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
-
Kim,
Thanks for the update. Most people just do what ever they decide to do and never report back. So, thanks!
I'm glad you were able to get the penalty removed. I actually was just helping someone out who got a penalty and saw something similar, a bunch of blog sites that were nondescript with a ridiculously wide range of topics and even languages, which screams private link network to me. The client said they weren't responsible. It seems that negative SEO is something being done more often.
Thanks again.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
For anyone still out there reading this,here is a brief update: I took the gentle path and followed Google's advice exactly. I used the recent links from Google Webmaster Tools, instead of all the other link info out there. I checked everything leading up to the penalty, and ended up finding a network of 'bad' sites with unnatural links pointing at us. After requesting link, removal I submitted a reconsideration request, being sure to point out the link network, of course, and Google moved the manual penalty.
The plan moving forward is to keep a watch out for bad links and remove them. (which I'm sure is part of Google's master plan - other than ruling the Universe, naturally) They keep appearing, which indicates that lawyers are a target for spam and/or negative SEO!
-
One more thing...I guess I will check the anchor text again, especially as the domain is an exact match domain. I'll see why martindale.com is linking so much, too. I'm sure the firm's partners are all listed there in multiple categories, but I don't see how that disproportionately high ratio of backlinks from martindale.com can be helpful. To be clear, that site is a legal site (with lawyer listings), not an individual lawyer's site.(Thanks Jesse.)
-
Thank all of you for your helpful responses! I used the trial version of link detox from linkresearchtools.com to help me get my bearings, then moved on to ahrefs and majestic seo. There are definitely shady links that exist so I will be trying to get these removed, then disavow them with Google's disavow tool, then request a review/removal of the penalty. I understand that Google may just be ignoring them, but I'm going to play it safe. One site in particular was hiding the backlink. I could only find it by hovering over a 'more links' area and the page's content and surrounding links were totally irrelevant. Other sites were useless directories with no Page Rank and just lists of location-specific law links (like Atlanta Bankruptcy Law, Baltimore Bankruptcy Law, and so on.) The one in particular I found with Link Detox was not even indexed, a sign of a Google penalty (if not total infancy, in a best-case scenario).
I had to put the time in and manually visit the links pulled from Webmaster Tools to discover these. I guess I will try to clean up the worst of them and perhaps leave the 'gray' ones with Page Rank because I'm not sure if they are hurting and I don't want to do more harm than good. Any other advice?
It's a learning process, for sure.
Thanks Again!
-
Yeah I'd have to agree with Marie or at the very least that other domain bringing in 60,000 of your 75,000 links.. why wouldn't that be a factor? Just because it's a "lawyer's site?" What does a lawyer need 60,000 referring links for? That's pretty intense...
Still I'd look closely at your anchor text profile and do a full audit as Marie is suggesting here.
-
I would think that it would be extremely unlikely that links from one wordpress blog would cause a site to get a manual review and a partial match warning message. Any time I've reviewed a site with one of these messages the cause is always a large number of domains linking unnaturally.
-
Great point.
-
Interesting Kurt, thanks for sharing.
Yes I'm sure it can go either way that makes sense as it's basically what the message says. Something along the lines of "some rankings/keywords/pages may be affected," right? I guess if your ranking is affected though you'll be all over this.
Like I said though it's always a good idea to clean up your link profile. Even if no manual action has been taken you may be surprised what sort of improvements you could make escaping any algorithmic penalties.
-
Jesse,
I think it depends on the situation. Matt Cutts has even said what you are saying, that in some cases you don't need to do anything because Google has just taken action against those links. I have, however, seen a situation where dealing with the links that caused a partial manual action did help to improve rankings. In that case, it appeared that Google had no only disavowed the suspect links, but had also penalized the specific keywords (or possibly pages) that were being targeted. There was a clear and quick drop in rankings for specific keywords, but not all the keywords the site ranked for. Once the suspect links were dealt with, the rankings for those keywords improved.
Unless it's a huge pain to deal with the links, I'd take care of them just in case.
-
Yes I was going to say pretty much exactly what ChilyDigital here is saying. Check your anchor text disparity using ahrefs.com or OSE.
The thing about these partial match penalty warnings that I've found is that while it is good to try and address the root of the problem so as to avoid further problems in the future, Google doesn't really seem to be asking much of you. I'm 99% certain what happens in these situations is Google decides to "disavow" the links in question from their end and not pay any attention to them going forward.
