Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?
-
Hello everbody!
I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines.
We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic?
kind regards,
Jeroen from the Netherlands
-
Thanks Steve.
That clears things up for us. It would be great if the backlinks were indeed the cause of the drop but unfortunately now we have to keep on searching for an other answer
-
Dejan's answer on this thread will help you with this question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-recent-discoveries-or-observations-on-the-official-line-of-incoming-link-penalization
-
Thanks for all your answers
@Theo & @StephanM: My website is not international, it's a dutch website (http://goo.gl/9nwq9) so i think it cannot be the panda update because i heard they did not launch it in Europe yet or did they? However, 24 february is almost the exact date the drop in traffic initiated.
As for the website that uses our RSS feed, we blocked the feed for that particular website. Not only because our suspicions but also because they loaded the feed on every single page request. We know it is not a popular website because over a course of 1,5 years we only received 40 visitors from that domain while the links to our website were clearly visible on each page.
Still i think it's weird that our old articles are doing just fine and only the new articles are affected. Also, the rest of the website is ranking as usual.
@Dave: Good point, it could be that the refering site got a penalty that devalued the links to our website thus causing a drop in ranking and traffic. I'm not sure if they had a penalty before we noticed the drop in traffic, im quite sure they have one now. But looking at the amount of traffic we received from them over a period of 1.5 years i suspect they always had a penalty but again i'm not sure.
-
I would suggest researching the traffic sources in detail if possible to see if a referring site dropped thus causing your decline. Maybe they got hit with the update and not your site.
-
If that were true, it would be possible to take out a competitor by setting up a link campaign to their website. I do not believe Google would allow such a thing to happen, so while I'm not 100% certain I think it's safe to say bad inlinks will not harm you. I must admit though, the two observations (dropping search engine traffic and a huge amount of bad inlinks) do seem rather coincidental, especially taking in account that the Panda update hit in February.
-
The (in)famous Google Panda update (thousands of posts on Google about this) struck international websites on the 24th of February, right in the same month where you reported the problems started. Perhaps the drop is traffic is a result of this update and not of the backlinks?
Regarding those links: I think a single website that links to you (be it with millions of links) probably won't be the cause of this drop. Unless, these backlinks were put in place close to (before) the date where the traffic started dropping. Have you tried contacting the website that has those links up and request them to remove your site from their system?
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
-
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
SEO: Can you rank Amazon product Pages ?
Hi Guys Just a general question about doing SEO for our product pages... We have a range of products on Amazon and wondered if it is worth build some good links to our product pages to get them ranked higher in Google ?? Is it easier to rank Amazon product pages ?? Thanks Guys G Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Recovered from Manual Penalty but rankings still suck
Hi All, We got a penalty Last March 2014 ( Side Wide Link - unnatural links) which we recovered from quickly and this changed to Partial Match penalty (impact links) which we recovered from back in December 2014. Our Site profile has been cleaned up but our rankings still suck for some of our main keywords (+500) . Also our traffic and local rankings still suck in some cases. From an SEO point of view our site is pretty good, we've done everything google has recommended including schema.org, mobile responsive, unique content (which we write regulary) and we only have a few duplicate pages. Our domain authority is better than our competitors but yet our rankings and traffic are still no way as good as theirs. Do anyone know if recovering from an impact links penalty take longer than 4 months . I know that google says than it discounts those links but I get the feeling google may be looking at an old dataset due to not rerunning panda & penguin since our penalty was removed and this may be whats affecting things. Does anyone have any ideas? I am more than happy to post my url if someone fancies taking a quick look ? to see if it's anything obvious ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Will buying a competitor negatively affect keyword ranking?
Hello All; After reading a lot of great info on Moz, I wanted to ask my first question. We are thinking about buying a competitor. It is a smaller ecommerce site that sells a subset of the products we already sell. The main value of the site is good ranking for a small set of keywords. For example, if we acquire this site, we would now have up to 4 listing on page 1 for some targeted keywords. We plan to operate the site separately from our own with its current name and technology. We plan to be transparent with the domain registration info, change the contact info on the new site, etc. Will the fact that both sites are owned by the same company negatively affect keyword rankings? Instead of having 4 listings for some terms will one of our sites be lowered since one company operates both sites? The site we are buying does not have a high MozRank, MozTrust or Domain Authority score. But it does have a domain that has been around for a long time. In addition to the keywords, there is value is using this new site to do marketing tests and experiment a bit. Thanks for any input. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulgerst0 -
Baffled why my site is not improving in rankings.
Site shows up in the Map results when ever Google shows them. But for all other organic terms site ranks way back. Have lots of unique content and one page grade of an A. The site is http://alexpadillabailbonds.com The main page is optimized for "sacramento bail bonds" with a Moz grade of A yet its not included in the search results. It was before. Any insight from any one will greatly help. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreyzolnikov0 -
My site still out of rank
Hello, I am working on a site for past 3 months, here are the problems with this site, 1. It had a forum full of spam becuase initially captcha was not included, 10000 spam backlinks 2. Affiliate page was also hit by spam about 4000 spam backlinks which were either not existing or porn etc.... 3. Too many internal links which were indexed, these additional links were generated due to tags, ids, filters etc. Existing SEO team decided to remove the forum and after 30 days they blocked it in robots. But within 30 days the site moved from 3rd page to no where. Now after few days lator internal links are also cleaned by putting following in the robots, Dissallow: / *? Dissallow: / *id Dissallow: / *tag Links are now cleaning up, all the spam and bad links are now put into disavow file and sent to google via disavow tool. On daily bases good quality links are been produced such as through content, article submission, profile linking, Bookmarks etc. The site is still not any where on top 50 results. The impressions are decreasing, traffic also do not rise as much. How do you see all this situation. What do you suggest and how long do you think it will take to return to top 10 when good linking is being done and all preventive measures are being taken. I would appreciate any feedback on it. Thank you. Site URL: http://www.creativethemes.net keywords: magento themes, magento templates
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Victim of negative SEO
Hello, I'm one of those people that got the "unnatural links" message from google. Since i run my site from the very first day and always was a one man business i know all the ins and outs of the website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Henkiepenkie
Basicly i have never ever used a seo company to submit my site anywhere.
Never ever i used any shady tactic to get better ranks.
The only thing i did was trading traffic/links with real active websites, being daily updated, high traffic, etc etc. So. After i got notified in webmaster tools i started digging into a list (provided by webmaster tools) to find out why i got this message (meanwhile i lost 75% of my se traffic in past 3 months) After searching for hours i found out that in the past 2 / 3 months my site has been spammed on about 150 forums (completely dead forums with nothing but spam on it) There was no logic at all since my site got linked with the most ridiculous and unlogical word phrases.
My site is adult related and all spam links contained word phrases like "bangladesh mobile" or "rock girl" or "animal abuse" or "ringtones" etc etc. if i ever would be so stupid to start spamming my 7 year old strong business i would at least use titles that would make sence. anyway.
I can't do nothing about these forums, i don't own them, i can't erase them and if there are any owners, they simply don't respond.
I made a list of all the forums and send it to google but the only response they come up with is "there are still unnatural links". I hardly believe they did anything with that list i send them. I don't know what else i can do and was hoping that somebody could advice me on what to do here besides sending google messages on a daily base. cheers0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0