On site links triggering anchor text algorithmic penatly?
-
I'm trying to figure out why a drop in ranking occurred and think it may be related to an increase in on site links. I've attached images of the SEO moz report showing a jump in links from a few hundred to around 15,000 within the space of a week. I think this may be due to some on site work I did when I created categories (I use wordpress) for a large number of cities and towns in the UK. I soon realised I'd run into duplicate content issues and removed all these categories within a few days. As I added categories I also ran into 'too many on page links' warnings as each category I added created a new link and I ended up with hundreds on each page.
If you look at the analytics reports I suffered a huge drop in rankings on the 10th March and think this could be due to an on site anchor text problem that was caused by adding the categories and in turn creating many on site links. SEO moz found these links on the 11th and 25th Feb but my guess is that Google found them around at the same time but if these links are the problem then why didn't my rankings drop until the 10th March? Surely they would have dropped sooner? Would this cause a drop in rankings?
I've recieved an email from google saying that no manual penalty was applied to the site after I submitted a reconsideration request. Therefore it must be some kind of algorithmic penalty. Could this be the problem and if not what else should I look at. My baclink profile appears to be okay and I've been careful to vary my anchor text with inbound link building.
I'm at a loss as to what to do next. Any help will be much appreciated!
-
Ok thanks.
Sam.
-
I'll need to wait until tomorrow to check on this in OSE when they revert to the newer index once again. All of my link exports are currently showing link count prior to the increase. Should be able to update you tomorrow after I get a chance to look.
Ok, to update my response here, OSE is showing 14,000+ links as a result of your on-site changes. You can see that as a list of 745 top pages: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/pages.html?page=16&site=www.top-10-dating-reviews.com&sort=page_authority. Looks like those pages have at least 70 links each, which easily exceeds 14,000 possible links being found.
Open Site Explorer is updated roughly 1-2 times per month, and shows data that is roughly 20-50 days old depending on when you look at it and when the index was crawled. That's the explanation for why you're still seeing this in the search results. If it doesn't go away within the next 1-2 OSE updates then I'd look into it further.
--
Regarding the original question about whether internal links can hurt the domain, a Matt Cutts video was released yesterday partially addressing this:
Will multiple internal links with the same anchor text hurt a site's ranking?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ
That doesn't mean all of those pages of duplicate content may not have hurt rankings, but the links themselves were not the issue.
--
I'm still confused by the Analytics drop but that could be due to a number of things. I'd say the answer lies in digging through Analytics and finding out what exactly dropped that day.
-
Thanks for your reply. creating an extreme number of categories is what I did. I've deleted them now but but still on my seomoz link analysis it says over 14,000 links? I have no idea why? The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com ( there is some adult content there) . Any ideas appreciated!
-
OK, so assuming that the large jump in links is coming from internal links, here are a few ways that Wordpress might create that many pages:
- Creating an extreme number of categories (more than 20-30) while using permalinks that contain /%category%/ and applying posts to multiple categories.
- Using a theme that contains parameterized URLs such as ?reply-to-comment at the end of every comment reply button.
- Using a strange permalink setting that causes issues.
If all of those pages are really new internal URLs then I suppose it could have confused Google and affected your rankings but since I have not dealt with such an extreme amount of duplicate content added so quickly I couldn't say for sure.
There are also plenty of ways that you could have triggered that many external links. Any sidebar or footer link on a large site could easily add thousands of links. I highly doubt this type of link would have caused a ranking drop on its own - it's no different than someone adding you to their blogroll.
This is a difficult question to answer properly without looking at the site or the exact links, because all I can do is list of lots of hypothetical causes. If you'd like to include the domain or PM it to me I'm happy to look at the website itself.
-
Thanks for your reply. The urls I removed are 404'ing so should I remove these urls in webmaster tools or let them drop out of the index naturally? They keep popping up in webmaser tools as crawl errors.
-
It's a tricky situation, it seems like you were making many changes to your site, it's always risky to put links with keyword rich anchors, and when they're too many and built in a short time period that's definitely dangerous.
First of all get rid of everything you made in a "dangerous way" like your many internal links, normally google has itsrict parameters to check out a page and when you're above a certain threshold you get hit. However I think that to recover the threshold is even lower, it seems like, google is more strict with you since you've tried to game their algo.
Now these are just my ideas and nothing confirmed but I think that you should try to clean up all the new links first, then have a look at your pages, that way to create a lot of pages in such short time, seems that they're programmed pages without any valuable content so they may be toxic for your recovery. Try to make a step back, and restart creating them on a slower pace and maybe hope google to reconsider your position. However if you don't have any manual penalty you'll have to wait until you get recovered. Reconsideration requests won't help you at all.
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
-
Will link juice still be passed if you have the same links in multiple, outreach articles?
We are developing high quality, unique content and sending them out to bloggers to for guest posts. In these articles we have links to 2 to 3 sites. While the links are completely relevant, each article points to the same 2 to 3 sites. The link text varies slightly from article to article, but the linked-to site/URLs remain the same. We have read that it is best to have 2 to 3 external links, not all pointing to the same site. We have followed this rule, but the 2 to 3 external sites are the same sites on the other articles. I'm having a hard time explaining this, so I hope this makes sense. My concern is, will Google see this as a pattern and link juice won't be passed to the linked-to URLs, or worst penalize all/some of the sites being linked to or linked from? Someone I spoke to had suggest that my "link scheme" describes a "link wheel" and the site(s) will be penalized by Penguin. Is there any truth to this statement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Sitewide Footer Links & Sister Sites
Hi We have a number of sister sites across Europe - the sites are under a different domain name, but have a very similar layout & product offering. When looking at duplicate content, they are flagged as being a moderate risk with similar content - we don't duplicate product content, however it's similar. We also link to them in the footer in a drop down - not anchor text links - however this is still seen by Google. I don't think I'll be able to remove links to our sister companies, but should I implement the Href lang if the sites are slightly different? Or find another way to link to them? Here's an example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key & https://www.manutan.fr/fr/maf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links FROM My Site - Where?
Hi Mozzers, I've just received a manual penalty for one of my websites. The penalty is for 'unnatural links from my site which I find disturbing because I can't see that anything really wrong with it. The website is www.lighting-tips.co.uk - its a pretty new blog (only 6-7 posts) and whilst I've allowed guest posting I'm being very careful that the content is relevant and good quality. I'm only allowing 1 - 2 links and very few with proper anchor text so I'm wondering what has been done so wrong that I'm getting this manual penalty? Am I missing something here? Thanks in advance. Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronGro0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Site rankings steadily decreasing - do I need to remove links?
Since mid-April, our ranking have been steadily declining. Our two main keywords are 'nuts and bolts' and 'bolts and nuts'. 'nuts and bolts' dropped from 7th to 46th in May and has recovered slightly to 28th, and 'bolts and nuts' moved from 7th to 16th, and is today 24th. Ranking on keywords we specialise in have fared better, but they're fairly niche. 'bsw bolts' has moved from 2nd to 4th, and 'imperial bolts' has moved from 1st to 4th. I think my link profile is the issue. I don't think we've been penalised by Penguin directly (I may be wrong, I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term as 'bolts and nuts' after Penguin if we had been penalised.), but I think what's happened is that sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect. Does that sound right? Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Do I need to delete all the directory links? We do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here. Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases. Should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Or should I just concentrate on building better links? I'm not sure where to start! Any advice is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
Anchor text diversity for internal links?
Should I be worried about anchor text diversity for my internal links? It seems like I should be ok but I just wanted to double check... you know how google can be
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
What's the news on sitwide nofollow links and anchor text penalties
Is it possible to be penalized for sitewide nofollow links because of anchor text penalties, even if you use branded anchor text?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Diversifying anchor text question
Hi, I've seen a new article by Dr. Pete on diversifying links for 2013 (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013), now my question is this: Dr. Pete talks about mixing up the anchor text for links, is so we don't get caught out by Google or actually mixing it has a better impact? For example: 1. 20 anchor text links targeting just the target term. 2. 20 anchor text links targeting 4 variations of the target term. Is number 2 recommended so things look natural or does it actually have a better impact on SEO. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0