Site dropped after I removed spammy KW-stuffed section from homepage
-
An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on.
1) In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords.
I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop.
2) Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal.
-
About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site).
-
I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine.
-
I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better).
* Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?
-
-
Thanks for the response. However, second question:
I've not received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Should I still clean up links I don't like the look of with Link Disavow? Or should I go with Google and do nothing?
-
I doubt signing up for GWT had any impact on your rankings. I would start by adding the footer back, and seeing if that restores your rankings. Maybe it wasn't as spammy as you thought?
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
-
Spammy Structured Data Markup Removal
Hi There, I'm in a weird situation and I am wondering if you can help me. Here we go, We had some of our developers implement structured data markup on our site, and they obviously did not know what they were doing. They messed up our results in the SERP big time and we wound up getting manually penalized for it. We removed those markups and got rid of that penalty (phew), however now we are still stuck with two issues. We had some pages that we changed their URLs, so the old URLs are now dead pages getting redirected to the newer version of the same old page, however, two things now happened: a) for some reason two of the old dead pages still come up in the Google SERP, even though it's over six weeks since we changed the URLs. We made sure that we aren't linking to the old version of the url anywhere from our site. b) those two old URLs are showing up in the SERP with the old spammy markup. We don't have anywhere to remove the markup from cause there are no such pages anymore so obviously there isn't this markup code anywhere anymore. We need a solution for getting the markup out of the SERP. We thought of one idea that might help - create new pages for those old URLs, and make sure that there is nothing spammy in there, and we should tell google not to index these pages - hopefully, that will get Google to de-index those pages. Is this a good idea, if yes, is there anything I should know about, or watch out for? Or do you have a better one for me? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Index subpages but not homepage
Hello, Google index all my subpages, but not the homepage, how is this possible ? https://www.google.nl/#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.lavistarelatiegeschenken.nl He index the homepage of the neigbour country in the same language How possible ? Gr Marcel
Technical SEO | | Bossie720 -
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Removing a large number of unnecessary pages from a site
Hi all, I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago. I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones. My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?
Technical SEO | | Silviu0 -
Site-wide Links
Hey y'all, I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case. The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site. Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google. It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low. If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are? Thanks guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | AAttias0 -
What do you think about my new site?
Hi everyone, I'm looking for a review for my new site www.interlive.it Could you please let me know what do you think about the work that I did for my site. I'll be very happy to receive your suggestions. Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
Remove Site from Google
How can I get my website out of google? I want all pages completely gone. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0