Now if these types of links continue to get built in a major way, then you might be facing a larger site-wide penalty. But so far the "penalty" is doing nothing more than discrediting the poison-links it has identified. This is my current theory anyway based on experience with the same message.
When I got this message, I never saw any ranking or traffic fluctuations. I did some more work removing links and cleaning up my link profile and it went away.. "KIND OF." It was weird, the message still existed but when you clicked it no text was present so I'm assuming the message got bugged but either way I never had any actual noticeable/tangible penalties.
Hope this helps..
-
Hi Kimberly, The links on the wordpress.com blog may be an issue. Are there many exact match anchor text links on it pointing to the site.org domain? Do you have any other backlinks on other sites other that the wordpress.com blog that may be 'unnatural'? It sounds like a link audit might be necessary to investigate further why you've received a warning from Google.
-
It sounds like you should either redirect the old Wordpress site or delete it. Redirects are the better SEO solution, but I don't know what Wordpress charges for that, so you'd have to make that financial decision.
As to whether that would solve your problem or not, I don't know. The manual action didn't have any sample links to indicate what the issue was and I haven't reviewed your link profile. There could be other issues.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com
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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Have a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages as a client and they are currently not getting much organic traffic to their level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: https://www.domain.com.au/category/s...-category-type These pages have been on-page optimised, category content added, yet hardly any traffic. However the site level 1, level 2 pages do quite well. So this suggests this might be an internal linking issue? The site is definitely not penalized and as enough authority for these level 3 pages to rank. Any ideas would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Internal nofollow links
Hello, We have a blog and at the end each blog post (and from the sidebar) we link to one main product page (tagged with a particular query string). Now Google will see from every blog post all of these internal links pointing back to this page. Do you think this would cause a problem and that these links should be nofollowed? I think Google will kind of detect that these is kind of a "navigation" as the code will be the same across all webpages. Most of all, doing them nofollow I think it is worse because it may trigger some sort of pagerank sculpting algo filter, if it still exists. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt0 -
Should I try to change these links or no?
Hey guys, I need some advice on a link profile I'm currently working on. Our client sells a product in the hunting industry and has been around for over ten years. I just finished up classifying and looking at all of their links today and found that around half of them are sponsor links, links on "link pages," and a few directory links with almost all of them being followed. Because we are the first company to do SEO for them, I know that these aren't maliciously solicited links, but I'm worried that they may be having a negative impact on the site. Most of the links are coming from other non-competing websites in the outdoor industry which typically tends to have very antiquated sites with very antiquated practices. Essentially, I don't want to go out and try to nofollow or disavow all of these links that the website has had for a long time on other related websites if they're helping us, but I also don't want to be leaving anything up that could algorithmically be identified as spam. Below are some examples to show you what I'm referring to by the sponsor links and link resource pages. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! Sponsored - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com/ or http://outdoorobsession.tv/ or http://thehollywoodhunter.com/ Link Resource Pages - http://bowhuntamerica.com/links or http://cornerarchery.com/CompanyLinks.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Different Hosting Accounts for Linking?
I have several different sites which link to each other (for valid reasons...sister companies etc). Would it be better if these were hosted from different web hosting firms? And if they are hosted by the same hosting company would it be better if they had different accounts and different IP addresses? Not sure I understand C blocks etc. Any tutorial on here about that? I wouls assume it would look better to Google if the links were not from the same IP address. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
DMOZ help
So yesterday I got a DMOZ editor account. I would like to know if Google indexes the editor profile pages on DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor= here are some examples http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=thehelper http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=raph3988 http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=skasselea I would like to know if it is worth while to build up this page so it will pass link juice. And can anyone tell me how frequently Google crawls for new editors (if that's possible?)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raph39880 -
Will links to a subdomain help it rank?
I have an affiliate subdomain on a larger company's domain. (For example I have: www.victor.company.com on www.company.com). Would working to attain backlinks to the subdomain help it rank or will I just be putting forth my effort and helping the domain rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Domain Links or SubDomain Links, which is better?
Hi, I only now found out that www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ are different. Most of my external links are directed to www.domain.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Which I understand is considered the subdomain and not the domain. Should I redirect? (and if so how?)
Should I post new links only to my domain?0 -
Links directory: is it worth it?
Would there be any benefit or penalty for implementing a links directory with over 300 external links to websites that somtimes return the link? Or would it be more beneficial to simply ask for one way inbound links when gaining links? For example this section of this website: http://directory.flyawaysimulation.com/ This is their directory and most but not all of the sites in that directory link back to them. Your ideas, thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640