Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
-
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?
More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.
Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..
"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."
We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.
Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?
What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?
Any other tips/tricks?
-
Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.
As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.
We're getting there
Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you. -
I'd hate for you to throw the baby out with the bath water - there are some good links you'd want to keep, and starting from scratch is a real pain. This is what I'd do:
-
Look at all the pages you did build artificial links to in OSE. Consider dropping (410/404 instead of 301) pages that are mostly sending artificial links.
-
Pages that you didn't build artificial links to should be fine. Continue to 301 them as you are.
-
Evaluate the pages you did build links to, and try decide which option is easier. An example would be the home page.
-
Remove the bad/article links manually. If you can't, just do your best and then disavow and resubmit.
-
Don't 301 the page (just kill it and 410 or similar), and then try to salvage any of the good links by having them changed to the .org.
There are at most 200 linking domains once you combine links from all your tools - it shouldn't be hard to see fairly quickly whether the site is a spam/article domain or a legitimate site. Also, if your friend's site is relevant there shouldn't be a problem if he links with branded (non-commercial) anchor text.
Most people only have a handfull of pages they build links to - review those and hopefully you can start over fresh with the good links you had.
-
-
Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend
-
Looking at the back links for .org, I'd think seriously about just dropping that 301 from the home page of the .com site and any other pages that have bad links going to them.
I'm not sure why OSE shows links that are pointing to the .com site as back links to the .org site. I'd go ahead and delete those accounts, since it seems all those links point to .com anyway.
I'd be working to distance myself from the .com site as much as possible.
-
Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012. Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.
But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems. One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.
-
180 days is the best practice for leaving a 301 in place. You could remove that redirect and that will leave all those links pointing to the .com unaffiliated with the .org site.
How did you do your 301s? page by page or did you 301 the whole domain to the .org site? There are still a few URLs left in the index for that domain
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
-
Author Credit when Using Existing Article
Hello, We have received permission from a consultant we partner with to publish one of his articles on our site (listing him as the author, of course). However, he currently has the article published on his site, so if I put it on my site will I get penalized for stealing content? Is there some sort of tagging that will provide him/his site credit? Maybe a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
Effect of Publishing Blog Posts Resembling Classified Advertisements
Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) markets commercial real estate for lease in New York City. Any potential negative impact in terms of ranking and traffic by using our blog post in an unconventional manner? I am considering publishing a weekly post describing the latest commercial listings for lease. The post would be formatted and resemble classified advertising appearing in such newspapers as The New York Times. The ads are concise and appealing. Property listings drive a high click thru rate, so I believe blogs posts based on property listings and formatted like old newspaper ads might really improve visitor engagement. Each add could have a link to a corresponding listing page. Would using the blog in this manner every week have a detrimental effect or could prove beneficial? Thoughts??? lr6MIiR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How to check competitors' strengths/weaknesses?
How to and what to check in competitors' strengths/weaknesses?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Green.landon1 -
Philosophy & Deep Thoughts On Tag/Category URLs
Hello, SEO Gurus! First off, my many thanks to this community for all of your past help and perspective. This is by far the most valuable SEO community on the web, and it is precisely because of all of you being here. Thanks! I've recently kicked off a robust niche biotech news publishing site for a client, and in the first 6 weeks, we've generated 15K+ views and 9300 visits. The site is built on the WordPress platform. I'm well aware that a best practice is to noindex tag and category pages, as I've heard SEOs say that they potentially lead to duplicate content issues. We're using tags and categories heavily, and to date, we've had just 282 visits from tag & category pages. So, that's 2.89% of our traffic; the vast majority of traffic has landed on the homepage or article pages (we are using author markup). Here's my question, though, and it's more philosophical: do these pages really cause a duplicate content issue? Isn't Google able to determine that said page is a tag page, and thus not worthy of duplicate content penalties? If not, then why not? To me, tag/category pages are sometimes better content pages to have ranked than article pages, since, for news especially, they potentially give searchers a better search result (particularly for short tail keywords). For example, if I write articles all the time about the Mayo Clinic," I'd rather have my evergreen "Mayo Clinic" tag page rank on page one for the keyword "mayo clinic" than just one specific article that very quickly drops out of the news cycle. Know what I mean? So, to summarize: 1. Are doindexed tag/category pages really a duplicate content problem, and if so, why the heck? 2. Is there a strategy for ranking tag/category pages for news publishing sites ahead of article pages? Thanks as always for your time and attention. Kind Regards, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Domain w/ Identical Content to Site we are Optimizing
Hi Guys, We've been optimizing a client's site for about a year or so now and on a call the other day the client brought up that he owns and operates another site that's marketing the same product, but to a difference audience (we work on the direct to consumer side, this is a distributior focused site),with the same exact content as the site we are optimizing. Obviously this is a major duplcant content issue and we need to get it resolved very quickjly. We have already reccomendt to the client that we re-write content, but this is where my questions comes in - Which site should we rewrite the content on? The site we are optimizing is the more impoorant of the two, while we still want the other site to hold rankings we dont want to end up accidently optimizing the other site wherein the site we are working on full time suffers a lost when a "compeiting" site creates compeltely new content and may, accidentally, end up ranking higher than the site we are focusing on full time. As links also play a role, would that be a KPI to look at here in determining which site gets new content and which does not? In this scenairo, would would you guys recommend? Just want to make sure I'm dotting all my I's, and crossing T's here. Many thanks to all in advance, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Havas_Disco0 -
Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles
Hello all, think per instance in a comparator of cars, motorbikes, etc, where you have dozens of brands, types of cars and motorbikes like diesel or oil, 4x4 vs sport, etc So, in one part of your site you are reviewing them in detail, explaining everything. You also have a database with hundreds of models with several specs like top speed, length, engine, etc so you can automatically create an info page for these hundreds of models. How would you make both of them live together in your website? If you add the review to the automatted articles, then you would have an unconsistency as you cannot manually review all the products. On the other hand, doing it separetly will lead to a very, very similar title posts and urls (revision vs automated versions). In my particular case, I just had the revisions until now and my site is developed in Wordpress. I had all the url posts below the home (mysite.com/review-of-car-x-of-brand-y) and now I am going to add the automatted ones and am thinking on place the automatted ones like WP Custom Posts and the url would be mysite.com/cars/description-of-car-x-of-brand-y. But still have the problem with categories, tags, etc, etc Well, it is long question but what do you think about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome1