Anchor text penalties and indexed links
-
Hi! I'm working on a site that got hit by a manual penalty some time ago. I got that removed, cleaned up a bunch of links and disavowed the rest. That was about six months ago.
Rankings improved, but the big money terms still aren't doing great. I recently ran a Searchmetrics anchor text report though, and it said that direct match anchors still made up the largest part of the overall portfolio.
However, when I started looking at individual links with direct anchors, nearly every one had been removed or disavowed. My question is, could an anchor text penalty be in place because these removed links have not been reindexed? If so, what are my options? We've waited for this to happen naturally, but it hasn't occurred after quite a few months. I could ping them - could this have any impact?
Thanks!
-
Here's what we got:
Reconsideration request for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/: Manual spam action revoked
Dear Webmaster of http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/,
We have processed the reconsideration request from a site owner for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/ and removed the actions previously applied to your site. Our review of your site indicates the violations of our quality guidelines have been resolved.
You can use the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools to view the actions currently applied to your site. It may take some time before recent updates to your site's status are reflected on this page and in our search results.
While there are no manual actions on your site, there may be other issues that could affect your site's ranking or how it appears in the search results. Google determines the order of search results using more than 200 different signals. Some fluctuation in ranking will happen from time to time as we make updates to present the best results to our users. Your site's ranking could also change based on any detected security issues. We suggest checking the Security Issues page to see if we have detected hacking on your site.
If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see our Help Centre for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of search results for our users.
Yours sincerely,
The Google Search Quality Team -
Did you file for reconsideration after the work? If so, did you get any kind of useful response, or was it just the default "Thanks for playing!" message.
-
Thanks Pete! The penalty was manual, with a message in WMT. It was more than six months ago too. I guess this means either the work wasn't good enough or we are waiting on a manual refresh. We'll carry on cleaning up then - it's all we can do!
-
Unfortunately, this can be a time-consuming and mostly manual process. If the link was actually removed, you can check the cached page directly through Google search, which may be the best bet. With disavow, though, you're really just left with Google saying "Yep, we got it." Six months should be plenty for disavow.
When you say it's manual, how did you verify this? Was it a message in Google Webmaster Tools? In the absolute worst-case scenario, you could have a combo manual/algorithmic penalty. If it was Penguin, you're still stuck waiting for a refresh.
More likely, the changes did take, but Google doesn't think it's quite enough yet. Have you filed for reconsideration? When you did, did you lay out all of the link removal steps you took (the more details, the better, in most cases)?
-
Hi! Do you mean the submit URL feature? That doesn't give that status, I'm afraid. I have added a handful though - it's just that we cleaned up over 800. It's a massive job!
-
Have you tried manually submitting a few of the links to see what their 'status' is in webmasters? I find this topic so vague as there is nowhere to actually get a solid answer from Google. It would be great if there was a facility to test these exact kind of issues.
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
-
Links
Hi 64% of our links come from a .com website and only 30% from .co.uk. We only do business in the UK should I continue with the .com links as they are easier to source. Does this hurt my SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Page must be internally linked to get indexed?
If a there is page like website.com/page; I think this page will be indexed by Google even we don't link it internally from anywhere. Is this true? Will it makes any difference in-terms of "indexability" if we list this page on sitemap? I know page's visibility will increase when link from multiple internal pages. I wonder will there be any noticeable difference while this page is listed in sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Can one back-link fluctuates ranking of website with thousands of back-links?
It happend to our website. We have seen major ranking fluctuations for our website because of one back-link. What kind of links those can be? Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Can 410 links trigger a penalty?
Hi! This is a follow on question from my other post - http://moz.com/community/q/site-dropped-after-recovery. As mentioned there, I've ad a manual penalty revoked for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/. This came after the forum was hacked and some poor quality SEO was done. We've managed to clean a large amount of links, but ones such as http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html (anchor is "microsoft") are still being found and indexed. My question is that although the forum is now 410'd, can these junk links still be causing any harm? A huge amount have been disavowed, and many others taken down after a manual outreach campaign, but still others are appearing. The site is performing poorly in search despite having a much better domain authority, driven by largely great links from national newspapers, than its competitors, as well as solid user metrics such as a bounce rate of 30% and few on-site issues. This makes me think it must be the link profile. Any advice would be much appreciated. S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10