Site recovery after manual penalty, disavow, SSL, Mobile update = but dropped again in May
-
I have a site that has had a few problems over the last year. We had a manual penalty in late 2013 for bad links, some from guest blogs and some from spammy sites. Reconsideration requests had me disavow almost all of the incoming links.
Later in 2014, the site was hit with link injection malware and had another manual penalty. That was cleared up and manual penalty removed in Jan 2015. During this time the site was moved to SSL, but there were some redirect problems.
By Feb 2015 everything was cleared up and a an updated disavow list was added.
The site recovered in March and did great. A mobile version was added in April.
About May 1st rankings dropped again. Traffic is about 40% off it's March levels.
Recently I read that a new disavow file will supersede an old one, and if all of the original domains and URLs aren't included in the new disavow file they will no longer be disavowed. Is this true? If so, is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update? Can I correct this by disavowing all the previously disavowed domains and URLs?
Any advice for determining why the site is performing poorly again? We have well written content, regular blogs, nothing that seems like it should violate the Google guidelines.
-
It sounds like this is a complicated situation. Regarding the disavow, each file you upload completely replaces the previous one. So, if you had unnatural links and then you uploaded a new file that did not contain some of those unnatural links, you've essentially asked Google to start counting them again. It can take time for them to start to count again as Google has built a lag in to the system to prevent people from trying to game it. However, it's certainly possible that the unnatural links are hurting you.
The main algorithm that uses data from unnatural links is Penguin and Penguin has not refreshed since 2014, so it is unlikely that Penguin is affecting the site. But, there are other algorithms that use links. If one of those is affecting you, then reinstating a full disavow file should show some positive effect within a couple of weeks.
With that said, as far as we know, the Quality update was not related to backlink quality, but rather on-page quality. So, if you dropped because of the Quality update then there are likely other issues with the site.
-
Yes, that does help some. Rebuilding my disavow list was my plan, but wanted some confirmation that it was the right thing to do.
-
Hi Bob,
First of all, have a read of the Google Disavow page here. It will run through how this needs to be performed.
What Google say about the file:
Note: Uploading a new file will replace all previously uploaded ones.
What this essentially means is that if you upload a new file, you will overwrite what is already there. You need to download the current file, add new links to at and re-upload. You can't just overwrite a new file with new links.
...is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update
I wouldn't have thought so, but I never rule out Google doing odd things. I would certainly rebuild your disavow list and re-upload it though.
I hope this helps a little.
-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
-
Redirecting Ecommerce Site
Hi I'm working on a big site migration I'm setting up redirects for all the old categories to point to the new ones. I'm doing this based on relevancy, the categories don't match up exactly but I've tried to redirect to the most relevant alternative. Would this be the right approach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
My site lost a lot of traffic in the lastest update - what to do?
Hi all, there seems to have been an algorithm update on February 7. One of my big sites www.poussette.com, lost about 25 % of its organic traffic afterwards and has not revovered yet. What are the best steps to take right now? It is 7 years old we continuously did conservative SEO (technical, link building, adding content). Thanks in advance. Dieter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
Loss of rankings due to hack. No manual penalty. Please advise.
I have a client who's site was hacked. The hack added a fake directory to the site, and generated thousands of links to a page that no longer exists. We fixed the hack and the site is fully protected. We disavowed all the malicious/fake links, but the rankings fell off a cliff (they lost top 50 Google rankings for most of their targeted terms). There is no manual penalty set, but it has been 6 weeks and their rankings have not returned. In webmaster tools, their priority #1 "Not found" page is the fake page that no longer exists. Is there anything else we can do? We are out of answers and the rankings haven't even come back at all. Any advise would be helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalimpulse0 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Any Suggestions For My Site?
I've recently started a website that is based on movie posters. The site has fundamentally been built for users and not SEO but I'm wondering if anyone can see any problems or just general advice that may help with our SEO efforts? The "content" on the website are the movie posters. I know Google likes text content, but I don't see what else we could add that wouldn't be purely for SEO. My site is: http://www.bit.ly/ZSPbTA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | whispertera0 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0