Penalty from Google due to spam that was not our doing
-
Hi,
My company has enjoyed pretty good rankings for our main keywords in Google for the past 13+ years we have been in business. We have always been very white-hat about our SEO -- always erring on the side of not doing anything rather than risking a penalty.
Well, last Thursday, we received the dreaded Google penalty due to a pattern of unnatural links. The hit is devastating - we are not even in the top 50 for our own company name anymore. Through research, we believe we have found the culprit -- and it has nothing to do with any of our own actions. We operate a discussion forum, and there was a link to one of the threads that was being used as the target for a lot of link spam -- Chinese blog comments, etc. We had nothing to do with this, but obviously someone had an agenda and was working on spamming to this page. Who knows - it may have even been the company that was being discussed negatively in the thread, attempting to have us blocked.
We discovered it the same day we received the penalty notice, and issued a reconsideration request, detailing what we believe we found. So far, we haven't disavowed any of the links, but I am thinking we should. We have asked Google if they're able to just turn off any link juice for that one page, especially since we don't know who is doing this spamming, and whether they will continue.
Has anyone experienced something similar? How does one prevent themselves from receiving a penalty that they had nothing to do with? What is there to keep any competitor from launching a spammy link-building campaign to get their competitor removed from Google? Is there anything we can do to resolve this?
Thanks for any and all thoughts...
-
If it is just one thread on a forum that was flooded with bad links, you could delete that thread. Make sure that any traffic to the associated URL's get a true 404 response.
My understanding is that doing so shows that you did not want those incoming links and that you are not gaining any advantage from them. If you do another Reconsideration Request, you should probably tell them that the targeted page was deleted.
-
Hi Kylie,
i can can understand your frustration here. A have had lots of clients in the same boat. Negative SEO seems to be quite prevalent.
i would just go through the disavow process and get rid of unnatural or problematic links. Google said they are pretty good at spotting when it's a target attack, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
-Andy
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 disavow file
Does anybody have any idea how often Google reads the disavow file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
25% of expired domains came with a Google manual penalty
25% of expired domains purchased came with a Google manual penalty, even when Moz spam score was 0 . Read the whole case study here: http://www.authoritywriters.com/2017/10/google-manual-penalty-on-expired-domains.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bluishclouds0 -
Different snippet in Google for same page
Hello, I have a question regarding the snippet of a specific case: When i search the homepage by searching the business name, i find the correct snippet of the homepage (with the meta description that was entered). If i search it via site:www. it still show the default meta description. Has anybody had experience with this? Is there a way to change the snippet of site:www.? Does it influence SEO? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
Html language deprecated by Google?
Hi Mates, Currently we are using on our site two tags for language (we are targeting english ) .... and these are defined on the head section, my question is it is required by Google in order to rank well or it is deprecated. Thank you Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
How to rank my website in Google UK?
Hi guys, I own a London based rubbish removal company, but don't have enough jobs. I know for sure that some of my competitors get most of their jobs trough Google searches. I also have a website, but don't receive calls from it at all. Can you please tell me how to rank my website on keywords like: "rubbish removal london", "waste clearance london", "junk collection london" and other similar keywords? I know that for person like me (without much experience in online marketing) will be difficult task to optimize the website, but at least - I need some advices from where to start. I'm also thinking to hire an SEO but not sure where to find a trusted company. Most importantly I have no idea how much should pay to expect good results? What is too much and what is too low? I will appreciate all advices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gorubbishgo0 -
How does Google select what ends up in the snippet before SERPs?
We rank on page 1 for some keywords. Pulling SEMRush reports, we discovered we were placed #1, and we thought it was out of the norm, then determined it was due to the snippet preview Google created before SERPS. Anyway to know how we can consistently be favored by Google to get the snippet preview? I've read up a structured data markup on schema could help. https://developers.google.com/structured-data/ All input is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ejcruz0 -
Does Google index more than three levels down if the XML sitemap is submitted via Google webmaster Tools?
We are building a very big ecommerce site. The site has 1000 products and has many categories/levels. The site is still in construccion so you cannot see it online. My objective is to get Google to rank the products (level 5) Here is an example level 1 - Homepage - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/ Level 2 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/ Level 3 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/ Level 4 - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/autocebantes.html/ Level 5 - Product is on this level - http://vulcano.moldear.com.ar/piscinas/electrobombas-para-piscinas/autocebantes/autocebante-recomendada-para-filtros-vc-10.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Photo Gallery marked as spam???
Hi all, we recently launched some articles with photo galleries. Our CMS produces a single URL for each photo you click--> www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/1, www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/2 and so forth... We have 6-15 photos in our galleries. Each photo has a caption which contains 1-3 sentences. We do not advertise on our pages, so these gallery pages just contain of the top navigation, sidebar, footer, picture and the caption. My question: Google is indexing these URLs, do you think that they will be considered spammy, as there is almost no content on these pages? Should we noindex them? Or canonical them to the article URL? Or write more content to each photo and let them be indexed??? Thanx....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accessKellyOCG0