How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
-
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity.
Some obvious things:
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEOMy client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool.
I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up.
Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.
-
If you feel like you have done everything within your power to try and get the links removed, but there's just no way, then you should disavow the URL or domain. You should attempt to reach the owners of the domain 2-3 times before giving up. During my link removals, there have been a decent number of webmasters that finally responded on my 2nd or 3rd attempt.
As for disavowing URL or domain, if the entire domain is something you'd never want a link from, disavow the entire domain. Even if you only have ONE link from the entire site. Still, disavow the domain. Only disavow the URL if you think the site in general is good quality but you happen to be on 1 particular spammy page for some reason.
-
Hi Philipp,
I checked with Google Webmasters and there is no penalty - good news! I've also attempted to contact those sites with spammy links and I am getting no response. So - would you recommend at this point that I simply go through the disavow at this point?
Thanks in advance,
Joeaux
-
Happy to help
And I took a quick look at the backlink profile for subconsciouschange.com... definitely spammy. A nice cleanse will get you on the right track!
-
Thank you so much for your input... yes, you are all correct - I had the wrong URL. It is actually www.SubconsciousChange.com
I so appreciate your input and will start working right away on those bad links.
-
Is it really www.SubconsciousMind.com ? PR 0 and listed at domainnamesales ?
-
Philip gives good advise, I would add, that if there is no manual penalty, then the algorithm will be dismissing links at best, it would not be penalizing you for them. not for links anyhow
but as Philip said, the domain seems to be parked
-
How to see if your site has received a manual penalty from Google? Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters).
From within there you will be able to see if the website has received a manual penalty from Google. Once you've got the account setup and verified, look on the left menu for "Search Traffic" and then "Manual Actions". If there is a MANUAL penalty imposed, you'll see it there. It will either be "partial" or "site-wide". The former means that only some pages are affected. The latter means that all pages are affected.
If you have a manual penalty, you will NEED to do outreach to get links removed, and THEN you submit a disavow for the ones you were unable to remove. You're right, most spam sites won't have contact info, but you can check http://www.who.is and find an email address in most cases. You will more than likely not get the result you're looking to get if you forego the link removal process and skip straight to a disavow.
One last note, if there's no manual penalty in Google Webmaster Tools, then the site may be penalized algorithmically. If you know there are spammy links in place, you should act as if you were penalized manually, with the only difference being that you won't be submitting a reconsideration request to Google. If the site quality is poor, you will want to research Panda recovery options.
By the way, www.SubconsciousMind.com doesn't seem to exist. So either you typo'd the name, or you have an ever bigger problem on your hands now
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
-
Scraped site, hijacked searches for business name.
Hello, I have a site that was scraped (possibly by a competitor's seo company), who then built links to the duplicate site. When people do a search for the name of the business the scraped site is all that comes up along with the usual third-party sites. They seem to take the site down and put it back up every couple of weeks to maintain the rankings in Google. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this? Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated. Search: LIC Dental Associates Scraped site: old-farmshow.net Legit site: licdentalassociates.com Thanks, Emery
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tntdental1 -
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Am I over "Optimising My Site" or following "Best Practice"
