No manual spam actions found - Now what to do
-
In last Panda update on 22nd January my site traffic reduced 30% to 40% but still some of my keywords are ranking on first and second page in SERP.
With latest Penguin 2.0 update all of my keywords ranking is out of 100. Both times I send reconsideration request and get message that No Manual actions found on site. I just don't know what steps are better to get ranking back. Should I use disavow tool and remove backlinks to recover from Penguin or work more on creating quality links.
My Site : http://goo.gl/sSBes
Thanks,
Steve
-
Thanks for the reply.
I will work on increasing content of sites and other suggestion you mentioned. Due to some lack of resources I am not able to update blog in timely manner I would try to post at least one post a week,
-
What Google considers garbage links has been changing for as long as I have been in search marketing. The problem here is that certain tactics that have worked in the past and might even still work today are starting to get devalued (or worse). Example: PR links, still have some value, but they will continue to get devalued. Matt Cutts continues to say (over and over) that if you do anything in an effort to build links that is not organic in nature (web directories that don't drive traffic to your site, forum posts with links, paid links, etc.) you will get smacked. It isn't a matter of if but when.
The thing that makes this even more confusing is the seemingly random nature of who these penalties affect. Did this guy get hit by P 2.0 definitively? No, but considering the date of his organic traffic drop, it is pretty easy to prove correlation. The fact that your websites have these bad links and that you haven't seen a drop in organic traffic does not prove that he did not get hit. All it proves is that you haven't been hit yet.
Proof:
<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg</a>
-
_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity. _
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.
As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.
The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)
-
I've seen conflicting views on this coming from Google, and I refer you to the link in my answer regarding Pete's comments about reconsideration.
So it may be wrong, but there does seem to be evidence that disavow does not action without either an update, or reconsideration.
Hence passing along the suggestion in good faith.
-
That is wrong...from Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664</a>
Question:
Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?
Answer:
That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.
-
You might want to check out the responses to this question : http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover particularly the comments from Pete Myers regards reconsideration requests.
What I take away from all I've read on Penguin 2 is to proceed as follows:
- Clean up your backlink profile by contacting assorted webmasters asking for link removal
- Use the disavow tool on any you can't get successful removal via direct approach
- If you've used disavow, submit a reconsideration request - once you're sure your site and backlink profile is clean. (I get the definite view that data obtained via disavow is only actioned at algo update, or reconsideration request; hence a reconsideration may be needed even though you have an algorithmic penalty to actually push the disavow live).
Hope this helps!
-
Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.
Here is a good article on this update by this by Danny Sullivan, including a short section on recovering:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463</a>
Other Tools Needed:
<a>http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/</a> - To locate which of your links are spammy
<a>https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal</a> - disavow tool (Use only after heavy research!!!)
Good luck!
Update: I looked through your link profile and have noticed that you have links from your customer pages. Remember that Google takes issue with links from websites that have nothing to do with your site.
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
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
-
URL Errors Help - 350K Page Not Founds in 22 days
Got a good one for you all this time... For our site, Google Search Console is reporting 436,758 "Page Not Found" errors within the Crawl Error report. This is an increase of 350,000 errors in just 22 days (on Sept 21 we had 87,000 errors which was essentially consistently at that number for the previous 4 months or more). Then on August 22nd the errors jumped to 140,000, then climbed steadily from the 26th until the 31st reaching 326,000 errors, and then climbed again slowly from Sept 2nd until today's 436K. Unfortunately I can only see the top 1,000 erroneous URLs in the console, of which they seem to be custom Google tracking URLs my team uses to track our pages. A few questions: 1. Is there anyway to see the full list of 400K URLs Google is reporting they cannot find?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usnseomoz
2. Should we be concerned at all about these?
3. Any other advice? thanks in advance! C0 -
Are ALL CAPS construed as spamming if they are used in a meta description tag call to action?
I know this seems like an old school question. As a long time SEO I would never use ALL CAPS in a title tag (unless a brand name is capitalized). However I recently came across a Moz video about creating better calls to action in the meta description tags. Some of the examples had CTAs that were using all caps (i.e. CALL NOW! or LOWEST QUOTES!) I realize there is a debate about the user experience implications. However I'm more concerned about search engines penalizing websites that are using ALL CAPS CTAs in their meta description tags. Any feedback/advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Repeatedly target a rolling list of kws..or is that cannibalization? Biggest Confusion in SEO Ive found
Also suggesting a WBF topic. Ive read and researched with no luck here... would love a Moz staff reply too! Is it better to blog repeatedly on the same topic (writing multiple blogs around the topic of "content marketing" for example in hopes Google sees you as an authority on the topic over time) OR is this keyword cannibalization? Is it better to have one powerful and comprehensive page on a topic if it makes sense. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Google Manual Action Disappear
Hi Guys, I have a website that received unnatural link message. We had started link removal process, disavowed not approachable links and file reconsideration four times but all the times Google sent some samples of unnatural links and rejected our reconsideration. Last week we again disavowed non approachable links and planned to file reconsideration after a week but today when i tried to file reconsideration, Manual action message was disappeared. We haven't received any message from Google. The same case was happened with one more of our site earlier. Manual action disappeared means it has been revoked or something else??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Will a Google manual action affect all new links, too?
I have had a Google manual action (Unnatural links to your site; affects: all) that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links. I have been spending the past few weeks cleaning things up and have submitted a second pass at a reconsideration request. In the meantime, I have been creating new content, boosting social activity, guest blogging and working with other publishers to generate more natural inbound links. My question is this: knowing that this manual action affects "all," are the new links that I am building being negatively tainted as well? When the penalty is lifted, will they regain their strength? Is there any hope of my rankings improving while the penalty is in effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barberm1 -
Whats the best way to revive a directory that was 301'd and now I want to remove that?
Last year i 301'd one of my directories on my site, pointing everything to a different directory. Long story short I am going to sell this product line again and would like to just remove the 301 to that original directory, but I am reading that the 301s are also cached in most browsers for a long time. Has anyone successfully done this and if you did what was it that you had to do? Thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandyEggo0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0