Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links FROM My Site - Where?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I've just received a manual penalty for one of my websites. The penalty is for 'unnatural links from my site which I find disturbing because I can't see that anything really wrong with it.
The website is www.lighting-tips.co.uk - its a pretty new blog (only 6-7 posts) and whilst I've allowed guest posting I'm being very careful that the content is relevant and good quality. I'm only allowing 1 - 2 links and very few with proper anchor text so I'm wondering what has been done so wrong that I'm getting this manual penalty? Am I missing something here?
Thanks in advance.
Aaron
-
Those guest blogs were mostly created for the purpose of improving another site's PageRank and manipulating the search results. Even if they're not paid links they are links that were made with the intention of gaming Google. If you remove the links or nofollow them and then file for reconsideration you'll get your penalty removed.
-
Hi Aaron,
Yup - MBG will be your downfall here. You will need to remove those posts to be considered for re-inclusion and the penalty lifted. Google has only just taken this action in the last day or two, so watch our for more analysis and blog posts / commentary on the fall-out and recovery. It has affected a huge collection of sites, including some that used MBG years ago and only for two or three posts.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Thanks Philip - As it happens it was part of myblogguest.com. I had no idea Google took it down. Looks like they really have it in for them.
The website has basically only guest blogs - I thought it'll be okay as long as the content was good and useful to real people and not too many links but obviously that's not the case.
So back to the drawing board.
Aaron
-
Curious... was your site apart of the MyBlogGuest.com network? They were recently taken down hard by Google.
Here's a recent Tweet from Matt Cutts stating that sites posting guest posts can receive manual penalties, not just sites that receive links from guest posts: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/446438659689316353
Your site does seem like pretty good quality, but the sole purpose of it appears to be for guest blogging opportunities. Someone manually reviewed it and decided it was penalty worthy... To be reconsidered you might need to either A) remove all the links or B) nofollow all the links. I'm not 100% sure if nofollowing is enough. You'll probably also want to start posting a lot more content that isn't guest blogs. You might be already doing that (I didn't look around for too long). Good luck, Aaron.
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
-
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Manual Removal Request Versus Automated Request to Remove Bad Links
Our site has several hundred toxic links. We would prefer that the webmaster remove them rather than submitting a disavow file to Google. Are we better off writing web masters over and over again to get the links removed? If someone is monitoring the removal and keeps writing the web masters will this ultimately get better results than using some automated program like LinkDetox to process the requests? Or is this the type of request that will be ignored no matter what we do and how we ask? I am willing to invest in the manual labor, but only if there is some chance of a favorable outcome. Does anyone have experience with this? Basically how to get the highest compliance rate for link removal requests? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Site Wide Footer Links Exception, Any Advice ?
I was reading the following Q&A on site wide footer links, http://moz.com/community/q/site-wide-links-from-another-domain-could-these-cause-a-problem I feel my situation is slightly different however,we have lots of international sites linking to each other through these links like our sites for different counties and languages so our German, French and Spanish sites, http://www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/ Our main UK site has always ranked very well and has never really had a problem despite always having had these followed sitewide footer links, Because of this we regularly get high amount of visitors performing English language searches from different counties and i don't think it is a bad thing having more country/language specific sites of ours available in the footer for visitors that may prefer a more localized site, Our main website has to be at least 10+ years old at least, has a lot of strong links compared to our competitors, but the smaller German and Spanish sites are relatively smaller in size and most only 1-2 years old, my big fear is that these smaller sites would not be able to stand on there own without these footer links from our main site, After reading the community question caused me to question this ?, should i take a leap of faith and no-follow all of these site wide footer links connecting all of our sites ? we never really had a problem ranking so i don't really see the need but would this be the best thing to do ? Thank you, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Google showing 10 million less links than October
I've received no messages from Google about 'iffy' links whatsoever, and the links they're reporting in Webmaster Toosl have declined by 10 MILLION since October. We did go through a CMS upgrade in December which I believe had some impact, and then I set a preferred domain at the end of last month, but we were bleeding links before then. Any idea what could have happened? We don't engage in any link building schemes whatsoever, and like I mentioned, I've received no messages at all from Google regarding a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aggie0 -
On-site links
Hi everybody, There's a lot of information about getting sitewide backlinks, but so few about on-site optimization. Is there a maximum of links to put on a page ? Is there a maximum of link that a page should receive ? etc ... ? So, what is the optimal strategy ? And I'm only concerned about on-page and on-site link, not backlinks commming from other sites. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPilon0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0