Hi We're developing our site an wanted to ask if we are "over optimising" or following best practice. Maybe you have some recommendations. I've provided 4 examples below. Eventually we'll use Moz on page grader but as a new start up, I'd appreciate your help. Thank you, Faye. 1. URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/ PAGE TITLE: Cipressa | Engineered Brown Wood | The Wood Galleries H1: Cipressa – Engineered Brown Wood KEYWORD: Engineered Brown Wood META: Buy Cipressa Brown Engineered Wood, available at The Wood Galleries, London. Provides an Exceptional Foundation for Elegant Décor & Extravagant Furnishings. IMAGE TAG: Brown Engineered Flooring KEYWORD IN BODY CONTENT: YES (1) 2. URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges/mauro/ H1: Mauro | Beige Engineered Wood | The Wood Galleries PAGE TITLE: Mauro – Beige Engineered Wood KEYWORD: Beige Engineered Wood META: Buy Mauro Beige Engineered Wood Flooring, available at The Wood Galleries, London. Designed to deliver Rich, Dark Undertones with Light hues of Muted Brown. IMG TAG: Beige Wood Flooring KEYWORD IN BODY CONTENT: YES (2) **3. URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges/vela-oak/ ** H1: Vela – Beige Engineered Oak PAGE TITLE: Vela | Beige Engineered Oak | The Wood Galleries KEYWORD: Beige Engineered Oak META: Buy Vela Beige Engineered Oak Wood, available at The Wood Galleries, London. Crafted from the most widely respected hardwoods in the world. IMG TAG: Engineered Oak Flooring KEYWORD IN BODY CONTENT: YES (1) 4. URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks/ciro-rustic/ H1: Ciro – Engineered Rustic Wood PAGE TITLE: Ciro | Engineered Rustic Wood | The Wood Galleries KEYWORD: Engineered Rustic Wood META: Buy Ciro Engineered Rustic Wood, at The Wood Galleries, London. Its stylishly classic oak look exudes a sense of luxury that is simply undeniable. IMG TAG: Dark Wood Flooring, The Wood Galleries KEY WORD IN BODY CONTENT: YES (2)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Faye2340 -
Site De-Indexed except for Homepage
Hi Mozzers,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emerald
Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September: Please see screenshot attached to show this: 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps. Site is: (removed) As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking. It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools. Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing. What else could be wrong? Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks. hDmSHN9.gif0 -
How to fix doorway site
Hello, This client has a one page doorway site that is a copy of a category of his main site. It looks like the main site and has over 100 links to the site. We're cleaning things up to be white hat and we're wondering how to capture this traffic and link juice (this doorway has no backlinks though, it is an EMD) without a ton of money and effort. My thought so far is to put a uniquely designed paypal cart on there with top products and one link to the main site that says something like: To pay by credit card or to see more products, visit mainsite.com Would that be squeeky clean white hat or is that still a doorway headed for an update? What's best to do here on a low budget?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Do sitewide links from other sites hurt SEO?
A friend of mine has a pagerank 3 website that links to all my pages on my site on every page of his site. The anchor text of all these links are the title of each page that it links to. Does this hurt SEO? I can have him change to the links to whatever i want, so if it does hurt, what should i change the anchor text to if needed? Thanks mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
How Does This Site Get Away With It?
The following site is huge in the movie trailer industry: http://bit.ly/18B6tF It ranks #3 in Google for "Movie Trailers" and has high rankings for multiple other major keywords in the industry. Here's the thing; virtually all of their movie trailer pages contain copy/pasted content from other sites. The movie trailer descriptions are the ones given by the movie companies and therefor the same content is on thousands of websites/blogs. We all know Google hates duplicate content at the moment... so how does this site get a away with it? Does it's root-domain authority keep it up there?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | superlordme0 -
Should I 301 Redirect a Site with an 'Unnatural Link' Warning?
Hey Fellow Mozzers, I have recently been approached by a new client that has been issued with an 'Unnatural Link' warning and lost almost all of their rankings. Open Site Explorer shows a ton of spammy links all using main keyword anchor text and there are way too many of them to even consider manually getting them removed. There are two glimmers of hope for the client; The first is that the spammy links are dropping off at a rate of about 25 per week; The second is that they own both the .com and the .co.uk domain for their business. I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to handle this, should I :- Wait it out for some of the spammy links to drop off whilst at the same time pushing social media and build some good clean links using the URL and brand as anchor text? Then submit a recosideration request? Switch the website over from the .com domain to the .co.uk domain and carry out a 301 redirect? Switch the website over from the .com to the .co.uk without doing a redirect and start again for the client with a clean slate? I would still register an address change via Webmaster Tools. Add a duplicate site on the .co.uk domain. Leave the .com site in place but rel="canonical" the entire domain over to the .co.uk Any advice would be very much apprecited. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0