No manual spam actions found - Now what to do
-
In last Panda update on 22nd January my site traffic reduced 30% to 40% but still some of my keywords are ranking on first and second page in SERP.
With latest Penguin 2.0 update all of my keywords ranking is out of 100. Both times I send reconsideration request and get message that No Manual actions found on site. I just don't know what steps are better to get ranking back. Should I use disavow tool and remove backlinks to recover from Penguin or work more on creating quality links.
My Site : http://goo.gl/sSBes
Thanks,
Steve
-
Thanks for the reply.
I will work on increasing content of sites and other suggestion you mentioned. Due to some lack of resources I am not able to update blog in timely manner I would try to post at least one post a week,
-
What Google considers garbage links has been changing for as long as I have been in search marketing. The problem here is that certain tactics that have worked in the past and might even still work today are starting to get devalued (or worse). Example: PR links, still have some value, but they will continue to get devalued. Matt Cutts continues to say (over and over) that if you do anything in an effort to build links that is not organic in nature (web directories that don't drive traffic to your site, forum posts with links, paid links, etc.) you will get smacked. It isn't a matter of if but when.
The thing that makes this even more confusing is the seemingly random nature of who these penalties affect. Did this guy get hit by P 2.0 definitively? No, but considering the date of his organic traffic drop, it is pretty easy to prove correlation. The fact that your websites have these bad links and that you haven't seen a drop in organic traffic does not prove that he did not get hit. All it proves is that you haven't been hit yet.
Proof:
<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg</a>
-
_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity. _
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.
As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.
The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)
-
I've seen conflicting views on this coming from Google, and I refer you to the link in my answer regarding Pete's comments about reconsideration.
So it may be wrong, but there does seem to be evidence that disavow does not action without either an update, or reconsideration.
Hence passing along the suggestion in good faith.
-
That is wrong...from Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664</a>
Question:
Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?
Answer:
That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.
-
You might want to check out the responses to this question : http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover particularly the comments from Pete Myers regards reconsideration requests.
What I take away from all I've read on Penguin 2 is to proceed as follows:
- Clean up your backlink profile by contacting assorted webmasters asking for link removal
- Use the disavow tool on any you can't get successful removal via direct approach
- If you've used disavow, submit a reconsideration request - once you're sure your site and backlink profile is clean. (I get the definite view that data obtained via disavow is only actioned at algo update, or reconsideration request; hence a reconsideration may be needed even though you have an algorithmic penalty to actually push the disavow live).
Hope this helps!
-
Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.
Here is a good article on this update by this by Danny Sullivan, including a short section on recovering:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463</a>
Other Tools Needed:
<a>http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/</a> - To locate which of your links are spammy
<a>https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal</a> - disavow tool (Use only after heavy research!!!)
Good luck!
Update: I looked through your link profile and have noticed that you have links from your customer pages. Remember that Google takes issue with links from websites that have nothing to do with your site.
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
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 Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?
Hi there, I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue. Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page) After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later. I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate. There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as: Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links, There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound. Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover? Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbutler9120 -
How can I stop spam Google Organic traffic?
