Help Understanding GWT Message
-
Brief background: A few months ago, our firm exchanged blog posts with another law firm in Pennsylvania with followed links. Though we did exchange links, the posts weren't spammy. They wrote "A Floridian's Guide To A Car Accident In Pennyslvania" and we wrote one for Pennsylvanians in Florida. (The reason for this is that Personal Injury law varies drastically from state-to-state, and Florida has a ton of people who move back and forth).
My question: His firm got a message from google saying our link to him violated googles' guidelines. I went and removed the link, BUT I didn't get any message saying his link to our site was a violation. Shouldn't we both have gotten messages? Perhaps, mine is "in the mail" so to speak, but I would think both would go out at the same time, so I'm wondering if there is another possible reason?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Yes, I got it from Majestic SEO. View page source then ctrl+f and type in 'daisy'. A lot of the domains with a lot of exact match anchors - hidden behind giant images.
The registrant of the site probably has no idea this all happened.
-
I'm searching for that anchor text with a site:sexualproblems.net, and once the site comes up (it takes a while), I'm not seeing that anchor text on the site itself, though Google did see it at one point. I wonder if their site got hacked?
Travis, it'd be great if you told us which tool you used. Thanks!
-
Travis,
Can you show me how your seeing we got this information, so I can figure out what to do with it? I just ran our site through OSE, and I'm not seeing that. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right spot.
Thanks,
Ruben
-
We never posted on sexualproblems.com. Well, at least I didn't, but thanks for pointing that out. I'll definitely look into.
-
Your site appears to have received a little less than 70K links from sexualproblems.net in the last 90 days. The anchor text is "daisy fondant cutters". It looks like the result of a post on sexualproblems.com. I could go on, but it looks like the guest posting strategy isn't working out.
-
Hi Ruben,
Since these are "manual" messages, a Google employee had to personally review the account and decide to send the message. It is likely something about the site flagged Google, prompting them to manually review the site. We don't really have a way of knowing if what they address in the message is what flagged that site, but it is likely.
If Google thinks what this site did violated the guidelines, that means any site, including your own, that is in violation of that guideline has the potential to receive the same message.
It is likely that yours is "in the mail." You could receive it a week from now or ten months from now.
I would recommend cleaning up or "no following" the link. You might consider waiting until the other site has submitted their reconsideration request to find out if your actions to remove the link were acceptable.
-
Here's a link to the post that got flagged (the links are removed now): http://www.kempruge.com/a-floridians-guide-to-a-car-accident-in-pennsylvania/
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
-
HTTP 500 Internal Server Error, Need help
Hi, For a few days know google crawlers have been getting 500 errors from our dedicated server whenever they try to crawl the site. Using the "Fetch as Google" tool under health in webmaster tools, I get "Unreachable page" every time I fetch the homepage. Here is exactly what the google crawler is getting: <code>HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 19:52:27 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3 X-Pingback: [http://www.communityadvocate.com/xmlrpc.php](http://www.communityadvocate.com/xmlrpc.php) Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> My url is [http://www.communityadvocate.com](http://www.communityadvocate.com/)</code> and here's the screenshot from Goolge webmater http://screencast.com/t/FoWvqRRtmoEQ How can i fix that? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Vmezoz0 -
User Created Subdomain Help
Have I searched FAQ: Yes My issue is unique because of the way our website works and I hope that someone can provide some guidance on this.Our website http://breezi.com is a website builder where users can build their own website. When users build their site it creates a sub-domain route to their created site, for example: http://mike.breezi.com. Now that I have explained how our site works here is the problem: Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools are indexing ALL the user created websites under our TLD and thus it is our impression that any content created in those sub-domains can confuse the search engine to thinking that the user created website and content is relevant to _OUR _main sitehttp://breezi.com. So, what we would like to know if there is a way to let search engines know that the user created sites and content is not related to our TLD site. Thanks for any help and advise.
Technical SEO | | breezi0 -
Need Help writing 301 redirects in .htaccess file
SEOmoz tool shows me 2 errors for duplicate content pages (www.abc.com and www.abc.com/index.html). I believe, the solution to this is writing 301 redirects I need two 301 redirects 1. abc.com to www.abc.com 2. /index.html to / (which is www.abc.com/index.html to www.abc.com) The code that I currently have is ................................................... RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | WebsiteEditor
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.abc.com/$1 [R=301,L] Redirect 301 http://www.abc.com/index.html http://www.abc.com ...................................................... but this does not redirect /index.html to abc.com. What is wrong here? Please help.0 -
Buying new domains to help with SEO
Hi, Does buying new keyword related domains and 301 redirect them to my site have any seo benefit?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710 -
Will password protecting my test sub-domain help keep the SEs from indexing it?
Hi, all. I'm working in an unfamiliar area here, so I hope someone can tell me if I'm out in left field. I am building a sub-domain called http://test.mysite.com, so that I can upload a client's still-under-construction site while working on it. When completed, it'll go up on his server, replacing his old site. Obviously, I want to ensure that it doesn't get indexed while it's on my test platform. A friend suggested that I password it with htaccess and htpasswd, since we can never be certain the SEs will obey site directives. My question is, what do you think would be the best (and hopefully, simplest) way to accomplish this? I'm no code-monkey, so "simple" is a big plus! Doc By the way, the platform will be Wordpress CMS.
Technical SEO | | Doc_Sheldon0 -
So I Get An Interior Page To Rank, But Lower. How does that help?
Hi, So, I have a term that would bounce around #3 to 5 for. I make a page some months ago that is solely targeted to that term. And, voila! Google sees the new page as the best result instead of the home page and the new page ranks, but at #9 or #10. Of course the homepage is a stronger page, but the new page is better targeted to that term. Using the handy SEOMoz toolbar, the homepage has a page authority of 59 and the newer interior page has 32. Both are equally functional to my purpose. Part of me just wants to 301 in the interior page to the homepage and forget about it. It would take forever to get that interior page up to a similar page authority through the magic of links. What do you think I should do. I feel like I'm channeling Wile E. Coyote. Thanks! Best...Mike
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
Need Help With Robots.txt on Magento eCommerce Site
Hello, I am having difficulty getting my robots.txt file to be configured properly. I am getting error emails from Google products stating they can't view our products because they are being blocked, and this past week, in my SEO dashboard, the URL's receiving search traffic dropped by almost 40%. Is there anyone that can offer assistance on a good template robots.txt file I can use for a Magento eCommerce website? The one I am currently using was found at this site here: e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php - However, I am getting problems from Google now because of it. I searched and found this thread here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/multi-store_set_up/multiple_website_setup_with_different_document_roots#the_root_folder_robots.txt_file - But I felt like maybe I should get some additional help on properly configuring a robots for a Magento site. Thanks in advance for any help. Please, let me know if you need more info to provide assistance.
Technical SEO | | JerDoggMckoy0