Too many links... OOPS
-
So I made a big mistake. I know it was dumb. I took a chance and got screwed. I've been researching one of my competitions back links and found that about 7000 of their 12000 links came from one site. Upon further investigation that site is a page rank 7 and the link looked bought. My competitions page rank is 6 which I thought was largely because of this one link. I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and they bought the link pretty cheap. So I thought... Hey!? Why not!
About two weeks later, today, google webmaster tools finally found the link and my links went from 100 to 7100. Now that I really think about it, I know it was a stupid move. I just figured if they got away with it, I could.
I'm a white hat seo'er from now on. I've learned my lesson. Wake up today and find that all 400 keywords I am attempting to rank for, which 60% used to be in the top 3, are now not in the top 100. Luckily I am still indexed in Google though, I'm just not ranking for anything significant.
Now I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and had him remove the links. He was pretty quick about putting them up, so I figure they'll be down today. Is it just a matter of Google realizing that they're gone until I'm back in the SERPS? Or am I screwed for good? This is a little scary, I depend on Google for my entire livelihood. Yeah, I know not something I should be gambling with then.
I only spent $125 on the links, but every month of traffic is worth about $3k to me. Ouch. If I lose a few months I'm at least looking at a $10k hit. Please give me some good news
-
Scary stuff, Brian.
I know that sinking feeling. Just got bombed myself. Whether by Panda, because of user experience or a little too over optimized anchor text, I am not sure yet. Two weeks and my ranking have yet to come back.
Clean up the site, remove the bad links and cross your fingers for a speedy return is about all you can do.
Good luck with it.
-
Google algo detects when you got a sudden urge of links to your site and it raises the "SPAM" flag, normally , like in your case, the algo sent the site to the SandBox.
Whats weird when this happens is that sometimes you drop for a few days than suddenly your site is back to the top and ranking higher than before.
Other times you just sit there in sandbox forever.
So I think you did the right move, the problem is that it can take quite sometime now to get your site back to where it was before.
Just as a side note, some people argue that if you keep building the links at the same rate for sometime you can come out of the sandbox with all the links, maybe this pattern makes the algo think that your site got viral or something (wich happens quite often I imagine) but to be honest i think its more a shot in the dark.
-
Yeah I've spent the last couple of hours looking for info on this problem. Almost everyone is saying "too many links can't hurt". There's just no other explanation for what happened this morning. I was doing perfectly fine in the SERPS then right when Google recognizes all my new links, I fall back to nothing immediately.
-
Where are all of those people who say... "Links can't hurt you."?
-
Remove the bad links, make sure they are all gone, then file a reconsideration request explaining why you were penalized and what you have done about it. You should be fine after that, might take about a month or so. You can request reconsideration in your webmaster tools account by going here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
Good luck!
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
-
Do dead/inactive links matter?
In cleaning up the backlink profile for my parent's website, I've come across quite a few dead links. For instance, the links in the comments here: http://www.islanddefjam.com/artist/news_single.aspx?nid=4726&artistID=7290 Do I need to worry about these links? I assume if the links are no longer active, and hence not showing up in webmaster or moz reports, I can probably ignore them, but I'm wondering if I should try and get them removed regardless? I've read that google is increasingly taking into account references (i.e. website mentions that are not links) and I don't know if inactive spam links might leave a bad impression of a website. Am I being overly paranoid? I imagine disavowing them would be pointless as you can't attach a nofollow tag to an inactive link.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgane0 -
I have 4012 links from one blog - will Google penalise?
My website (http://www.gardenbeet.com) has 4012 links from http://cocomale.com/blog/ to my home page -a banner advert links from the blog - I also have 3,776 from another website to 6 pages of my website 1,832 from pinterest to 183 pages etc etc overall there are 627 domains linking to my website I have been advised by a SEO company that I was penalised in about may to july 2012 due to a large number of links coming from one domain or two domains is that true? should I ask the blog owner to remove my link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Is there a paid link hierarchy?
It seems like the more I learn about my competition's links, the less I understand about the penalties associated with paid links. Martindale-hubbard (in my industry) basically sells links to every lawyer out there, but none of the websites with those links are penalized. I'm sure you all have services like that in your various industries. Granted, Martindale-hubbard is involved in the legal community and it's tied to Lexis Nexis, but any small amount of research would tell you that paid links are a part of their service. Why does this company (and companies that use them) not get penalized? Did the penguin update just go after companies that got links from really seedy, foreign companies with gambling/porn/medication link profiles? I keep reading on this forum and other places that paid links are bad, but it looks to me like there are fundamental differences in the penalties for paid links purchased from one company vs another. Is that the case or am I missing something? Thanks, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Many Regional Pages: Bad for SEO?
Hello Moz-folks We are relatively well listed for "Edmonton web design." - the city we work out of. As an effort to reach out new clients, we created about 15 new pages targeting other cites in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Although we began to show up quite well in some of these regions, we have recently seen our rankings in Edmonton drop by a few spots. I'm wondering if setting up regional pages that have lots of keywords for that region can be detrimental to our overall rankings.Here is one example of a regional page: http://www.web3.ca/red-deer-web-design Thanks, Anton TWeb3 Marketing Inc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
What means a back door link. Please explain and I will give you credit
Some one is asking me to do a back door link to each other, what dose it mean?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Redesigning my site, and not sure what is best for seo, subfolders or direct .html links?
,I have 4 examples to choose from, what is best:? http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | hoodamath0 -
How do you remove unwanted links, built by your previous SEO company?
We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clairerichards0