How long will this Site be punished? (place your bets!)
-
Got hit with a manual penalty in Feb2014. Got it removed in 6 months (before the Penguin refresh). Whole site got deindexed at one point including BRAND searches. (Brand searches has since come back)
Disavowed over 20k domains (yea spam was bad). But still have a good amount of authority links such as huff post, edu, wiki, apple apps, reddit etc. About 97% of our links are on page 2 or beyond. Cant get past that spot 11 'Wall'. The suppression machine is not kind. We even had a very popular article get tons of shares, media pick up, and the original article would not rank on the first page for its title.
Our 'brand + keyword' gets about 2k searches a month. Just 'keyword' gets nothing, which i find amusing.
So whats the prognosis doc? Another year, 3 or never? Anyone else in same boat? Wait for the next penguin refresh and hope for the best?
Cheers
-
Yah it took us 6 reconsideration letters to get out of the 'manual penalty'. I thought you meant there was another way to contact them after the fact.
-
It might be worth it to switch domain names at the end of the day, depending on how important it is to you.
Fortunately, I've never had to do it, but I've read a million times that after you disavow links and try to get rid of bad links the best you can, at some point, after you've literally attempted to get rid of each and every link that has the potential of causing you issues, you have this option to write a "reconsideration request" to Google.
Read this guide, it's great, and the reconsideration request is mentioned in Step 7: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
Best of luck! Let us know if anything changes in the future!
-
Yah i figure most of it would be speculation - just doing due diligence to see if i missed anything.
We've gone through GSC with a comb. No manual penalties remain(in there), received the whole 'congrats you're out of jail 'message. Still add to the disavow list every month. Did a whole onsite audit to fix any on page issues (404s, thin content, meta tags etc) Made the site responsive as well. Planning a site redesign shortly which hopefully does something.
Message to Google? How do i do that lol. Do you mean through the google product forums, or is there an actual email? We have our Adwords reps, but they have done all they can to pass along our message.
Thanks for the response!
-
I don't think anyone can give you a real answer to that question. Any answer would be speculation. There's also not enough info here.
Have you gone through Google Search Console and looked under Manual Actions? How does the rest of GSC look in terms of errors and such?
I would try using the Moz Span Analysis tool and see if you missed any other bad links.
It sounds like it could be possible that Google is manually banning you from the first page. I don't know if that is a real thing or if they actually do that, but I suppose that could be possible! Have you tried sending a message to Google explaining all the steps you have taken to try to remove all spam?
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
-
Two sites with same content
Hi Everyone, I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces Website A approx 12k listing pages Website B : approx 2k pages from one specific brand. The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name. Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code. The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evoe0 -
We are writing 5,000 word long form content that is relevant and engaging. It is too long?
We are writing a series of relevant and informative "power pages" on our site. In the past these have been 2,000 to 3,000 words and our audience has shown to be highly engaged with these pages and they converted well. We have decided to expand our new pages to capture more relevant keywords/topics and the result is they are a bit over 5,000 words. Is there a point where long content, even if highly relevant and engaging, is too long to benefit SEO? Is there any reason we would limit ourselves to 2,000-ish word long form content? I ask because I have read multiple blog posts that suggest that long form content that has ranked well in Google ranges between 2,000 and 3,000 words.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Site not indexed in Google UK
This site was moved to a new host by the client a month back and is still not indexed in Google UK if you search for the site directly. www.loftconversionswestsussex.com Webmaster tools shows that 55 pages have been crawled and no errors have been detected. The client also tried the "Fetch as Google Bot" tactic in GWT as well as running a PPC campaign and the site is still not appearing in Google. Any thoughts please? Cheers, SEO5..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Site: on Google
Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0