/ We have a fairly large e-commerce site--roughly 23,000 urls according to crawls using both Moz and Screaming Frog. I have created an XML sitemap (using SF) and uploading to Webmaster Tools. WMT is only showing about 2,500 urls indexed. Further, WMT is showing that Google is indexing only about 1/2 (approx. 11,000) of the urls. Finally (to add even more confusion), when doing a site search on Google (site:) it's only showing about 5,400 urls found. The numbers are all over the place! Here's the robots.txt file: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket
Allow: /
Disallow: /aspnet_client/
Disallow: /httperrors/
Disallow: /HTTPErrors/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /test/ Disallow: /i_i_email_friend_request
Disallow: /i_i_narrow_your_search
Disallow: /shopping_cart
Disallow: /add_product_to_favorites
Disallow: /email_friend_request
Disallow: /searchformaction
Disallow: /search_keyword
Disallow: /page=
Disallow: /hid=
Disallow: /fab/* Sitemap: https://www.flagandbanner.com/images/sitemap.xml Anyone have any thoughts as to what our problems are?? Mike0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Please, help me to understand these Google results
Hello here, I am eager to know your thoughts on this. If I search on Google for "fur elise violin sheet music", we are on the second page for our sheet music title of "Fur Elise for violin and piano" (look for "virtualsheetmusic.com"). Ok, that's not very good and I still have an hard time to figure out why there are many crappy and NOT really related websites listed before us, but here is the best (weird) part... .... search now for "fur elise violin and piano sheet music" which should narrow the query further down and so increase the chances for us to get on the first page results... and in fact we are on the first page with that query, but for a different page and a different music for a different instrument! If you scroll the first page of the results, you will find our site at the end of the 1st page for our version of "Fur Elise" for "viola and piano" and not for "violin and piano"... What the heck!??! Why's that??? Doesn't make any sense too me... why if the user search for "fur elise violin and piano" Google shows "Fur Elise for viola and piano"???!! I would really appreciate any thoughts on all this. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Renaming your domain from an existing live domain and SEO implications - Please Help *shudder*
Please see the details below. Site A: http://south-african-holiday.mobi is an existing site that is our best site. It is Joomla 3.1 and runs all our ecommerce. Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky. joomla 1.5 and all bookings (tour site) are redirected to Site A for processing. Instead of redesigning the Site A I'd like to change the domain name of http://south-african-holiday.mobi -> http://southerncircle.com So far my reading and research (Thanks MOZ for awesome forum!) has provided me with: 1. Do the SEO groundwork. i.e. remove dead links from both sites. Delete useless content and generally tidy up both sites. 2. Map all pages from site a: http://southerncircle.com -> http://south-africa-holiday/ so that the existing pages that have good ranking will have a home on the new site. 3. When ready do a small sample 301 redirect from: http://southerncircle.com to http://south-africa-holiday.mobi. 4. arghhhh now I'm stuck ..... If I redirect to this site then I lose my http://southerncircle.com domain which is what I want to keep....I just want the .mobi site to move to the southerncircle.com site.... I don't consider myself totally thick but this is really confuseing the *$%# out of me PLEASE could you give me some insight here. I'm sure it has been done before without completely losing the sites seo ranking and sending my site into SEO oblivion. If there are any JOOMLA gurus that have done this I'd love to hear from you as well. Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoutherlySwell0 -
Site penality revoked but no movement? how long?
its now more the 30 days since google revoked the manual link penalty and still no movement in the serps I am sitting around position 350 for something I should naturally site on the first several pages.. another thing I wanted to point out, the keyword that I'm ranking 350+ for is my domain name without the .extension ( i.e. .com ) How long should I wait, or have they forgotten to remove the penalty. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob20130 -
Pagination for Ecommerce Site - How do I fix this?
Hi Everyone... I'm having issues on how I should fix the pagination on my ecommerce site http://www.moondoggieinc.com Right now I have rel="canonical" putting them all back to the main page like on: http://www.moondoggieinc.com/dog-harness.php but there are also some shop all categories like: http://www.moondoggieinc.com/products.php?cat=all+dog+harnesses But I wish I could get it so that the content only showed on the first page of them all and then just the products showed in the pagination after that. I have no clue how to make this happen successfully. I know this is a big problem with the structure to the site, creating some duplicate content and such, and I was wondering how I can even begin to go ahead and start tackling this. My background is as a designer so I'm just learning both seo, and anyhting past html / css, so I could really use any help you guys can offer. THANK YOU! KristyO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO0