Website rankings plummeted after a negative SEO attack - help!
-
Hello Mozzers
A website of a new client (http://bit.ly/PuVNTp) use to rank very well. It was on the top page for any relevant search terms in its industry in Southern Ontario (Canada). Late last year, the client was the victim of a negative SEO attack. Thousands upon thousands of spammy backlinks were built (suspected to be bought using something like Fiverr). The links came from very questionable sites or just low quality sites.
The backlink growth window was very small (2,000 every 24 hours or so). Since that happened that site has all but disappeared from search results. It is still indexed and the owner has disavowed most of the bad backlinks but the site can't seem to bounce back.
The same happened for another site that they own (http://bit.ly/1tErxpu) except the number backlinks produced was even higher. The sites both suffer from duplicate content issues and at one point (in 2012) were de-indexed due to the very spammy work of a former SEO. They came back in early 2013 and were fine for some time.
Thoughts?
-
Matt, tell you from the experience that your concern is right but you are missing a thing that should really consider!
You are removing and disavowing all the bad links this is exactly what you should be doing (give a try on removing them because this is very important here) and then try to build so high quality links at the same time.
If you see less margin of quality resources available within your niche try to do something that get you press ad authority links from media sites. This will give you some positive points in the eye of Google and get you more chance to recover!!
-
Doesn't take much in this particular industry to rank. The competitors who do consistently well have a small number of backlinks and lower authority levels than the sites listed above. The client does have a few good back links and a nice handful of internal links.
What concerns me is the never bouncing back part. I have advised them of this and further advised them to start fresh but their is an emotional attachment to the brands that they can't let go (understandably so). My fear is that we will put in a great deal of time and resources into something that may be destined to fail now.
Would love to hear stories of others who were in a similar circumstance.
-
Sorry to hear about your website pain.
I am on the other side of the spammy link fence. I paid for an seo in 2011 to work on a site. They used black hat seo methods such as link from places such as Fiverr, yet they used digital point forums for links.
Then Here it is 2012. and Google hates me.
2013 I am a member of Moz. The best move I have made for sure.
I have done what you have and updated a disavow txt file.
I have heard many different strategies. Some say you will never recover from a non manual penalty. Some say clean up bad backlinks then replace them with good quality natural links. Then I have had some say clean up backlinks, create new ones, and then wait till the next update.
I have started with zero citations to now I have 200 or so. I do not have a bunch of backlinks, about 230, yet I am trying to gather high quality links.
So I think if you once ranked with bad backlinks, you must replace them with good quality backlinks. Other sites are ranking, so maybe use the explorer tool to see what the competition sites are using for backlinks, and see if there are any opportunities.
Best of wishes
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
-
Is it possible that my Da and Pa will be high and i’m still not ranking?
what would be those reasons ? factors that im not ranking? what bad seo practices to steer clear? need an anwer in depth i would really appreciate the answers Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calvinkj0 -
I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
Hi there, I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc.. however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week. The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good? Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now. Thanks for reading! duGeW
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binkez321 -
.com geotagging redirect to subdomains - will it affect SEO?
Hi guys, We have a .com domain and we've got geoIP on it, so UK goes to .co.uk and USA goes to .com/us We're just migrating over to another platform so we're thinking of keeping a "dummy" server just to do this geoIP pointing for us. Essentially .com will just point over to the right place and hold a specific .com/abc (which is generic for everyone worldwide) Current Scenario:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Infruition
.com (Magento + geoIP)
.com/us (US Magento)
.co.uk (UK - geoIP redirect to Shopify)
.com/abc (sits on Magento server) Wanted Scenario:
.com - used for GEOIP and a specific .com/abc (for all users)
.co.uk (UK) - Shopify eCom
.com/us -> migration to us.xx.com (USA) - Shopify eCom I just wanted to know if this will affect our rankings on google? Also, any advice as to the best practises here would be great. Thanks! Nitesh0 -
Bad for SEO to have two very similar websites on the same server?
Is it bad for SEO to have two very similar sites on the same server? What's the best way to set this up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Redesign Troubleshooting Help
We launched a redesign at the end of May and soon after, our website was de-indexed from Google. Here are the changes that I implemented so far to try to fix this issue: 301 redirect chain - We changed all our URLs and implemented 301 redirects. However, these are multiple redirects meaning 1 URL redirects to a second and then a 3rd. I was told that this could confuse Google. For example: http://cncahealth.com 301s to http://www.cncahealth.com 301s to https://www.cncahealth.com We wrote a rule for each variation of the URL and not there is only a one to one 301 redirect and this was validated with urivalet.com. Canonical tags did not match URL - We created the new website in a CMS where the CMS generated non-SEO friendly URLs. We applied 301 redirects to those CMS URLs, but when we enable canonical tags within the CMS, it uses the original CMS URL and not the URL of the page, so the canonical URL doesn't match the page. For now, I disabled canonical tags until I can figure out a way to manually insert canonical tag code in the pages without using the CMS canonical tag feature. After doing these two fixes our website still doesn't seem like it is able to get re-indexed by Google even when I submit the sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools...the sitemap doesn't get indexed? Questions...there are two more concerns that I am hoping can be answered in this community: Cache-Control = private : I saw from URIvalet.com that our cache-control is set to private. Is this affecting us being indexed and should this be set to public? Load Balancer - Our old website was not on a load balancer, but our new website is. When I look in our analytics at servers, I notice that the site is being picked up on one server and then another server at different times. Is Google seeing the same thing and is the load balancer confusing Google? I'm not sure what else could be an issue with us not being indexed. Maybe its just a waiting game where after I implemented the 1 & 2 change I just have to wait or does 3 & 4 or other issues also need to be addressed in order to get re-indexed? I hope someone can help me. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rexjoec0 -
SEO expert advice needed :)
So I have a niche site that I'm pretty sure has received an over-optimization penalty. This was about nine months ago or so. I haven’t really done much with the site since however I’d like the site to start appearing in the serps again, as I am adding fresh content and trying to create a really useful resource. I don't appear in the serps for any keywords related to my niche anymore. The site IS still indexed though. I didn't get any messages telling me that I was penalized so I don't think it was manual. I didn't use any spam or anything like that but I believe the penalty was probably for anchor text over-optimization and/or too many links to non-home page urls in comparison to the total amount of links the site had. I know removing these links or changing the anchor can help but the thing is the site only has about 30 total linking root domains pointed at it. So I was wondering if I could just add more links to other pages/the home page and add more links with varied anchors/naked urls to change the ratios and make it appear more natural. Now, would/could this fix my penalty? I am frustrated that I even received a penalty at all because much of my competition is ranking for fairly competitive terms with no real solid links pointed at their site and tons of comment spam. I have some relevant links/quality links so I am hoping that fixing this penalty could help put me back where I was before I got knocked into oblivion. There is one example of a competitor with a PR0 site getting good traffic and ranking for some nice keywords with only a bunch of self-set up web properties (and some comment spam) containing one only page for the purpose of linking back to their money site (blogspot, wordpress, weebly, mywebstarts ect). On top of that a lot of the sites I'm competing again are MFA, garbage sites that are written by non-native English speakers that offer zero value to the visitor. I need to start out ranking these spammers again. What should I do? thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmckiernan86_gmail.com0