Hit hard by Panda 3.3 and Penguin. What to do?
-
Hi there.
I work with a company that was originally all white hat, then began to dabble in some pretty serious black hat activities last year (usually paid linking in private blog networks). At the time we saw tremendous results - many of our most highly competitive keywords shot up 20, 30 positions to the top 10. And they didn't seem to budge so long as we kept those (very expensive) links intact.
Alongside all of this, we have had a lot of white hat activity going on (pretty much everything recommended by Google/SEO Moz is ALSO in effect on this domain - lots of consistent/relevant blogging, social media, good content, good on-site SEO, etc), which I attribute to SOME of our success with keyword ranking, but what really made the difference was the paid linking. Let's just say we had two different mindsets behind the SEO strategy of the company, and the "Get rich quick" one worked for a while. Now, it doesn't. (Can you guess if I'm the white hat or the black hat at the company?)
So here's my question. I have made the effort to contact all of the webmasters of our egregious links and, as everyone else has described, it is effectively useless. Especially given the amazing post by Ryan Kent on this question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links) I have sort of given up on the strategy of contacting these webmasters on a case by case basis and asking for the links to be removed, especially if Google is not going to accept anything less than a perfect backlink portfolio. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to clean up these links.
Meanwhile, this company is a big name in a very competitive online market and it really needs to see lead generation from organic SEO. (Please don't give me any told-you-so's here, it was out of my hands.)
MY QUESTION IS:
WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Should we just keep the domain going and focus on only building quailty links from now on? Most of our keywords fall anywhere from position 40 to position 150 right now, so it's not like ALL hope is lost. But as any SEO knows that is basically as good as not being indexed at all.
OTHER OPTION: We have an old domain that is the less-SEO-friendly, but it is the official name of our company . com, and this domain is currently 301'd to our live (SEO-friendly) domain. The companyname.com domain is also older than our SEO friendly domain. Should we manually move our site back over to the old domain since there is no penalty on it? It seems like a lot of sites that are ranking are brand new anyway (except their URL's are loaded with keywords.)
Blah, I know that was a lot, but I'm feeling lost and ANY insight would be helpful.
Thanks as always SEOMoz!!
-
Thank you Rand. I also think this is the best idea. Really appreciate the help.
-
I've not seen penalties transfer via the 301 very often (in fact, I've only heard stories of it but never seen it confirmed with a public example). I'd probably do the 301 - as you said, it's not a great experience otherwise for visitors who bookmarked or get referred to the old domain.
If you're really nervous, you could create a message that shows up on the site and refers visitors to the new location, but that's a lot of extra work, and requires that extra click, which isn't great for UX.
I suppose if you're sure Google is going to pass the penalty, you could use the 301, but robots.txt block the site from being accessed, so Google wouldn't actually see the site being moved over (thus, it would show Google you're doing this purely for UX and not for SEO).
-
Wow, a response from Rand! I'm honored :-D. Thank you for your input.
You're definitely right about Google "scaring" people into White Hat SEO and I think they were very effective in that sense.
I'm actually going to be moving onto a new (strictly white hat) marketing company but I need to come up with a future plan for this current (penalized) site.
If I advise this company to rebuild a website using the old domain, what would you suggest as far as redirecting the current (penalized) domain? I've heard a 301 redirect transfers the penalty to the new site. But I do anticipate that there will be a good number of visitors landing on the penalized site. Should I build a page that doesn't redirect but tells users "Please visit "newdomain.com" to learn more about our company" ? Or should we have both sites live simultaneously and just create all new content so as to avoid the duplicate content issue? Any suggestions?
Thank you all.
-
I think this is exactly what Google hoped would happen with the Penguin update - SEOs and marketers who invested in gray/black hat links would have such an utterly horrific time trying to dig out that it would scare a broad swath of the industry into more white hat territory. Whether that's actually working is arguable, but it was certainly a goal of the update.
If you are ready to make the move over to the old domain, I wouldn't stop you. However, if you've built up some valuable brand equity, visitor loyalty and marketing prowess outside of SEO on this site, there's a few other possibilities:
- Work hard on UX and UI. Google hates penalizing beautiful sites that visitors love, and if you do get a manual review, this can help.
- Make the content truly exceptional, too. Ensure that there's nothing that feels like artificial/manipulative/done-just-for-rankings stuff on the site. Again, this makes it more likely that any reconsideration request will work
- Send out as many requests for link removal as possible and include the lists of where/how you acquired links and how you've tried to remove them in your reconsideration request
- Hope and pray
This process might not get you back in, but it could work. Google's requiring a "good faith" effort and some proof of said effort, but there's a possibility your site might get by. For the future, I'd strongly recommend sticking to entirely editorially given/earned links.
Wish you luck!
-
if you're having to contact webmasters, I would bet at least some of them are getting bombarded by a lot of similar requests. If it's on sites of the type I am figuring we're having to deal with (low quality sites that were designed with no care, regard or concern for anything other than low-level SEO), they're very unlikely to care about people harmed by the changes. And just as likely, want to spend their time figuring out a new get rich off nonsense scheme.
-
Thank you for the advice Alan. Maybe we can hope that over time all those sites get deindexed and so the links disappear on their own, because I'm finding it impossible to contact webmasters / they don't seem happy to help us out.
-
Play with fire, get burned. Yes, you already know that. No, I don't think you personally should have to suffer through untold similar cliche's.
So here's the reality. Without cleaning up the profile, it's highly unlikely the site will ever recover. That leaves the only other reasonable option, which is the drastic one. Abandon the existing domain as far as SEO goes and start fresh with the clean domain.
