Penalized by Penguin 1.1 Release
-
I just realized that my blog, (www.onbetterterms.com) just recently got blacklisted. That blog actually redirects to www.springcoin.com/blog
On May 25th, Google released the Penguin 1.1 update. After looking at my rankings, I found out that all my keywords positions were dropped.
I have no idea why, and don't know how to fix this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-
There is no signal of this website's (www.onbetterterms.com) getting penalized. But still this URL has been redirected to a different one. My advice, concentrate on your onpage optimization techniques, instead of running after and checking for page penalty. Stick to the natural ways of seo and promote your website through quality contents, maintain a keyword density of maximum 1%, things must be fine in the next two catches by Google Bot.
Don't mind but I feel that you have mentioned the URL ie. www.onbetterterms.com here, only to get some traffic to your website, which you have actually got. Nice trick..., but not good for the community.
-
Yes, those links were on the first page of OSE.
In order to properly diagnose your issue, a trained SEO would need to evaluate your website along with your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools account.
For the purposes of this Q&A, I will accept your diagnosis of a Penguin "penalty". The purpose of the Penguin algorithm update was to stop sites from manipulating their ranking based upon unnatural links. Taking a quick look at the links to your site, there seems to be at least some valid reasons for Google to believe your site engaged in manipulative linking.
Did anyone else own the domain before you? Are there others who helped you with the site? An SEO, developer or employee who may have built these links?
Either way, the links need to be cleaned up.
-
Hi Ryan,
First of all, I appreciate all your effort and input. Can't thank this community enough!
I have no idea on how those links were created. All our links were from personal finance blogs or mainstream media sites. I never bought links or hired anyone to do link building for us.
If you don't mind me asking, how were you able to find these links? Are you using open site explorer?
-
Kevin,
It seems your www.onbetterterms.com site has been redirected to another site. If you have a penalized site and redirect it to another site, you run the risk of penalizing the other site.
Regarding the onbetterterms.com site, do you have any idea how the following example links were created?
There are other links which appear manipulative like the ones above.
-
I never really went too deep into building links to the new SEO articles I wrote...I did a few internal links within my blog, but NEVER went crazy.. maybe just 1-2 at the most...
I never in my life bought any links
-
OK so you built links specifically to the landing page of your new content? Or to your home page?
Where did you get these links from? Did you buy them or build them?
-
Thanks Ryan, the reason i suggest Google Webmaster tool for extracting the link profile is because its a good point to start! then yes one can go deep in to links using other software...
-
About 3-4 Months ago, I focused heavily on doing a lot of keyword research analysis, and cherry picking keywords I could rank for using SEOmoz's tool.
I would say that I was moderately successful, but the funny thing is that literally almost EVERY SINGLE keyword that was ranked just fell off the earth. I always wrote unique content.
But some articles that weren't specifically targeted for SEO purposes maintained their rank (for the most part)
-
Thanks for your help. When I went here: http://onlinealley.com/seotools/googlebannedchecker/ I entered www.onbetterterms.com and it says it's been blacklisted. Is there another more legit website that you check?
So would you say the solution is to try and hunt down the domains with the anchor text of "debt eye" and kindly ask to remove it?
-
Thumbs up...
However, Im not sure the self-diagnosis is correct as the sites still rank for their domain name etc... I would like to see more information on the search terms which have dropped rankings.
-
I'm still trying to figure out why I exactly got penalized. It's a mystery that I don't seem to understand.
This article answers that question: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
At some point in time either you or someone working on your behalf built some bad links to your site. An example is: http://christianprotocol.com/bbs/view.php?id=cpiboard01&page=14&page_num=20&select_arrange=hit&desc=&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&keyword=&no=630&category=
The above link is one of many links you have from asian websites which are pages full of links related to viagra and other spam. Web pages like this one are not helpful to users. They have little reason to exist other then to manipulate search engine rankings. In short, placing links to your website on such pages violates Google's Guidelines. The Penguin update is designed to penalize websites which practice in such behaviors.
How to fix the issue? At a high level, it is a three step process:
1. Compile a complete list of all URLs linking to your website. Do not simply use the list from Google Webmaster Tools as that list generally only captures about half the links to your site.
2. Every site needs to be visited. A determination needs to be made if the link is "organic" (meaning it complies with Google's Guidelines) or "inorganic" which means it is a manipulative link.
3. The webmasters of each inorganic link need to be contacted with a request to remove the link.
The above solution assumes your self-diagnosis is correct.
-
Please can you clarify the situation?
Neither onbetterterms.com nor springcoin.com have been de-indexed or blacklisted.
Did you get a message in your webmasters account?
Looking at the anchor text backlink profile of onbetterterms.com specifically I can see why it looks very un-natural! You have 136 links coming from only 16 domains all with the same anchor text. This anchor text appears to have nothing to do with your domain name. See attached.
For some reason it uploaded the image three times but they are all the same image so ignore two of them... EDIT You also still rank number 1 in the UK for debt eye so I'm unsure where you have been penalized. Please can you clarify the situation so we can assist.
