Pleasing the Google Gods & Not DeIndexing my site.
-
Hey Mozzers,
So plenty of you who follow these threads have come across my posts and have read bits and pieces of the strange dark dark gray hat webspace that I have found myself in. So I'm currently doing some research and I wanted all of your opinion too.
- Will Google always notify you before they stop indexing your website?
- Will Google always allow you back if you do get pulled?
- Does Google give a grace period where they say "fix in 30 days?"?
What is every bodies experience with all of this?
-
No worries. I haven't labeled you as a blackhat. In fact, my apologies, but I didn't remember that I had answered a question for you previously.
So, your questions are mostly ones that can't be answered in a general sense. They'd require someone to know the intimate details of your penalty/algorithm demotion/technical on site issues/etc etc etc. There's no black and white answer to any of these questions.
Google doesn't often just completely deindex a site. Most penalties cause ranking demotions. If you get affected by an algorithm (ie Penguin for unnatural links) then your site won't rank well until the links are cleaned up AND Penguin refreshes again. But for algorithms your site won't get deindexed.
Google does not give warnings to say that you are going to be hit soon.
Google says that any site can recover from a penalty or algorithm change provided you fix the issues. But you've got to have good stuff there in order to recover. In other words, if you got a penalty or an algorithmic demotion because of unnatural links and once you've removed those links there are no natural ones there then don't expect recovery.
I've written some articles on Moz that probably answer your questions:
http://moz.com/blog/google-algorithm-cheat-sheet-panda-penguin-hummingbird
http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase
-
Thank you! I do value the criticism, that's how we learn!
I want to make it clear as possible that I am not engaging in anything Blackhat in anyway shape or form. If you look back at some of my older posts, for example the one that you and EGOL commented on, it begins to paint the picture that I am working with.
I am trying to remain vague to protect the company that I am working for, although realistically I'm not sure how much that matters.
So, as I have stated before, I am pretty new to SEO in the scheme of things (seriously for about 1 year). And I am new to this company (about a month). As you pointed out in the last paragraph I have no idea what I'm doing in this realm. I understand SEO theory, but the problem that I am running into, and probably part of that makes my questions appear blackhat, is that I am not even sure how to identify exactly what has been done with this website.
In the last post of mine that you commented on we discussed the various updates and how the may or may not have effected the website that I am working on. Now this post was aimed at trying to add to that data.
I told my boss that I thought we needed to pull the links and restructure the website architecture immediately because I did not want google to remove us from their Index on my shift. His response was:
What was put in place is working. We want to do a rebuild and redesign. All of that will happen, what I want to know is:
- When will google pull us from the index?
- Have we already been hit?
- Do they warn people if their website is going to be pulled.
- Can we come back from a hit?
- If we are pulled how quickly can we get back on google?
I will be following up shortly.
-
I can't tell from your posts whether you are just trying to remove black hat work from a site or whether you're actually engaging in black hat methods. I'm going to say some harsh stuff. I would say that if you have to ask these questions then you really should not be going down either road unless you are working on sites that you can afford to lose permanently. Also, in some cases if you get caught doing black hat stuff Google can take action on ALL of your sites.
I know a number of people who are really good at black hat methods. And a good number of these guys who have been gaming Google for years can either no longer do it or are finding that it is getting harder and harder.
I work with a lot of penalized sites and there are many different kinds of penalties. For some you get manual notification of the penalty in WMT (not a warning...just a notice that it's been penalized). For others there is no notification at all but the algorithms just stop trusting your site. While recovery can be possible, a good number of the sites that I consult over are completely toast because of past SEO efforts.
If you are trying to clean up a site that has been damaged by former SEO work and you are asking the questions that you have asked above, then you probably need a lot of help. I'd make it really clear to your boss that you are not experienced in penalty cleanup but that you're doing your best and to set expectations low.
You probably already know this, but still, I felt I should comment.
-
Thank you both.
I have inherited a website that is entangled in a very devious web of darkness. And the process of trying to expediently prune the links, dismantle the foundation, and eradicate the poor content while not drastically hurting us more is very difficult to put into words to my boss.
At the end of the day I just want to make it as clear as possible that if we get taken off Google on my watch, that I have given him all the information necessary to make an educated decision.
-TronQ
-
-
Consider a warning a pleasant courtesy from Google. They by no means do this on a consistent basis.
-
You can usually get back in, but the effort it takes to recover from being deindexed is demanding and probably not worth it for you naughty "dark dark grey" hat folk.
-
I agree with Irving: I've never encountered a friendly warning from Google before they destroyed all the things.
-
-
-
Google says they MAY send you a message in WMT
-
You need to make a reconsideration request, and if the site is found to be no longer in violation, they will allow your site to get indexed again
-
No, if you get banned it's usually because of something they feel is very serious like a site that is infected with a virus, of it violating some copyright laws. Banning is the worst thing that they can impose and when it happens it will just happen out of the blue because they don't want it in their index, so you'll get no grace period.
-
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
-
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Forcing Entire site to HTTPS
We have a Wordpress site and hope to force everything to HTTPS. We change the site name (in wordpress settings) to https://mydomain.com In the htaccess code = http://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos Ensure we are using HTTPS version of the site. RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] but some blogs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19168489/https-force-redirect-not-working-in-wordpress say RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] Which one is right? 🙂 and are we missing anything?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | joony0 -
Our site has too many backlinks! How can we do a bad backlink audit?
Webmaster Tools is saying we have close to 24 million links to our site. The site has been around since the mid 90s and has accumulated all these links since. We also have our own network of sites that have links in their templates to our main site. I'm fighting to get these links "nofollow"'d but upper management seems scared to alter this practice. This past year we've found our rankings have dropped significantly and suspect it's due to some spammy backlinks or being penalized for doing an accidental link scheme network. 24 million links is too many to check manually for using the disavow tool and it seems that bulk services out there to check backlinks can't even come close. What's an SEO to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoninjaz0 -
Many sites added some excerpts of my Blog post and linking back ? Most of them are Spamy site !
Many sites added some excerpts of my Blog post and linking back ? Most of them are Spamy site ! Some are great blogs, but some blogs just copy some excerpts and link back to them - which i never approve. Will it affect my blog. i ask them to remove it. no use. !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Esaky0 -
Are back links from audio sites any good?
In light of G's view of links from directories and other sources I have heard that links for audio sites like soundcloud.com can be beneficial. Has anyone had any positive experiences building likes from sources like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Google authorship and multiple sites with multiple authors
Hi guys :). I am asking your help - basically I would like to know what would be the best way to set all of this up. Basically I have two main (e-commerce) sites, and a few other big web properties. What I would like to know is if it is ok to link the main sites to my real G+ account, and use alias G+ accounts for other web properties, or is that a kind of spamming? The thing is that I use a G+ account for those e-commerce sites, and would not necessarily want the other web properties to be linked to the same G+ account, as they are not really related. I do hope I was clear. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sumare0 -
Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamesjd70