Is There Such Thing as Minor Penalties or Restrictions?
-
Hello Mozzers
So generally its said that when a site receives a penalty from Google - it's obvious - you can't miss it...
But does google apply minor penalties (say dropping 5-10 places for one not so great link)
One particular campaign we've been working pretty hard - really great stuff - all white hat techniques - but there were a couple of links I wasn't 100% sure on - but got them any way as I guessed that the effect of them, if not positive, would be neutral at worse... (The sites wen't obvious spam sites but just seemed 'not great')
Recently after, we dropped around 8 place for our main keyword ranking. It's not a very competitive space. Is this likely just standard inexplicable fluctuation, or is there such thing as minor penalties or restrictions?
Cheeers
-
Hi Radi,
It's hard to say, but with the new penguin update, there is a chance that certain parts or pages of your site might have been affected by the new penguin as a result of spam signals, but there is still a lot of uncertainty.
Here is what Google said: "Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site."
They said "adjusting ranking" as opposed to penalisation, which looks like your situation.
More about it here: https://moz.com/blog/penguin-4-was-it-worth-the-wait
I hope this helps!
Thanks,
-
Hey Radi,
Historically there used to be 'Site-wide' and 'Partial' penalties for link spamming.
SEOValley covered this pretty well here - http://www.seovalley.com/blog/googles-manual-penalty-site-wide-matches-vs-partial-matches.html
If you've been hit with either one of these, it should appear in Google Search Console.
What you're referring to might be a more small-scale fluctuation that might indeed be based on a couple of the links that you weren't so sure on. Check the competitive landscape of the page and, if other sites haven't been improving their SEO substantially, consider evaluating those links you've acquired and remove them if you're not 100% sure.
Cheers,
Sean
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
-
Guest blogging penalty
We would like to receive a blogging post from guest on our blog which links to their website and vice versa....a link from their blog to our website. Does this affect us in terms of Google's "guest blogging" scenario? We have natural link exchange from our partners...website to website from partners page.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | williamgoodseoagency.com0 -
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
Resubmitting disavow file after penalty removal
Hi, We had a manual penalty for links removed about a year ago. The disavow file we submitted was pretty extensive and we took the machete approach, as recommended by Matt Cutts. Recently we took a look over the file again and are of the firm conviction that some of the domains are entirely legit and the links are not manipulated. We would like to resubmit the disavow file excluding these domains so Google picks up the links again. Does anyone have experience of this and if so what were the results? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | halloranc0 -
Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers. One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic. And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword. The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
Jen Davis0 -
IS there such a thing as a Link Juice Viewer?
Hi, I am managing the tech and SEO for an ecommerce site with a big mega menu with over 140 cats/subcats and well, I know that my link juice is diluted and am thinking of cutting back on the categories but in the meantime. Is there a link juice visualizer? How can I see in a visual format how linkjuice is flowing through the site? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Finding out why Bing gave page-level penalty?
In the last couple of weeks Bing has gradually removed 5 webpages of my website from their SERP's. The URL's are totally gone. They all had top 5 rankings and just got removed out of nothing. Have can I investigate what went wrong with these pages? Are here perhaps experts who are willing to investigate this for a fee? How can I restore a page-level penalty? I have no messages in my Bing Webmastertools account.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Anchor text penalty doesn't work?!
How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0