-
Kevin this could be the quality of links pointing to your website... if the quality of links is bad then it will eventually hurt your website as well... (happened with one of the client i have)
-
Kavin not to panic and planning a solid strategy is the real key to success…
If you are sure its Penguin… then get in to your link profile (best is to extract the link profile from Google Webmaster tool). Now when you have your link profile (may be in a csv) get in to it and figure out how many links are coming from your own network or network of websites… even more how many link pointing to your website that are already hit by penguin…
Clean your link profile and submit the reconsideration request to Google.
IT is good to build some good high authority links from different resources while removing links.
Removing links from 3<sup>rd</sup> party website is sometime difficult so in order to be successful one have to use every possible way to request the website to remove a link i.e phone, email and others.
-
HI David,
Thanks for the resources. I had a chance to look through the articles, but I'm still trying to figure out why I exactly got penalized. It's a mystery that I don't seem to understand.
In one of the articles, it mentioned that there could be "over-optimization" with anchor texts. I looked at some of my articles and I don't have many in-bound links with similar anchor texts.
I did, however, submit a request to Google to review it, but I'm not expecting anything out of it.
-
There are a number of helpful guides on this, instead of summarizing I'll point you int he right direction.
See:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/7-achievable-steps-for-great-seo-after-the-penguin-update
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
-
Any crawl issues with TLS 1.3?
Not a techie here...maybe this is to be expected, but ever since one of my client sites has switched to TLS 1.3, I've had a couple of crawl issues and other hiccups. First, I noticed that I can't use HTTPSTATUS.io any more...it renders an error message for URLs on the site in question. I wrote to their support desk and they said they haven't updated to 1.3 yet. Bummer, because I loved httpstatus.io's functionality, esp. getting bulk reports. Also, my Moz campaign crawls were failing. We are setting up a robots.txt directive to allow rogerbot (and the other bot), and will see if that works. These fails are consistent with the date we switched to 1.3, and some testing confirmed it. Anyone else seeing these types of issues, and can suggest any workarounds, solves, hacks to make my life easier? (including an alternative to httpstatus.io...I have and use screaming frog...not as slick, I'm afraid!) Do you think there was a configuration error with the client's TLS 1.3 upgrade, or maybe they're using a problematic/older version of 1.3?? Thanks -
Technical SEO | | TimDickey0 -
1 multilingual site, 2 domains in different languages.
My client wants a multilingual site: English and Spanish but with a domain name in both languages: jorgewantstofight.com And jorgequierepelear.com Is it possible? To have 1 site with both domains pointing each one to its version? and how this affects SEO?
Technical SEO | | Trazo1 -
Penguin 2.1 update, ranking dropped.
Hi, My website was hit by Google's new update like never before, first my ranking dropped back in May when Google rolled out with their second Penguin update, back then i was outsourcing my SEO since most of the time i was working on optimizing my local maps. As soon as noticed my traffic dropped i start doing SEO my self, I removed over optimized keywords on website ( title, meta description) then i analyzed my link profile and found that i had a lot of commercial anchor text linking from spammy websites, mostly blog comments. Its been over 4 months since I used Google's disavow tools in hoping that will help me get my raking back, but i still see these spammy links in my profile, 90% of them are nofollow anyways , so i'm not sure if disavow tool helped me at all. With this Penguin 2.1 update my website ended up on page 4-10 for 90% of my keywords http://screencast.com/t/3bcw8LUxpj Im not sure what would be the best way out this, should i buy a new domain and start fresh?Please let me know if you want to take a look on my link profile and give your opinion. Looking forward to your help!
Technical SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
Determining Penalization
Hello, I have a site that initially ranked in the first 30 google results for targeted keywords. However, after I contracted out further SEO work to a consultant, my site is nowhere to be found for any keywords. I'm afraid that they have done something to get me penalized, but I'm not sure how I would tell if 1) I have in fact been penalized and 2) what the issue(s) are so I can fix them. Thanks in advance and any help would be appreciated. -Alex
Technical SEO | | felt0 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?
Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind. We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords. I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now. So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on. 1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long. Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter? 2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page. Here are the two pages: howtomaketutus.com/ howtomaketutus.com/?p=home They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that? 3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile? We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 123craft0 -
Please Help! I lost ranking from #1 SERP
PensacolaRealEstate.com I am new to SEO. I lost my first place ranking on google. I held it for YEARS. I think I lost it with the last update... How do I analyze my site to find what is penalizing me? How can I get back to the top?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
I Bought AD on a site, am i being penalized for it
Hello... I have bought two ads on the site : http://goo.gl/nXnRA If you look on the right hand column, you will see the top two images under the word sponsors are mine.... Am i being penalized for this? are these ads frowned upon by Google? I need guidance as my ranking for the words being used as that alt text have tanked, badly and i also received a letter from WMT about unnatural links. If that site, and the ads (not links) i bought are fine with google, please advise what you think it may be... my site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e Please help... Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850