No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work
-
Hi Everyone,
i hope someone can help.
Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April.
We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious.
Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration.
There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove.
It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis.
Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name.
any help is much appreciated
-
Dump the bad links like your doing but try and gain some 'super' links as well.
Find some relevant blogs, maybe there is a hub website or a few in your industry and try and sort out a guest post or 2 on a few of these.
-
It all depends on so many factors. It could be that the site hasn't been penalized but has simply lost its authority due to the bad links being ignored. If it has been penalized then it can help remove any penalty's. I have heard of one or two people trying this method and receiving responses.
Webmasters is also a useful resource for finding these bad links. Thumbs up.
-
No problems at all, Steve.
Your anchor text is only a small part of a big picture but it certainly looks like a stand out issue in your case.
You don't need to edit any internal anchor text though, it will only really matter for incoming links from external websites. It looks like most of these links are poor quality so instead of getting the anchor text changed, get them removed (if you can). If you do come across any links using that anchor text term which are from good and trustworthy sites then by all means keep the link and maybe ask them to change the anchor text.
You will need to concentrate on building good quality links from now moving forwards. A good place to start is with guest article writing, see if you can get some good content written and head over to MyBlogGuest, you will find blog and website owners all over the world who will be happy to accept good content in return for a link to your website within the content of the article. Remember to make your link natural - try things like "click here", "danbro", "here"... things that look like they aren't trying to manipulate Google's algorithm.
-
A fantastic place to find out where your links are unnatural is in the same place that told you it was unnatural: Webmaster Tools. Inside the page for your site expand Traffic then click Links to your site. This gives you links based on how Google sees your site. You can easily identify unnatural links (like sitewides) this way.
I don't know that I've ever heard of Matt's spreadsheet idea before. Does Google actually respond to such things? If he is being penalized, it's because of Penguin and Google has been adamant that there's no manual adjustments they can make to fix it (hence why re-inclusion requests don't work).
-
Hi Matt,
Great answer and thanks for taking the time to help.
So is it a matter of us going through our link anchor text and modifying some of these to make more natural?
Again, many thanks
-
I feel your pain, Steve! Unfortunately these things take time. If you havent already, whip up a spreadsheet of all the remaining bad links. Add a column to explain what steps you have taken to get the link removed. Google will understand that sometimes you are not in control but you can only try. They might help with manual interventions. You can then use this spreadsheet to send them to ask to be reconsidered. It is important not to keep sending the request, fix the problem and then ask. Remember that they don't owe you anything so don't depend on this method - chances are they might not even reply!
Google have announced that a tool could be coming out soon which will allow you to tell them which links you wish to distance yourself from. Keep an eye out... Clicky.
In the mean time, don't just work on removing these bad links, concentrate on building much more good quality links in a variety of forms. Try and make your link profile look natural - over time these things will help.
On a side note, you need to add a canonical tag to your home page. Your domain loads a different homepage for http://www.yourdomain.com as well as http://yourdomain.com.
Check out the attachment to see why your link profile is so un-natural. You have 8220 links from ONLY 78 domains for one anchor text and 4047 links for another anchor text while your domain name only has 188 links.
EDIT: You haven't actually been de-indexed (see attached) so you don't need to submit reconsideration yet. You just need to sort that link profile out BADLY first.
As a token gesture to help you out in your time of need I have added a contextual link from one of my websites to your homepage with the anchor text "click here" - its a small drop in the ocean but every little bit helps make your profile look that tiny tiny tiny bit better.
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
-
Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty
Hi , over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda). We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool. now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2.. is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1? we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links. also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1.. this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Google News Sitemap
Currently for our website Thinkdigit, we are using a rss sitemap (http://www.thinkdigit.com/google_sitemap/news_rss.php) for news. Please let me know is this the right format or we should use xml format only. Also we have lost a huge chunk of traffic from news search, Previously it used to be around 10,000 visit from google news, now it is just 300 visit per day.
Technical SEO | | 9dot90 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePunditCan you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
How is Google finding our preview subdomains?
I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there. Does anybody have any insight on this?
Technical SEO | | ZeeCreative0 -
Adding Google + to SEOmoz
I wanted to add my google + signature to every post I make on SEOmoz and I think every user should do the same... Two reasons why... Google helps our existence so we should help theirs. If someone likes what I wrote or vice versa we should be able to follow each other in a simple click. In my opinion all blogs forum posts etc... should Lead to a user not a website, this will prevent spam and help people network. In other words blog spammers and forum spammers will be SOL (Which they all ready are lol).
Technical SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Issue of my website Google Penalty or Recent Algorithm Changes only!
I recently faced issue of Google recent algo update on my main website. I found my ranks were all of 5th to 7th page even with website name without .com at end we have 5th page shown our biz website. It was a news portal and behind in subdomain i was running my web hosting website. 1. I removed all news content from my website since i thought the news agency send me content send same content to others may cause in the issue so i removed the NEWS AREA 2. I am turn off all of my old subscriptions or membership of blog networks etc. to make sure i get proper good backlinks with good research etc. Is there anybody who can suggest me what shall i take more action ? Mean any kind of further good suggestion i will highly appreciate if anyone can help me with any suggestions of SEO. I know there are many people who knows lots about it thus i thought to ask to community.. I am also unsure its a Google panelty or a Google recent update negative changes to my website ? However i have already filled reconsideration request as an possible alternative by explaining google that we are no more NEWS CONTENT Website. Will wait for responses...
Technical SEO | | anand20100 -
Google & Separators
This is not a question but something to share. If you click on all of these links and compare the results you will see why _ is not a good thing to have in your URLs. http://www.google.com/search?q=blue http://www.google.com/search?q=b.l.u.e http://www.google.com/search?q=b-l-u-e http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e http://www.google.com/search?q=b%20l%20u%20e If you have any other examples of working separators please comment.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic3