Would 37,000 footer links from one site be the cause for our ranking drops?
-
Hey guys,
After this week's Penguin update, I've noticed that one of our clients has seen a dip in rankings.
Because of this, I've had a good link at the client's back link profile in comparison to competitors and noticed that over 37,000 footer links have been generated from one website - providing us with an unhealthy balance of anchor terms.
Do you guys believe this may be the cause for our ranking drops?
Would it be wise to try and contact the webmaster in question to remove the footer links?
Thanks,
Matt
-
Hi
continue optimizing and do not assume it will get back to where it was before.
I see some of the site I optimize stuck in new positions and only a very slow movement upward.
I guess it takes a lot of work to move up again
-
When you say a "waiting game", do you mean weeks? Months?
We've now returned to page three for the keyword.
-
Hi Tom
this may be a waiting game.
I would assume this link is not the only reason for the drop in ranking.
continue with your site review. get busy creating content and clean any other unnatural inbound links.
-
Just an update on this; after removing the footer links we're still seeing a downward movement for one of the most competitive keywords that we were ranking on the first page for.
As I mentioned in my last message, a couple of days ago it dropped to third page and now it's on page 8! Should we be looking at a reconsideration request even though we didn't receive an actual warning from Google?
-
We've now managed to remove the footer links that were incoming from the website I mentioned.
Any advice on the next stage of the process? Or is it just purely a waiting game? Should we submit a reconsideration request? Will we be able to see any immediate changes?
To give you an idea of the scale of the ranking dips; the site was originally floating around 6/7/8 for a competitive keyword but has now dropped to the third page.
-
Hey Tom,
That's great. Just the sort of confirmation I was looking for.
I'll get on to the process of removing these links now.
-
Hey there
That's really an unnatural amount. And if it looks unnatural it's always in line for a penalty.
Has a commercial anchor text been used? Or is it brand? Even if it's brand, it's still a grotesque amount of links, while many of the pages linking to your client's site may be from low quality pages. If it was a commercial anchor text, partial or exact match, then I'd be in little doubt this would cause the penalty.
I'd get the links removed ASAP, or ask the webmaster to make the links nofollow, although that may not suffice now the penalty has been put down.
If this coincided with the penguin update, the likely thing is that you won't see a recovery until the algorithm refreshes - unless we hear otherwise from Google - which is pretty frustrating. A manual penalty can be appealed any time with a reconsideration request, of course.
Hope this helps.
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
-
75% Overnight Drop in Organic Search Traffic
On April 10th my organic search clicks dropped 75% overnight. I have never seen anything like it. What Google algorithm change could have caused this? I have no manual actions and my indexed page count is about the same. I have noticed that several queries that I was number one for including my brand have dropped by anywhere from two to ten spots. The brand dropping out of the first spot is what really gets me. There is nothing similar to it at all. My speed score is moderate, so I don't think that is it. My site was down most of the day on the 9th or 10th, but that has never caused a drop in search clicks and the next day they were about the same. I noticed that the CDC now occupies the number one spot for my brand. Even though the exact brand name is nowhere in the text of the CDC page. I think this might be due to Google trying to help official health organizations do better due to COVID19, but the queries I have dropped on have nothing to do with Coronavirus. Also, none of my other sites have seen this type of problem. Only the health site seems affected. I recently did a press release campaign and my link counts are up, so I don't that is it either. The brand page is https://stdcarriers.com and an example of an effected query is Celebrities with STDs.
Algorithm Updates | | STDCarriers0 -
Too many wordpress redirects impact Rankings?
Our website cms is WordPress. We have recently changed the URL pattern of our blog pages which resulted in hundreds of crawl errors in Google search console. Even though we don't have any broken links; old pages have been reported at Google. We are trying to redirect the old URLs to new which will be handled by auto redirects or manual redirects. Will so many redirects impact on website? I don't mean about internal redirects. I mean about redirects made for the cause of reclaiming non existing pages referred from external sites
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do more internal links from sub-domains to domain (website) hurt rankings?
Hi, We have nearly 10 sub-domains. Couple of our website top pages including homepage have been linked from every page of these sub-domains; from footer or top menu. Is this kind of linking is bad as per Google? What is the right way of linking between website and sub-domains?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Links to category pages unnatural?
If people are linking to your site, it would seem natural that the vast majority of those links would point to the homepage, product page, or a article/content page. Let's say you have 100 links pointing to your site, and 40 of them are pointing to category pages. Would this seem unnatural? Does Google or other search engines have a way of determining this as a factor in ascertaining whether the links are natural or not? Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the pages that are linked to on your site?
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
Recommended action for site hit by penguin ?
What is more advisable, though there surely could be debate on this? Back in '07 till sometime around a year ago it seems our site got hit by google's updates, no manual action though, and have seen in past few months disavowed what we could find as well as deleted a lot of links. We are also working on getting word out on the brand as well and trying to get on some business websites to have articles and offer some discounts. Our keyword rankings seem stuck in limbo the past year or so though. Some main keywords for example seem stuck around page 8 when they used to be on page 1. Question is, can what seems to be a penguin update be recovered from? Is Google likely to refresh the algorithm? Also could starting a new site be more worth the investment - starting fresh with natural links, etc And if googles system could pick up that the site is run from same ip, etc. would they care? Also the keyword competition one of Moz's tools said around 46% if that makes a difference for one of the main keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | xelaetaks0 -
Importance of Links for Local Search
**According to an article about the "no no's for local SEO" links are not very important. Here is an excerpt: "**Local SEO is very different when compared to traditional SEO. The importance of backlinks in local SEO isn’t as important. In other words, links simply don’t matter as much when it comes to local SEO. Googles’ local search algorithm treats links completely differently than its standard algorithm." How accurate is this statement? Wouldn't more links help your local pages rank better in non-local organic results such as the results outside of the new carousel?
Algorithm Updates | | pbhatt0 -
Top resulting sites sites for a specific keyword
I'm teaching myself SEO so that I can speak more intelligently to it with my clients. I've spent a great deal of time on seomoz and love it. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know and that brings me to my current question. I can search on a keyword and see results, however I see every URL available. I'm looking for a simple way to see the root domains for the top 100-500 resulting websites for a specific keyword. Is there an easy way to get this information I'm sure it's right in front of me, but I can't find it. Many thanks, ahossom
Algorithm Updates | | ahossom0 -
Lesser visited, but highly ranked landing paged dropped in rank on Google. Time for a content update?
I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week. This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell. The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side. Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one. This is a first for me. Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms. Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up? I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.
Algorithm Updates | | Ticket_King0
