My site was a PR 5 and now is unranked?
-
A site that I do SEO and SMM (www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com) had a PR 5 and now it shows "unranked".
I had the #1 position for many core keywords, and now they are all gone.
I don't do any black hat at all. Mostly article distribution and onsite content growth.
The only logical thing that I can think of is, the server was going down several times a day, for about 3 days, a few weeks ago. But I can imagine that would cause me to lose all my rankings, and a PR 5. But then again, this has never happened to me before.
I am trying to find out what caused this, how to fix the problem, and how long it will take to recover.
Any suggestions or help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
I am willing to pay for good advice on this issue if need be.
JT
-
Hi JT. Here's how I found the nastiness. I looked at your url on Open Site Explorer and clicked on "Anchor Text". This shows you how your site is linked to. The 6th most popular anchor text was "buy cheap viagra online" and the seventh was "buy cheap software". I expanded the first one and saw the urls linking to you and clicked on one.
Then, when I was on that page, I did a CTRL-F to search for your site. I also searched for the words "buy cheap viagra online". My CTRL-F told me that the words did exist on the page but I couldn't find them. So, I did a view source. (I'm using chrome, so I just right clicked and chose view source.) I can't remember exactly what the issue was but I believe they were positioning the words so that they are off of the screen.
As far as removal goes, it may be a good idea to start a new question on this one. Perhaps title it, "My site has 'buy viagra' links pointing at it that I didn't create! How do I get them removed?"
I have never had to deal with such an issue so I'm not sure how you would do it. You can certainly try to find contact info for the URL but I'm doubtful that they're going to talk to you. I do believe that you can file an reinclusion request with Google and explain the situation and they may listen. But I'd want to get more advice on that before I did it.
Also, set up your webmaster tools now! You may not get a message, but I have heard of sites that set up WMT and 1-2 days later the unnatural links warning pops up. At least then, you'll know what you're dealing with.
Good luck!
-
Nakul,
Thanks for the reply! No errors, or major changes lately. I wish that was the problem!
Many Thanks
-
William,
Thanks for the reply!
Yeah! I've lost ranking before that quickly bounced back in 3-4 weeks, but never something like this.
I had about 8 #1 rankings and they are all gone.
-
Marie,
Thanks you so much for your answer. I had no idea those nasty links were there. I took the SEO and SMM over on this site last November, and there were a lot of that stuff. I thought I had gotten rid of it all.
Do you mind me asking what tool you used to find them?
Your explanation seems the plausible. But I have never had a Google penalty, and unfortunately I have not used WMT. So I did not receive any messages. That mistake will be corrected immediately.
Any advise on how to handle the penalties? Procedures? - Time-frames?
Thanks again,
JT
-
Do you have any messages in your WMT?
You've got a lot of unnatural looking stuff in your backlink profile including a large amount of anchor texted links.
Were you aware that you have links pointing back at your site with the anchor text of "buy cheap viagra online" and "buy cheap software"? I checked out one of those backlinks and they're linking to your home page. The link (on http://archive.d3sports.com/dailydose/) is a hidden one.
I would venture a guess that you've got some penalties going on.
If you didn't place those links, then you may need some professional advice on how to get rid of them. Hopefully some of the more seasoned pros will chime in for you.
-
It looks like your homepage is not cached in Google. A lot of the category pages I checked were not cached as well. However your article/post pages are cached. Did you install any new wordpress plugin lately that might have messed up ? It does not look like related to your server being down. Do you see any errors/warning in the Webmaster Console ? I would suggest you install a XML sitemap Plugin, Generate the Sitemap and submit it via the Webmaster Console unless you are already doing so.
-
Give it some time, this happens sometimes in my experience.
It is unlikely that the down time will cause PR problems because PR isn't updated frequently. So give it a few days and try different PR checkers.
Also on another note, if your traffic and organic traffic hasn't changed, there shouldn't be too much worry.
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
-
Site Migration
Hi, I have been researching the best way to migrate six sites into one, since I have never done it, and I am frankly overwhelmed. Some resources say to do it incrementally, and a/b test; but I would prefer not to have to do it, as won't it present a disjointed representation for visitors? The previous sites are older and a bit clumsy compared to the new design and functionality in the new site. Can someone please tell me the right way to approach this? Or tell me the best resource for a step-by-step prep, migrate, and watch process? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1230 -
301 old site to new site?
I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings). Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain? If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Redirection strategy for mobile site
Hello folks! I am just about to launch a mobile specific version of our website. We were not able to make the main site responsive so have decided to make a seperate copy on an m dot subdomain. I have kept the url structure identical between both sites and added a canonical url on the mobile pages pointing to the desktop site. I will detect and redirect all mobile devices and googlebot mobile crawler to the m dot site. The questions i have are as follows... Is that the best approach if you use a mobile specific site on a seperate subdomain? What type of redirects should i use to send mobile users (and googlebot mobile) to the mobile site? My mobile site does not have all the pages the desktop site has. What happens if i redirect a mobile user from a page on the desktop site to a page on the mobile site that does not exist? (will give 404 currently). I guess i could maintain a list of valid mobile urls but this would be a pain (and a bit of an overhead) Your help is most appreciated Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertHill0 -
Magneto site with many pages
just finsihed scan to a magento site. off course I am getting thousand of pages that are dynamic. search pages and other. checking with site command on Google I see 154,000 results which pages it is recommended to block? some people are talking about blocking the search pages and some actually talking about allowing them? any answer on this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Pages that were ranking now are not?
Hi Folks Noticed something strange just now pages that were ranking on position 10 on Google for searches such as 'ufc trainer kinect best price' at the start of this week are no longer ranking? Is what has happened to the site the famous google dance or sandbox effect as the site only officially went live on Monday If this is the case what is the recommended course of action to get back ranking competitively again? as I have no idea on what has gone wrong as I has always tried to follow best practice from these forums and the SEOMOZ and YOUMOZ articles My site is www.cheapfindergames.com Many Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
Help with a Sticky Site
Hey Everyone - I work for a company that is just getting into SEO. We have had some successes, but one project lately has got us stumped. We have been working hard, but have been unable to make an impact in Google rankings with the following site: http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/index.cfm/DesMoines We are trying to optimize for the keyword phrase, "des moines hotel" This hotel is a branch location of a hotel chain in the Midwest. *Note we've already moved up some other branch locations for this hotel chain successfully. We've used several tools including the SEOmoz tool and seem to have higher marks than those sites that rank above us in Google surprisingly. Any idea what we're missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markhope0