Google Penalty
-
Hello thereIt has just been confirmed that my site is suffering for a Google Penality. The odd thing is that it is just for my set of key keywords and not the whole site.
It seems in 2010 that a rouge SEO company I used sent loads of spammy links but I have lots of other good links too.
What is your advice moving forward? Will it drop over time? Do I set up a new site (this has been established over 10 years) or try and get better quality links to compensate for the spam ones?
Thanks so much! Kindest regards
Victoria
-
I agree with Gary, you should definitely go through all your links and be really ruthless in terms of which are the poor quality links. Anything that is on an article or directory website you can probably get rid of (apart from directories like Yahoo, DMOZ etc) and submit your disavow file to Google.
If it is only your target keywords that have dropped then you have been lucky to escape a site-wide penalty but there is a good chance that this will be on its way so if you can clean up your profile sooner rather than later, it should help.
-
Do you have a Manual Penalty? How have you confirmed you have the penalty? Is there an option to send a reconsideration request in Web Master Tools?
Removing those links is always the best thing to do. However I would start by putting them all in a disavow file first so that Google can start to ignore them as dofollow links. Meanwhile you can start to remove them.
However if you have a Manual penalty, you will have a lot more work to do. Let me know and I will guide you.
-
You can remove the "spammy" links but make sure they are in fact spammy as removing all low end links can also hurt your rankings and may not have been doing you any hard in the first place. You can also as you mentioned build some good links and help counteract it.
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
-
How To Encourage Google To Discover Links?
I got a valuable backlink from a high authority website (MSN), but the link is placed in the middle of a slideshow with 20 pictures, and the only way to reach it is by clicking through the slideshow. After 6 months, this link still hasn't been noticed by Moz or Semrush, and I assume Google hasn't seen it either, because it's in the middle of a slideshow. Is there any way to encourage Google to find this link? Or am I all out of luck?
Link Building | | David56750 -
Once you have cleaned up links / disavowed them how to get google to take notice quicker
Once we have contact webmasters and had some links removed / changed from money anchor text to brand anchor text. Or failing that once we have submitted spam URLs to our disavow file, should we just wait and keep and eye on the how quickly google re caches the URLs or should we try and force google to recrawl the urls quicker by submitting them to Google's submit url tool ?
Link Building | | jpeg800 -
Does Google use link CTR as a factor?
Been wondering for a while if Google might be using CTR of links pointing your site? Anyone run any tests or have any clues?
Link Building | | Crunchii0 -
Google sending warnings about Artificial or Unnatural links in Google Webmaster Central
Has anyone seen warnings about Artificial or Unnatural links notice show up in their Google Webmaster central yet? I just looked at each of our clients and had not but after reading the Search Engine Land article at http://searchengineland.com/google-warning-more-about-bad-link-networks-117079 I was wondering what your thoughts were regarding this topic? We are not purchasing links for our clients sites but definitely going out their and building links. Article concerned me that I may run into issues for my link building clients. Thoughts?
Link Building | | jfeitlinger0 -
Google notice of unnatural links - no penalty
my site just received this warning on 3/18. I haven't seen any rankings drop or anything... i don't know why i got this as i really don't build links in a frowned upon way. Anyone know if you get penalized for this, and if so, how long after you get the message does the penalty kick in, and what is the penalty.... Also, if i gave you guys my domain name do you think you'd be able to tell which links would cause this message? thanks
Link Building | | Prime850 -
How often does Google crawls old pages, is it worth to get links from them ?
Let's say there's a blog post in my industry niche that's 2 years old. Is it worth to get a link from that blog post ? How do I know Google will actually re-crawl that page, and how long can that process take ?
Link Building | | pqdbr0 -
Would notifying visitors that they can put text link ads on your site destroy you in terms of Google?
I am debating buying this product for Joomla on that note: http://www.jv-extensions.com/content/_/joomla-extensions/jv-contentlinks-r52 Would you advise for or against this purchase?
Link Building | | Uramark1 -
There are penalties by Google for the purchase of links? If yes which are the penalties ?
There are penalties by Google for the purchase of links? If yes which are the penalties ? When we buy links how to see if the site is considered as salesman of link by Google? Thanks you
Link Building | | elitepronostic0