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
-
Improving SEO Structure of a Page
Our site is an online Marketplace for Services. Naturally, we have a lot of unique content in the form of :
Technical SEO | | Ideas2life
a) Job Posts
b) Profiles of Service Providers We also have 2 very important pages:
a) The Job Listing Page
b) The Service Provider Page The Listing pages have very valuable H1 Titles, but everything else is duplicate content. To capture those keywords currently in H1, we have created a different landing page for each category page, and we`ll optimize around that, so these H1s are not that big of a deal any more. These landing pages are the key to our SEO strategy and we are building new content every day to help them rank I want to make the Listing Pages No Index Follow. This way they pass Juice to Jobs, and Profiles which have unique contents, but are not indexed themselves. Is this a bad idea? I have been thinking about doing this for over a year but it never felt important enough to be worth the risk of accidentally screwing up We `ll soon do a new on page flow optimization and that's why I am considering this again. Thank you so much in advance Argyris0 -
My Google Author Pic Disappeared
My Google author picture, which had been in place for a couple of years, disappeared from all SERP results recently. I checked, and rel=author attribution is valid on every post, as is the link to to the Google + authorship page (which contains a link back to the web site). When I test URL's in the structured data testing tool the picture appears. I'm out of troubleshooting ideas. Any suggestions welcome.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Determining the Cause of a Penalty
I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10. Here are some things I noticed about the site: Over 2,500 linking domains. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer. Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized? What do you think?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Confirmation of penalty
Hi, I have been discussing with friends about possible penalties on few domains [listed below]. I would appreciate if any of seomoz staff could check them and explain if these sites are penalized in full, or part of these websites are penalized or homepage being penalized, any identification of penalty being imposed, and how to get these sites restored. http://www.google.com.pk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=123businesslistings.com&oq=123businesslistings.com&gs_l=hp.3...4797.4797.1.5047.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.8.psy-ab.xDG3ytsYUVU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45107431,d.aWc&fp=db751f8c4669b6fe&biw=1441&bih=603 keyword searched=123businesslistings.com
Technical SEO | | ClaudioJudsoni0 -
Google having trouble accessing my site
Hi google is having problem accessing my site. each day it is bringing up access denied errors and when i have checked what this means i have the following Access denied errors In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons: Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.) Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories. Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.) The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results. Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site. Now i have contacted my hosting company who said there is not a problem but said to read the following page http://www.tmdhosting.com/kb/technical-questions/other/robots-txt-file-to-improve-the-way-search-bots-crawl/ i have read it and as far as i can see i have my file set up right which is listed below. they said if i still have problems then i need to contact google. can anyone please give me advice on what to do. the errors are responce code 403 User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/0 -
Help - just disappeared from Google
My google listings have disappeared in the last few days. I used to have positions 1, 2, 3, and sometimes 4 on page 1, but since the last update (19th?) it appears I have been dropped? My domainn is www.eseyo.com and the search terms I used to acheive results for were "seo in brentwood" and "seo brentwood" I even created a screencast of my success some time ago for a blog post: http://www.eseyo.com/seo-in-brentwood/ Is there anything that I can do to get these listings back? I have not done anything too naughty in terms of tactics. Purchased a few fiver gigs to get some fake social likes but that is it the rest was all true links and listings. your help and advice most appreciated. Scott.
Technical SEO | | eseyo0 -
Google Indexing
Hi Everybody, I am having kind of an issue when it comes to the results Google is showing on my site. I have a multilingual site, which is main language is Catalan. But of course if I am looking results in Spanish (google.es) or in English (google.com) I want Google to show the results with the proper URL, title and descriptions. My brand is "Vallnord" so if you type this in Google you will be displayed the result in Catalan (Which is not optimized at all yet) but if you search "vallnord.com/es" only then you will be displayed the result in Spanish What do I have to do in order for Google to read this the way I want? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
Google News URL Format
Hi, We are currently redesigning our gaming website (www.totallygn.com) and one of our main goals is to get listed by Google News in future. Looking at the Google News URL requirements "The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits." How does the above affect SEO structure? I was planning on using a format such as www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review how would this compare to something like? www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review234 Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | WalesDragon0