Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?
-
For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.
-
Nah. Ditch em. Article directory links are pretty garbage these days. Any miniscule benefit they may still provide isnt worth the headache of wondering if those are the links keeping ya down. Also if you ever have to do a reconsideration request it'll be one less thing for you to clean up because under a manual review there isnt google engineer out there who isnt going to frown on them links.
-
Thanks for the great advice. Should I dump them all or leave a single master copy of each article online? Thanks
-
Article directories have been looked down on by google for quite some time now (basically since panda, long before penguin). Couple that with them coming down on overly aggressive money anchor linking and the issue you have with semi-duped content there (Im guessing you spun them so you could take the same article and shop it to all 10 directories each time you did this) and yeah thats a bad recipe. I'd definitely delete the articles if you still have access to all the accounts. 50 unique * 10 directories Im guessing 500 crap links in total? Ditch em and then work on getting some really awesome replacements (you wont need nearly as many). High quality guest blogging is the new article submission. See if you can't get some guest author accounts at a few tightly related sites from your industry or aim high and see about getting guest author accounts on general purpose but super authoritative sites (few examples that allow this, national geographic, cracked.com, washington times, guardian.co.uk, investopedia, you get the idea here...) dumping those old links and adding in just even 20-30 great ones is going to be a huge lift for you.
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
-
Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
Hey guys and gals, I am hiding elements with @media sizes on the mobile experience for this site. http://prepacademyschools.org/ My question is when hiding elements from mobile, will this have a negative effect on rankings for mobile and or desktop? Right now it is a hero banner and testimonial. My interest is because I feel responsive is now working against conversions when it comes to mobile because desktop typically has the same info several times where mobile it can be repetitive and only needed once. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel1 -
More or Less pages helps in SEO?
Hi all, I have gone through some articles where less pages are suggested and they claim that they will be favoured by Google. I'm not sure as with limited pages, we can only target limited keywords. There might be threat from Google in-terms of doorway pages for more pages. But one of our competitor has many pages like dedicated page for every keyword. And their website ranks high and good for all keywords. I can see three pages created with differnet phrases for same on keyword. If less pages are good, how come this works for our competitor? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
How can do I report a multiple set of duplicated websites design to manipulate SERPs?
Ok, so within one of my client's sectors it has become clear that someone is trying to manipulate the SERPs by registering tons of domains that are all keyword targeted. All of the websites are simply duplications of one another and are merely setup to dominate the SERP listings - which, at the moment, it is beginning to do. None of the sites have any real authority (in some cases 1 PA and DA) and yet they're ranking above much more established websites. The only back links they have are from dodgy-looking forum ones. It's all a bit crazy and it shouldn't be happening. Anyway, all of the domains have been registered by the same person and within a two-month time period of each other. What do you guys think is the best step to take to report these particular websites to Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Will aggregating external content hurt my domain's SERP performance?
Hi, We operate a website that helps parents find babysitters. As a small add- on we currently run a small blog with the topic of childcare and parenting. We are now thinking of introducing a new category to our blog called "best articles to read today". The idea is that we "re-blog" selected articles from other blogs that we believe are relevant for our audience. We have obtained the permission from a number of bloggers that we may fully feature their articles on our blog. Our main aim in doing so is to become a destination site for parents. This obviously creates issues with regard to duplicated content. The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance? And if so, how can this effect be avoided? It isn't important for us that these "featured" articles rank in SERPs, so we could potentially make them "no index" sites or make the "rel canonical" point to the original author. Any thoughts anyone? Thx! Daan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | daan.loening0 -
I need de-spam help/advice
For one of my sites I am working on I outsourced SEO about 3 years ago. One of the "tricks" the SEO used at the time was to pay for several Blog posts to be "sponsored" by this web site using exact match keywords for the domain. 1 Where do I look to determine the spammy links pointing to this site? 2 Have you had success getting rid of these bad links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kadesmith0 -
Would the same template landing page (placed on 50+ targeted domains) help or hurt my ranking?
Scenario: Company ABC has 50 related domains that are being forwarding to the main company URL. Q1: Would there be SEO value by creating a template landing page for each domain that includes product info, photos and keyword links to the main URL? Q2: If all 50+ landing pages were the same, would that penalize the main site due to duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brianmeert0 -
HELP! My client got a DDOS Attack! Need advice
Here the setup: Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore. URL is registered at GoDaddy. Signed up at Dreamhost. We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully. Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server. We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server. Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'. MY QUESTION IS: What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Francisco_Meza0