Hey Moz, I'm a rather experienced SEO who just encountered a problem I have never faced. I am hoping to get some advice or be pointed in the right direction. I just started work for a new client. Really great client and website. Nicer than most design/content. They will need some rel canonical work but that is not the issue here. The traffic looked great at first glance 131k visits in April. Google Analytics Acquisition Overview showed 94% of the traffic as organic. When I dug deeper and looked at the organic source I saw that Google was 99.9% of it. Normal enough. Then I looked at the time on site and my jaw dropped. 118,454 Organic New Users for Google only stayed on the site for 3 seconds. There is no way that the traffic is real. It does not match what Google Webmaster tools, Moz, and Ahrefs are telling me. How do I stop a service that is sending fake organic Google traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | placementLabs0 -
Change domain whilst under a partial manual links penalty
Hi there We're currently under a manual penalty for some unnatural links to our domain and have been working on fixing that but had our first re-consideration request rejected so we're doing a second round of link removals The issue we have is that we were planning to change our domain before the SSL certificate expires in a couple of weeks and renew the certificate with the new domain but are unsure whether to stop working on the reconsideration request, change the domain and wait until the manual penalty moves to the new domain before continuing the link removal. Alternatively try and use the domain change to select which links are 301'd to the new site and leave behind the bad links in the hope that the manual penalty wouldn't be applied to the new domain Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Google contradictory communications about manual action being applied
Hello,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mylittlepwny
we received a manual action (partial match) for pure spam for a site of ours. The date is not sure, because we didn't receive any notification in mail or inside Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, so all we can say for sure is that we noticed that the manual action page wasn't empty anymore in 10/03/2013. Some context: our Google traffic got a big hit on 07/20/2013, losing around 60% out of 250k visits per day. At first we thought it was an algorithmic penalisation related to Panda update. It already happened a few times in the past: losing part of Google traffic and having it back usually a couple of months after, often even better than before. We were really surprised at first to be deemed as pure spam given that the domain is ours since it was created 7 years ago, that we have never employed black hat techniques and that our efforts were always put into building valuable pages for users instead of using spam techniques to deceive them. But after noticing the manual action, we obviously thought that this was the actual reason for our traffic sudden drop. So we tried to figure out from the 4 URLs that Google reported as examples of the pure spam affected pages, what issues on our site could have been misinterpreted for pure spam. We also checked all the webmaster guidelines and fixed the issues we thought we could not be fully compliant with. All this process lasted for 3 months, after which we submitted our reconsideration request on 12/16/2013.
On 01/07/2013 we got the following answer: We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that would directly affect your site's ranking in Google's search results. You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view actions currently applied to your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking. Google determines the order of search results using a series of computer programs known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or if it's performing more poorly than it once did, check out our Help Center to identify and fix potential causes of the problem. Now we are really puzzled because Google is saying 2 opposite things: We still have a pure spam manual action, and we don't have a manual action (as per their newest response to our reconsideration request).
We could find online a few cases somehow similar to our own, with Google apparently giving contradictory communications about manual actions, but none of them helped to build a clear explanation. I don't want to enter into the merits of the reasons of the penalisation or whether it was or wasn't deserved, but rather knowing if anyone had the same experience or has any guess on what happened.
What we could think of is some bug or problem related to synching between different pieces of Google but still, after some days, the manual action notice is always there on Google Webmaster Tools and nothing changed in our traffic. We are now thinking about sending a second reconsideration request asking to update our Google Webmaster Tools manual actions page accordingly to our current actual status.
What do you think? thank you very much0 -
Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health (GWT)
Hi, We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message: Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
</a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages? Some important page is blocked by robots.txt. Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc..... Now, this message just wont go away - its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ?? Any ideas? THanks0 -
Anyone have an hour right now to cover some SEO questions
Hi folks, I need someone to Skype with me today, on some seo questions, for a multi wordpress set up I`m in middle of developing for franchise local sites. Will pay you $95 for the hour. Thanks Brent Sky pe me: cyberbrent (Brent H, Richmond, BC)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts1 -
My ranking on some keywords is getting better . Now what about geography!
Hi, I finally got a better result on my ranking on specific keyword. Now, here is what I need to do. Just to place you in context, we have acquired 2 companies in Europe since last year ( One in the UK and one in France ) and our head office is in North America. Since our servers are located in NA, I realize the ranking will be better here on specific keywords than it is in the UK and France. I actually managed to get on the first page on google North America, but I am till very var in ranking in France and the UK. Where should I start to get a worldwide ranking ? I could start on the 2 geography mentionned but is there a strategy to get ranked worldwide ? Any help would be appreciated. Best regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | processia0 -
Think I may have found a problem with site. Can you confirm my suspicions?
So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0