That's potentially going to be the biggest challenge to get others to agree to, because those who have the guts to play with fire in a known dangerous environment typically have too big an ego to admit there isn't yet another quick and easy fix that instantly reaps big rewards on the scale that should never have been achieved previously in the first place.
However even Matt Cutts said this past week, that in worst case scenarios, people just may need to start with a new site. When Matt comes out and says that, you can be sure the potential for all hope to be gone on a now burned site to rebound is now lower than it ever was.
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
-
Unique meta descriptions for 2/3 of it, but then identical ending?
I'm working on an eCommerce site and had a question about my meta descriptions. I'm creating unique meta descriptions for each category and subcategory, but I'm thinking of adding the same ending to it. For example: "Unique descriptions, blah blah blah. Free Overnight Shipping..". So the "Free Overnight Shipping..." ending would be on all the categories. It's an ongoing promo so I feel it's important to add and attract buyers, but don't want to screw up with duplicate content. Any suggestions? Thanks for your feedback!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeffbstratton0 -
Website that just got hit....Need some tips or ideas...
Hey guys, The website of the company i work hit in the PR update two days ago . A little history , the site was notice by Google about spam links around 5-6 months ago .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
Since then there is a company that cleans all the spam links and manage all the disavow process. In the last penguin update ( about two months ago ) the site jumped like crazy in the ranking and stayed there ever since... In the last three months we create less than ten links to the site, and we have focus all our work to improve
the optimization of the site.
It should be noted that the company is investing a lot in social networks and all the work in the past 3 month are White and clean... Now, two days ago in the PR update (more or less) the site just dropped , but when i say dropped , it's 200 keys that was in page 1-2 that just want out to page 5-6-7. Like the website is gone, i never see something like this... The things that pass through my head: A lot of the links the linking to the site with high PR lost their pr and now they are worthless, but still this drop ? its to extreme.
Or that Google received the disavow and just disavow a lot of links.... Does anyone have any ideas or tips on the subject ? Thank you0 -
Does this look like a Penguin drop to you?
Hi Folks, This is my first post here. Psyched to be part of this great community. I have a site that's seen a steady drop in Google organic traffic since September of last year. Slow at first, then picking up speed in late January, then in a free-fall in May. Things are finally flattening out, but I'm left with 30% of my former traffic. See graph. I've been thinking that this was caused by Penguin. Back in 2006-2009, I used free directory submission services, and it looked like I was finally getting penalized for it. However, from the research I've done so far, it looks like websites hit by Penguin see a decrease in traffic over a couple days, not six months. Should I concern myself with disavowing those spammy directory links, or focus my energy elsewhere? There are other plausible explanations for the decline. I haven't posted much content on the site in recent years, and have let my blog go fallow. Obviously, this needs to be fixed. My question is, in addition to my content development and quality linkbuilding efforts, should I be worried about those spammy links? For the record, this is a high-quality informational site with lots of high-quality links mixed in with the spammy ones. Thanks for any insight you can offer. qozm7Rr.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | srmaximo0 -
Penalized by Penguin 2.0
I believe our site has been penalizes by Penguin 2.0. Our impressions in Google Webmaster are down and our traffic in Google Analytics also took a hit. Both of these occurences took place right when Penguin 2.0 was unleashed. What are the steps I need to take to regain my ranking? Is disallowing all the links I think maybe spammy the first thing to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | joebuilder0 -
One of my outbound links website go hit by panda!
Hi mozzers, today I received a message from one of my blogger partners announcing me that he got hit by panda. 2 weeks ago I had him placing 2 anchors one in our main domain and a second one on our subdomain. I know panda focuses essentially on dups and I have paid attention to our webmaster tools to make sure we haven t got any messages Which we re good with. What do you guys suggest, will this affect us at some point or we re good? also in case that we re good will panda affect the blogger's authority therefore ours? if yes I should probably remove them, right? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Month old site and alreasdy ranks 3 for competitive keyword
I know this individual does this with several sites and then offers them for sale to his competitors. Obviously spammy thru and thru, but how can google reward a site thats not even two months old, with 1900 + links with a ranking of #3 for a highly competitive keyword? Please dont post the actual name or url of the website as we dont want to give him any more credit but this blows my mind as he has done this several times with other sites and never gets penalized. http://tinyurl.com/b9jysa5 Any ideas as to how he can accomplish this besides almost 2000 links in less than 2 months? How is that even remotely natural? I know his other sites have been reported to google but they never did anything about it. Thanks for any feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anthonytjm0 -
Penguin link removal what would you do?
Hi Over the last 4 months I have been trying to remove as many poor quality links as possible in the hope this will help us recover. I have come across some site's that the page our back-link is on has been de-indexed, goggle shows this when I look at the cached page... 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGNI_enGB482GB482&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fforom.eovirtual.com%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D84 was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins> If goggle is showing this message do I have to still try to remove the link, or is it a case goggle has already dismissed the link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
I think I've been hit by Penguing - Strategy Discusson
Hi, I have a network of 50 to 60 domain names which have duplicated content and whose domains are basically a geographical location + the industry I am in. All of these websites have links to my main site. Over the weekend I saw my traffic fall. I attribute our drop in rankings to what people are calling Penguing 1.1. I want to keep my other domains as we are slowly creating unique content for each of those sites. However, in the mean time, clearly I need to deal with the inbound linking and anchor text problem. Would adding a nofollow tag to all links that point to my main site resolve my issue with Google's penguin update? Thanks for the help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160