Devalued links or negative affect?
-
Hi there,
I'm looking into an issue with a site that was hit after Penguin was introduced.
The site lost 70% of traffic over night.
The site in question seemed to have a large number of backlinks with over optimized anchor text which seems to most likely be the reason for drop in rankings.
But there is also some links from blog networks here too unfortunately, so my question here really is do Google just devalue these links and discount them from consideration in their ranking algorithm or do the links still count but instead of adding positive affects in SERPs add a negative affect?
My reason for this question is I'm trying to determine whether it's worth saving this website or just starting fresh with a new domain.
That does bring me to another question, if I have to start fresh on a new domain is it a possibility to reuse the content from the old site? (providing I remove the URLs from Google via Webmaster tools).
Any help/advice/answers here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools
_Honestly speaking I did not know that thanks for the update .. _
-
If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools.
Now, if a website didn't have webmaster tools, you could set it up and then file a reconsideration request. If there was no manual warning to start with you will get a notice from Google telling you so.
However, when you ask for a reconsideration request you are opening yourself up to potentially have a manual review from Google. So if you're not squeaky clean you could end up attracting yourself a manual penalty on top of the algorithmic issues you have.
As far as diagnosing Penguin, here is some information on how to diagnose Penguin, but it's not always a simple diagnosis.
-
_But how do you know that your website is hit by penguin? I hope there is no way to tell whether a website is hit by penguin or manual penalty. _
-
Hi Marie,
That's a great response and inline with our thinking here. The links are not within our control and we've decided to start a fresh.
The site content ranked really well before Penguin so I am hoping it will recover fast.
Thanks and best regards,
Jason
-
A reconsideration request will not help if there is no manual warning in WMT. Penguin is algorithmic.
-
Ok, Here is the thing.
Did you send a reconsideration request?
_If not, please send reconsideration request after getting rid of some spammy links. Make sure you have listed all the URLs where the link references are still available in a separate Google Spreadsheet File along with the reconsideration request. If you get a response that no manual action is taken, we can be sure of one thing that your website is hit by algo shuffle and this will make things murkier.
Now if your website is hit by manual penalty, you will get a response that the manual penalty is partially removed or not removed at all._
_Now, as some reputed online marketers say if you have not built those links, you would not have to care for them at all but if you have done it themselves, you need to get them down. _
-
I really do think that sites with bad links are penalized as opposed to just losing the link juice from those links. I am working on a site right now that was ranking well for years. Then they hired an SEO to try to rank even better. The SEO built a bunch of anchor texted links and on April 24 (Penguin) their rankings plummeted.
No one knows exactly what is necessary for recovery from Penguin. I think a site can recover if the backlink issue is an easy one to fix. For example, the SEOMoz article on WPMU recovery showed that they were able to remove a pile of footer anchor texted links and regain their rankings with the Penguin refresh on May 25. But for most sites, if you've got anchor texted links in a bunch of places, recovery is pretty much impossible.
In doing unnatural links penalty removal I have found that maybe 15% of webmasters respond to my requests to remove links. For some niches that number is higher. But in order to recover from Penguin I'm guessing you'll need 85-95% of bad links removed and that is probably not going to happen.
I'd start fresh. Definitely don't redirect the old domain to the new.
You can noindex all of the content on the old domain and reuse it on the new domain. It may help to go into webmaster tools for the old domain and ask Google to remove the old urls from the index.
Of course, you'll be starting fresh and have to earn good quality backlinks. Good luck!
-
Hi Alison, thanks for your help with this.
We started contacting webmasters initially however this proved to be a waste of time for the most part as the majority of webmasters didn't respond to requests.
A new site is looking like the way to go, thanks again.
-
Thanks Deb Dulal Dey, unfortunately there are too many links to make this worth while doing. On the other hand the content on the site is very good though.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
-
Thanks Baptiste, you've given me a lot to think about there.
-
Well, @Jason Brooks
Sorry to say but you need get rid of these crappy links otherwise your website will never be able to recover from Penguin update. And in the mean time, you need to make your website awesome by publishing great content that will help you earn some quality links the natural way.
-
Hi Jason,
To answer the first question, low quality links can have a negative effect on rankings, particularly those associated with link networks or if the links look manipulative. That being said, most sites have some sort of spammy sites linking to them for reasons beyond their control, and Google don't seem likely to penalise a small amount of these - they will probably just ignore the links and discount any value that they would have passed.
Have you tried to clean up your link profile by contacting the webmasters of the blog networks and asking them to remove the links?
Starting completely from scratch seems a little extreme, but if you feel that the links are very extensive and hard to rectify, and if the current domain isn't ranking and doesn't have much authority, then it might be the easiest way to "start fresh". Bear in mind that a new domain is likely to be sandboxed and will take a substantial amount of time to gain trust and authority. It would be fine to reuse the content provided that the original content is removed and deindexed.
Good luck.
-
Hi Jason,
With infos from the latest slideshare of Ian Howells, http://slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin, I think some of these links are devaluated, and some are penalizing the site. You may remove them and confess to Google, or start on a new domain, or maybe use a new URL for every page, including the homepage.
This is a though question, penguin recovery is still an unknown process and nothing is guaranteed.
About content re-use, Howells did put the same content on another page, without 301 and it worked. Maybe you can put 404 or remove the content and put it on a fresh domain.
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
-
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
How should we handle re-directory links? Should we remove these links?
We are currently cleaning up bad links that were purchased by a previous SEO agency. We have found links on anonym.to pages that redirect traffic to our site automatically. How should this be handled? Should we remove these links?
Technical SEO | | Lorne_Marr0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Bad link profile?
Hi Mozzers! We have recently been handed this client due to the former SEO company building up a bad link profile, which resulted in the site dropping off the search results all together. Forcing them to get a new domain. This happened in July last year and we are unsure whether it would be wise to submit a reconsideration request and then 301 their old sites pages to the new domain. Basically I'm asking whether you can spot any spammy links being built in their profile. Here is the old domain: http://www.claimssolicitors.co.uk/ It would be great if you could help me out! 🙂 Thanks
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Having www. and non www. links indexed
Hey guys, As the title states, the two versions of the website are indexed in Google. How should I proceed? Please also note that the links on the website are without the www. How should I proceed knowing that the client prefers to have the www. version indexed. Here are the steps that I have in mind right now: I set the preferred domain on GWMT as the one with www. I 301 redirect any non www. URL to the www. version. What are your thoughts? Should I 301 redirect the URL's? or is setting the preference on GWMT enough? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
HTTP301 or link ?
We have a page on a website (let's name it ABC) which ranks very well on Google for a specific keyword but this keyword is not the main activity of website ABC. For this reason we created website XYZ for offering the services related to the specific keyword. How shall we redirect the visitors from website ABC to website XYZ so XYZ gets all the weight ? Is it best to do an HTTP301 from the specific page on site ABC or from site ABC, remove nearly all content related to the keyword and create a link to website XYZ ? Your advice is well appreciated.
Technical SEO | | netbuilder0 -
Can spammy links affect indexing?
Meaning, if you have a lot of bad quality links (directories, blog comments) that are giving great rankings for some terms (on a homepage of a site), could the low quality of these links negatively affect the crawling frequency of interior pages or perhaps even give interior pages a ranking penalty?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0