Google Penalty for strong industry link?
-
I work as the SEO manager for a company and we recently launched a new site. Along with this I've been doing some intensive SEO over the past 30 days in getting partners to add or change links and had a big impact on our main keyword, document management software. For the past 2 weeks we've been at position 6 but today I noticed that we dropped down to 11th. I'm wondering if I'm getting penalized for too many exact anchor matches because we recently have been featured on an industry site, cmsreport.com with good anchor text and suddenly we have dropped. Is Google penalizing me for this? If so it seems odd that with legitimate PR and posts I get penalized.
-
My rankings dropped as well, although we got a relevant link from bbc (linked with only the url)... I didn't see any positive impact on that yet.
-
I can't offer a direct explanation for your recent ranking drop. I would not suspect a penalty. It is a common practice for articles to be published or PR announcements to occur, then for this content to be picked up and duplicated. I disagree with the idea of changing your latest release to adjust for a penalty that may not exist.
You shared you have been recently performing a lot of SEO work. The changes you made kick up a lot of dust with respect to Google. They index the web in chunks so it may take a bit of time for the dust to settle. If the changes you made were improvements I would expect your ranking to be restored without any further action. I hate to offer a "wait and see" response but often that is the best approach.
Whenever someone asks "why did my rankings drop" I look at their site and the first thing I ask myself is "does this site deserve to be on the first page of Google results for a competitive term?" It's a lion fight. If you want to be the best then all stops need to be pulled out and an intense focus is required on every last component of the site. This is my approach and others may disagree.
I noticed opportunities for improvement on your site. Below are a few I noticed immediately but there are probably others.
-
your image names should be changed to include more accurate descriptions that perhaps include keywords. For example one image is named "Homepage42.jpg". It seems most images follow this naming convention.
-
some images are missing alt text, such as the one mentioned above. The couple images I did see with alt text show "document management software". I would suggest caution here. Using that phrase in alt text once should be fine but make sure the alt tag describes the image and gently includes keywords otherwise it may appear as stuffing.
-
The current page title is "Document Management Software for a Paperless Office | Docstar". Possibly consider shortening it to "Document Management Software | Docstar". This is a judgment call but it would give more weight to your primary keyword phrase and you can include additional details in your meta description.
-
The site uses 7 H1 tags. For most sites I would say this is too many. Your site looks very nice and makes it work with the header images rotating. I would suggest changing the tags outside the header to H2 tags out of concern that Google may not like that many H1 tags. A side suggestion would be to slow down the header image rotation. It is so fast that a reader cannot possibly even read the header, not to mention the other text. I realize the rotation can be stopped by selecting the appropriate tab in the menu bar but users may not understand how that works.
-
A couple non-SEO suggestions. Add a favicon. Your gold star would work well. Also remove the "Page optimized by WP Minify plugin" footer. These changes will slightly add to the professional appearance of your page in my opinion.
-
-
I absolutely agree with you as far in that some of the best sites have few to no exact anchor matches, I'm just surprised that with a featured press release on a very related site that Google dropped my ranking. Given your advice I switched my latest release and will see if the Google oracle likes me again
-
Nobody can say for sure... but if I look at the anchor text of the links for sites that are powerful but do zero linkbuilding they have almost no matching anchor text and a ton of links with domain.com as anchor.
I am not disputing the value of keyword anchor text... but just saying that domain.com anchor text might be better than you think with the words in nearby sentences delivering the goods. .
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
-
Value of Links? What is each link worth?
Morning Everyone, I just had this thought and wondered what everyone's opinions were in terms of link value in monetary terms. We'll assume for the purposes of this that the links come from contextually relevant sites and that the sites in question have got the Moz DA from being high quality and have a good quality incoming link profile. Its a bit of a theoretical question, but i guess imagine if the only way you could get links was to pay for them, what would they be worth to you. This is link value for SEO purposes, they will have in addition value from traffic from good sites, that no doubt varies wildly depending on topic. I assume everyone also agrees on: The first link from a domain is the most valuable High DA sites are worth more than low ones. So could anyone who has an opinion on the link value suggest a monetary value for links. Its really just using a monetary amount to see how best to target my time. Here is my example of what might be expected, but I am hoping people with more knowledge will perhaps correct it. DA Rating First Link 2nd-5th Link 5th-10th Link 10Plus Links 5 $5 $2 $1 $0 15 $7 $3 $2 $1 25 $25 $10 $5 $2 35 $45 $20 $7 $3 45 $65 $30 $11 $4 55 $95 $45 $19 $5 65 $200 $100 $45 $6 75 $350 $120 $65 $9 85 $700 $240 $95 $15 95 $1100 $450 $200 $30
Link Building | | wellandpower1 -
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
Does Google Groups and Google Community links count?
Hello Everyone. I noticed when I added a few links from Google Groups and Google Communities. It has a do follow? Does that mean it help your SERPS? Thanks for you help?
Link Building | | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT0 -
What are inbound links worth after Panda and Penguin, since a site ranks for the NATIONAL keyword "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS!?!?
ARE INBOUND LINKS TODAY ALMOST WORTHLESS??!!? After having been the KING of SEO, down to the toilet? Today I got a great sample from a fellow SEO professional showing a site, rockymountainfurniture.com rank for "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS FROM 3 DOMAINS and a domain trust of 14!!!! ON A NATIONAL, VALUABLE, HIGH QUERY VOLUME KEYWORD!! I was stunned, but is this the "NEW SEO WORLD" we live in, so we should skip spending hundreds of hours on link building? There are over 32 different types of inbound links but this is much MORE than a radical change, this is turning SEO as it was up-side-down. Any input, thoughts, ideas?
Link Building | | yvonneq0 -
Google Webmaster Tools Message regarding unnatural links - how to respond
I acquired a small website which was subsequently hit by Google Panda for unnatural links. Since the previous owner was involved in the link building, I'm not sure what to look for. Here's the message I received from Google: ** Message from Google ** "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass pagerank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. ** End Message from Google ** I'm not sure how to locate "unnatural links" when there are so many pointing to the site. For example, are there specific domains I should look for that are known offenders? Or, should I look for sites that are using obvious anchor text that seems orchestrated? Any insights would be appreciated on creating an action plan. Jerry
Link Building | | JerryCharles0 -
If I write a PR release on a site such as PRweb with anchor-text links that is picked up and published by other news sites, do the engines consider this duplicate content or additional, beneficial links?
I recently wrote a news release on PRweb that was picked up identically by 8 other news websites, with the same anchor-text links as the original. Is the reproduction of duplicate content and links across different websites like this to the benefit or detriment of SEO and ranking power? Some of the links are: http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/view/pressrelease/eventa-new-eventa-christmas-parties-website-is-launched-648923?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Alert&utm_content=pressrelease http://www.prweb.com/releases/christmasparties/neweventasite/prweb8562064.htm Many thanks!!
Link Building | | RobertHill0 -
Google dosent care that much about links lately?
Google dosent care that much about links lately or crawl started beeing more intelegent about it? Do you feel any changes?
Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0