How long before our website bounce back after Google Penalty?
-
One of our client websites got recently hacked. In a span of 4 days, it received random backlinks from random websites with random anchor texts. We are already in good standing for some of the keywords we are tracking and the attack got us a penalty from Google and we lost our rankings, moving out of the top 500.
We already disavowed these dirty backlinks though we never really diagnosed where these came from. How long do you think our client's website will bounce back from the penalty?
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
-
Back links issue and how to resolve it
Hi there! We have a client who has been generating back links from external sites over a period of two years with all the same anchor text which all link back to the home page. This anchor text is also their main search phrase they wish to score highly on. In total, they have roughly 300 domain names linking to their site. Over 50 of these domain names all have the same anchor text. These links have been generated through articles and blogs. So roughly 20% of the total number of links all have the same anchor text. Over the past 6 months the client has noticed a steady drop in their rankings for this term. From the back link analysis we have done, we believe it is this which is causing the problem. Does any one else agree? For the remedy, do we go in and see if we can change the anchor text or disavow them through Google webmaster tools? Suggestions? Thanks for your help! P 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Globalgraphics0 -
Why homepage is not getting cached by Google ?
It has been more than 2-3 months that I didn't notice that our website homepage is not getting cached by Google ?? i don't know why?? help me please, thanks in advance. Regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | spellblaster
Spel why.PNG0 -
Competitor website, how come they get away with it?
Hi we have been looking at competitors websites do see how we can improve, this website jumped out at me straight away as spammy gateway pages where 3 words was the only difference on all of the pages. Why does google give them so much weight still and rank them so highly? I thought this is what G was trying to avoid? Am I missing something here in terms of great SEO opportunity? A checked for noindex or canonical and I cannot see any. Love to hear some feedback. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Is Google not Penalizing aggressively anymore for on page manipulation?
I wanted to throw this out where we have been seeing so much emphasis on Google cracking down on bad linking, have they let up enforcement on manipulative on-page tactics that have faded in current years? I've been seeing hidden text popping up again and ranking. Here is an example. Google "landscaping Portsmouth NH" and find the #1 result. Now find "Portsmouth" on the page. So what I find interesting, the site has a clean backilnk profile, but that's a pretty blatant manipulation hiding those keywords. What I find interesting is I filled out a report on it a year ago. (I'm not a big "fill out spam report" guy, I was curious if Google would take action). A year later it is still #1 for the competitive keyword. So I'm curious if others have seemed similar trends like font-size:0px, or text color as the background popping back up and ranking. I would love other's thoughts on it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCutrer0 -
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 -
How to recognize Panda, Penguin or Unnatural Links Penalty ?
Hey guys, today I've received below message from Google, but I'm confused that there NO such message in WMT ?!??!?!?! I've login /out few times and situation is still same ?!?!? Still Nothing there ? Anybody had same issue ? Do I need to fill reconsideration request ? Pleased to hear back from you guys. NikoT Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to .com/ Dear site owner or webmaster of , We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NikoT0 -
Google authorship and multiple sites with multiple authors
Hi guys :). I am asking your help - basically I would like to know what would be the best way to set all of this up. Basically I have two main (e-commerce) sites, and a few other big web properties. What I would like to know is if it is ok to link the main sites to my real G+ account, and use alias G+ accounts for other web properties, or is that a kind of spamming? The thing is that I use a G+ account for those e-commerce sites, and would not necessarily want the other web properties to be linked to the same G+ account, as they are not really related. I do hope I was clear. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sumare0 -
Can I just delete pages to get rid of bad back-links to those pages?
I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters). We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality. Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question.. b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it? Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033 I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s... Thanks so much!!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zingseo0