Client participated in Link farm.
-
Our client participated in link exchange activity between 2008-2009. The service they used was http://link2me.com/
Its an obvious link farm scheme and their drop in traffic/rankings correlates to panda release early this year.
The site does have tons of unique content, their are no technical SEO issues. They DO have great inbound links from some very authoritative sites (ie: peta.org)
They do not rank even for unique strings taken directly from their content. Rankings for some very n long tail terms are virtually non existant.
So the question were trying to figure out is, did the domain get hit with a penalty bc of past link farm participation, if so how can we correct?
-- killing the account with link2me has already been done
Could the domain NOT be penalized, and since all those external links were penalized did our site lose authority?
-
Thanks for the clarification Keri.
Always helps.
-
A quick clarification. The private questions are private, and always stay that way. SEOmoz Associates that answer the questions are under NDA and we don't share the details of those questions. Period.
Public questions and responses are now viewable and indexed right away (there had been a two week waiting period for the responses to be public, but that has changed), though only Pro members can ask and answer questions.
I hope this helps! Do feel free to ask this question in private with more details if you would like. You can create a new question and leave this one here for additional community input if you would like.
-
Lee,
With a client like this where you are reticent to share the domain, the answers will be a bit less authoritative. But, if you think you were hit with a penalty, you should go through each page to insure no further issues exists ( I would check those long tail KW pages to see if there is duplicate content, and that there is no hidden code, etc.) If you have tons of useless links in the footer I would take them out, etc.
Once that is all done and SEO is tight, submit to Google for reconsideration. But, be sure you have a clean site: It would be painful to submit and then get shot down.
If it is a big issue and you need to be circumspect due to the site being a client site, I would use a private question to SEOmoz for assist. This way you can choose if it is kept private or is seen two weeks later. If you have used your private question, you get another one each month.
Hope this helps,
-
Dear Lee,
According to the link farm I can't really agree with you that they became useless and doesn't drive any result. Of course you need to know which link farms to use and how to use. Following this we can't exclude the presence of any penalties on the domain name which effect on growth of the particular keywords. Usual it takes from 6 month to 2 years for penalties to be removed in some case you need to contact with Google Support regarding this.
About domain authority, you can measure it only if you remember which number it has before changes (according for ex. to SEOmoz bar) and which number is now.
Also I need to say that if you are using link farms still you should do really stupid things there to get a penalty from Google. My feelings that it might be some problems with on-page optimization or the keyword competitions are high and links which you got for them are not enough. Try to measure competition and develop a strategy and be tolerant because after adjustments you can't see immediate effect.
Thanks,
Russel
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
-
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
What To Do With Too Many Links?
We have four pages that have over 100 links (danger, danger from what I gather), but they're not spammy footer links. They are FAQ videos for our four main areas of practice. Does that make a difference? If not, should I just take half the questions on each page and make four additional pages? That strikes me as a worse UX, but I don't want to get penalized either. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How can i stop such links being indexed
Hi, How can i stop such links being indexed The first link is what i want to stop indexed. We have 1,000's of people writing articles and the below URl shows how many articles each did http://www.somename.com/article/15633 But this is the URl which shows the exact articlehttp://www.Somename.com/article/step-step-installation-ibm-lotus-notesAs both start as thishttp://www.Somename.com/article/How can i set noindex? Should we set for each URL manually one by oneThanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to build URL links too dilute link profile???
One of my sites has a very spamy link profile, top 20 anchors are money keywords. What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to help dilute the link profile by building links with URLs, Click Here, more Info, etc. I have been building URL links already, but due to the site age(over 12 years) the amount of exact match anchor text links is just very large and would take forever to get diluted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
A potential client who got busted !
We had a call this week from a company who have been using a SEO company providing link building services. The back links they have been generating are seriously dodgy back links ! www.jumpforfun.co.uk Here are some examples of the back links - http://www.utc.fr/interactions/?FORUM-DEBAT-quel-s-role-s-pour-les http://mad.blogtv.uol.com.br/2010/03/12/homenagens-ao-grande-cartunista-glauco http://medical.gate2finance.com/node/67 Yes a seriously dodgy back link profile ! He received the following email from google via webmaster tools - Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.jumpforfun.co.uk/, 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 I mentioned to the client I would speak to the community on SEO moz to the owner of the site and see what opinions other SEO's would have on solving this issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10 -
Reciprocal link finder tool - not looking to do reciprocal links.
The company I work for had an old SEO company that did a lot of reciprocal links with websites that are not what we want to be associated with. Does anyone know of a tool that might be able to tell us if there are still reciprical links to our site? I want to try and find them, but the old pages we had with links going out have been deleted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b2bcfo0