Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?
-
Dear Friends
I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png
-
Hey - it's just so hard to say without a link / some research. Just focus on quality and try to understand where the problems are so you are not SEOing in the dark. You could get an experienced consultant to take a look for a few hours or get a full on SEO audit which again will give you some more intel and a prioritised approach. Certainly though you can likely learn lots from analytics by understanding where there has been a drop in traffic, engagement etc.
Always try to base the work you do on data and analysis where possible so you are not just spinning your wheels!
-
Thank you so much. I am doing the same right now. Please let me know whether the thinking is right
-
I had 3 ads on site and i am dividing it all so that the top is not heavy. it wasnt previously heavy too, but i have modified it nonetheless.
-
I am rewriting at least 150 articles out of the 950 articles on site. I think those articles are poor in quality. And they need a boost. I am also tackling duplicate content issues and have removed multiple tags from a single post and kept 1 tag on 1 post limit.
-
If after all this, the site does not come up, then it is a backlinks problem and then i need to dig into ahrefs and check out what to do. But i am hoping to god it recovers after the content modification.
These things might take 2 months but i think they will make a slow but sure difference. My livelihood depends on this blog so the return of traffic is very essential for me.
-
-
Hey
The main issue here is that things rarely happen in isolation. Sure, you may have had a penalty for outbound links but if you are selling links or generally looking to manipulating results with the links on the site what else is going on?
You have to step back and look at the site with a quality reviewers perspective:
- Why does the site exist?
- Does it provide value to the intended audience?
- Is it the best answer for a range of targeted queries?
- Is the site an expert resource?
- Is the site an authority on the targeted topic(s)?
- Is the site trustworthy?
- Is the site technically well optimised?
- Does the site have technical or traditional SEO issues?
There are a lot of moving parts here but you need to go back to basics. It's always hard to advise without any direct context (not having seen the site) but the the two elements I would consider would be a qualitative review and a more traditional SEO audit.
This is a great overview of the leaked Google quality guidelines:
https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines
That is probably a good starting place and you can start to ask the big questions rather than look for some single algorithmic answer to why your traffic seems to be going in the wrong direction.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Mystery Penalty
I have a client site that seems to have been penalized with a huge drop in rankings site wide for all keywords. I would like to hire an expert that could figure out what the issue may be.
Technical SEO | | execubob
HOWEVER, I've done all the standard audit items, including submitting a huge disavow file. Nothing is reported in GSC and the site is built out in pure HTML, so not a WordPress issue. I don't need a basic audit, I need someone with expertise in finding a possible penalty.0 -
Broken canonical link errors
Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
G1 -
Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?
Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind. We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords. I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now. So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on. 1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long. Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter? 2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page. Here are the two pages: howtomaketutus.com/ howtomaketutus.com/?p=home They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that? 3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile? We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 123craft0 -
Penalised due to links?
Hi, Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links? Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this. Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP. Many thanks. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Penalty on two primary keywords
Hi Seomoz, I have been strugling to get www.texaspoker.dk out of what seems to be a keyword specific penalty (we are on page 5 on "poker" and "online poker"). First I thought it was Penguin related, but I'm not so sure any longer. I have removed all the bad links to my site possible (it's not easy to get other people to remove links, I can tell you), and I have reported all the links that I would like google to "ignore" (reconsideration request) ... all in all I have requested for reconsideration 5 times, and - despite some small changes - I got the same answer every time. We violate the quality guide lines and we should be looking for unnatural links pointing to our site. If any one - by having a look at our site - have any idea what could be wrong, please don't hold back, we would love to hear your point of view. Right now we are in the middle of making our partners take off their site wide links to us (the partners you'll find if you click the flags to the right in the top of the home page). On Texaspoker.dk we only link to the partners from the home page, but maybe we should consider to take of even these links? No one is really clicking on them anyway. Another thing, which is only under consideration, is to ask our partners from Betxpert.com (with whom we have exchanged our news feed - you will find their feed if you schroll down the home page) to set the feed to "no follow" and do the same our selves. What do you think of this thought? As far as I can see, there is nothing wrong with the on page optimization, but maybe some one can see what I don't see? Again - what ever thoughts you guys may have - shoot ... i'm ready to take all bulets 🙂 Thanks in advance! Nicolai, Texaspoker.dk
Technical SEO | | MPO0 -
Too Many Internal Links?
Hi Guys, I'm completing a overhawl of our website at the moment have a certain penguin killed our site for our main keyword. I'm currently working on our internal linking as most of our blog posts have a link back to our home page with the main money keyword. At present we have 3,331 internal links and our site has only 1,000 pages. Can you get penalised for having too many internal links with exact match anchors. Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
What loss of value would this link experience?
What loss of value would this link experience? If the link is actually a link to the from site that is 301'd to your site like this example below: i.e., www.domain.com/29834?=www.yourdomain.com My thought is that simply because you're going through a redirect (In this case a 301) you will lose slight value there. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and reasoning on any other affects if any (direct or indirect) you think it may have.
Technical SEO | | Webfor1 -
Nofollow internal links
Hi, we have problems with having too many links on page. Our website has a menu with 3 level sub-navigation drop down for categories which we want to maintain, for easy-navigation for the users. http://www.redwrappings.com.au/ After reading this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru, and some other articles, we came up with a solution. We can easily reduce the number of links per page by putting 'nofollow' on our categories links menu dropdown and create a separate 'landing page' that contains links to these categories (and allow 'follow' links for robots). Is it wise to do this? Or any better, easy solution that you can suggest? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Essentia1