Penalty recovery gone
-
Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic.
Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty.
Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.
-
Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like we may have taken a hit from Panda 21 at the beginning of November but we were moving the site to a new server so the days right before the update don't have any analytics data.
The last couple of days saw a spike last year because Advent started this weekend instead of next weekend this year so that's why some of the numbers for this weekend look off.
Overall though, it looks like we hit a peak for most keywords in January and then saw a major decline in February when we received our manual penalty and even though the penalty has been officially revoked, we've never recovered fully.
Thanks for the panguin suggestion. We use chartelligence which actually overlays within GA on any chart which is very nice.
I guess I'll go back and manually disavow those bad links even though I've already submitted them and see what happens.
-
It is strange that a page has bad links if not done SEO, I think you may be being affected by Negative Seo
-
A great tool for checking your traffic against google updates is panguin tool - it's a great resource for seeing your google traffic and any drops you may have had and how they're related to panda, penguin, and other algo updates.
Also, check in webmaster tools your latest links - see if more spammy links are coming in recently and if this correlates in any way with your drop - if so, disavow these links and do another reconsideration request.
Do you know if it was specific keywords that were bringing a lot of traffic that you've dropped for or it's more across the board? That will help in figuring out the problem.
Mark
-
You can disavow links in GWT.
-
Hi Ian,
You might still be having bad links associated with your site, that's why you've gone down in traffic again. Check to see if the drop in traffic was associated with any of Google's updates here . Check your competitors and the keywords that they are outranking you for. Are they better optimized for those keywords?
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
-
Google has penalized me for a keyword,and removed from google some one know for how long time is the penalty
i have by some links from fiverr i was ranking 9 for this keyword with 1200 of searches after fiverr it has disappeared from google more then 10 days i guess this is a penalty someone know how long a penalty like this is how many days to months ? i don't get any messages in webmaster tools this is the gig https://www.fiverr.com/carissa30/do-20-unique-domains-high-tf-and-cf-flow-backlinks-high-da?source=Order+page+gig+link&funnel=a7b5fa4f-8c0a-4c3e-98a3-74112b658c7f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexmuller870 -
Google Penguin 2.1 Penalty - Recoverable?
Hello, I have a client that was hit very bad by the Google Penguin 2.1 update. He mentioned he did an intensive link analysis and removed all the bad links; however there were a lot of them (around 6000). His domain has a decent sized domain authority of 30/100. I'm wondering if it's worth it to try and save his domain, or start fresh from a new one. Due to the high number of links I'm not 100% confident that all the bad links were taken care of, and I've heard that even if you remove the links Google won't lift the penalties. What would you do...get a new domain, or risk the next couple months trying to save the existing one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven751 -
Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.
Hi, A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com. If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain? Many thanks! Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThisisPlanB0 -
Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links
Hi, We are in the process of trying to remove a partial manual penalty for unnatural links. I would like to do a complete link audit of our site, where can I get complete data on sites linking to my website? Webmaster tools only appears to show the top 1000 domains. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Hit By Penguin...Wait for recovery or do i change domains?
Hey Guys Would very much appreciate all opinions on our following situation, we have an .uk based ecommerce sports nutrition site www.cardiffsportsnutrition.co.uk Previously we worked with an SEO, that to put it simply did not follow webmaster guidelines(money anchor heavy, bad links etc), we reached some very good ranks too quickly and subsequently after the first penguin we where hit. We didn't receive any link warning or manual penalties just what i am assuming algorithmic...Rankings and traffic drop significantly, but not business ending. Since the first penguin we have done very little to no SEO, some unique content, re-writing of product pages, lots of social activity and didnt really lose much traffic after that, some small ups and down after refresh s and a slight slow decline on some keywords. Come Penguin 2.0...things that where still ranking for have now dropped even further, impressions in webmasters is now down over 50% and we have a had a wkly but not drastic drop in traffic since then. Over the last couple of months we have obtained some good quality links, have added lots of great unique content that has been shared significantly and generated some great traffic to our blog, added more unique product pages and category pages. But organically things are starting to look pretty grim apart from our brand keywords and everything is still in a slow decline and no increase in impressions in webmasters either jsut small drops We have been working to remove the poor quality and toxic links that the previous SEO built,getting anchor text corrected and collating information on the whole process ready to submit a file of links to disavow tool. which we are planning to do within the next couple of wks. Now i have read some successful stories and some not so successful one, so im starting to think of how to deal with this worse case scenario, If our domain is too damaged by the previous SEO guys We have the same domain name but on the .com that will help us carry over our brand name directly, but my concern is even though we have not had any manual penalty and not 301'd the .com back to the .co.uk or any other form of link will the penalties be carried over to the new domain just on the basis of brand association. We wouldn't plan to redirect any of the .co.uk traffic back to the .com but rather focus on our already strong ablate less converting traffic from the likes of twitter and facebook and run a small PPC campaign for some brand keyword to help buffer the traffic loss. While we focus on building good quality links and putting up plenty of new quality content on the site on the new domain that does not have any poor quality links back to it. What im trying to avoid is carry on spending time money and effort on the .co.uk domain for the next 3/4 months and continue to lose traffic slowly and then have to switch the domain anyway. I plan to wait and see for the next 4-6wks after we run the dissavow to but October time would be time i would have to make a decision and go for it. Any advice or opinions would be appreciated marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSN0 -
Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benbug0 -
What is the meaning of anchor text penalty?
If i have 70% back links with same anchor text, will i get penalized? some of my blog's pages which were previously in top 100 in google are no where now. but for other long tail keywords, m still in same position. How to get rid of this penalty? Should i create more links with different anchor text to reduce the effect or should i remove that 70% back links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | web2smspk0