Micro Site Penalty?
-
I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz.
After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper.
Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH!
Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns. Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites!
As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO.
Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this!
- server-side 301 redirect for the micro site?
- Delete the micro site (drastic measure)
- Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7
- other options?
The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.
-
Cheers, yea certainly unintentional from my client.
I will include a Google docs spread sheet showing the actions taken to remove these links and probably a link to this discussion!
With a rather humble and embarrassed apology!
oh well my first penalty in a 100 sites or so.
Thanks for your help!
have a great day!
-
Hi Eric
The manual action appearing in the site is not a bad sign to have at all - it shows that it was not algorithmic action and so now that you've identified the problem you should be able to get it removed ASAP.
Yes, I would remove all the links and then in your reconsideration request mention exactly what you have here. The manipulative links were unbeknownst to you, you've identified them all, removed them all (and cite the URLs where they have been removed) and you should be good to go.
To me it looks like these were made in genuine error and not meant to manipulate rankings; you should mention that. It's not everyday where they get reconsiderations where 100% of the bad links will be removed, as in your case, so it should be pretty positive.
These requests typically take 5-7 days, but I have seen them take up to 2 weeks, just an FYI.
-
Cheers Tim I suspected this was a result of this "Unnatural links to your site" and appreciate the reinforcement.
Ranking improvements were solid before unnatural links were put in place but I agree it is a combination of the two.
This just popped up in "Manual Actions" in Webmaster Tools
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.
I will get all the links removed to show best intent then click "Request A Review" hopefully this will speed up the process?
This was out of my control but certainly reinforces my view "Links are earned not bought!"
-
Hi Eric
To me, it looks like you've identified the problem. In the technical sense, it looks like your website is suffering from a over-optimisation/Penguin penalty.
If you look at the links pointing to your product pages, there are a number of unnatural signals. Virtually all of the links come from shademakers.com (unnatural), they all have commercial or targeted anchor text (unnatural) and they are all dofollow, thus passing SEO equity.
The fastest way to remedy this in my eyes would be to remove the links. You could 301 redirect, but I believe removing the links on shademakers.com looks more like a conscious effort to stop this manipulative linking (as it stops any link equity being passed altogether, which is more what the Google algorithm will want to see).
It's worth noting here that, since this is likely an algorithmic penalty, it may take a while for the removal of these links to be seen and reconsidered by that part of the algorithm (and there's nothing unfortunately you can do to accelerate this). Similarly, those links were likely to be the cause of the big jump in rankings (in tandem with your on-site SEO), so in order to see top 3 rankings again you may need to earn high quality and relevant links to those pages with healthier anchor texts. The third scenario is a sort of combination of the two - the bad links have been devalued but no negative action on your site has been taken by the algorithm - in which case you just need to earn high quality links in order to recover the rankings.
I would remove the links completely and try to earn better links. Once rankings start to pick up, you may want to link from the shademakers.com site again (if it's getting any relevant traffic), but if you do so I would almost certainly use branded or non-keyword rich anchor texts and also use no-follow links - to show that you're not trying to pass PageRank or any SEO link equity, but just want to link to a relevant site.
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
-
Ajax tabs on site
Hello, On a webpage I have multiple tabs, each with their own specific content. Now these AJAX/JS tabs, if Google only finds the first tab when the page loads the content would be too thin. What do you suggest as an implementation? With Google being able to crawl and render more JS nowadays, but they deprecated AJAX crawling a while back. I was maybe thinking of doing a following implementation where when JS is disabled, the tabs collapse under each other with the content showing. With JS enabled then they render as tabs. This is usually quite a common implementation for tabbed content plugins on Wordpress as well. Also, Google had commented about that hidden/expandable content would count much less, even with the above JS fix. Look forward to your thoughts on this. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt1 -
Redirecting old mobile site
Hi All, Trying to figure out the best option here. I have a website that used to utilize a separate mobile site (m.xyz.com) but now utilizes responsive design. What is the best way to deal with that old mobile site? De-index? 301 redirect back to the main site in the rare case someone finds the m. site somewhere? THanks! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Interlinking sites in multiple languages
I am working on a project where the client has a main .com site and the following additional sites which are all interlinked: .com site targeting US
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rachelmanning888
.com site targeting China
.HK site targeting Hong Kong All sites contain similar information (although the Chinese site is translated). They are not identical copies but being shopping sites, they contain a lot of similar product information. Webmeup software (now defunct) showed that the inbound links to the main site, from the additional domains are considered risky. Linkrisk shows them as neutral. The client wants them to be interlinked and would not want to remove the additional domains as they get a good amount of traffic. In addition, the messages and products for each country domain have been tailored to a degree to suit that audience. We can rewrite the content on the other domains, but obviously this is a big job. Can anyone advise if this would be causing a problem SEO wise and if so, is the best way to resolve it to rewrite the content on the US and Hong Kong sites? Alternatively would it be better to integrate the whole lot together (they will soon be rebuilding the main site, so it would be an appropriate time to do this).0 -
Merging 11 community sites into 1 regional site
I am merging 11 real estate community sites into 1 regional site and don't really know what type of redirect should I use for the homepage?, for instance: www.homepage.com redirect to www.regionalsite.com/community-page Should I 301 this redirect? If yes, how could I 301 redirect a homepage to an internal page in my new site? Cheers 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mbulox0 -
Does a 302 redirect pass penalties?
I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on. I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain. However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new. This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand. A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty. So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?) Thanks for your help! MB.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Dupicated Site Issues?
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com. Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same. The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped ) Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0