Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?
-
Dear Friends
I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png
-
Hey - it's just so hard to say without a link / some research. Just focus on quality and try to understand where the problems are so you are not SEOing in the dark. You could get an experienced consultant to take a look for a few hours or get a full on SEO audit which again will give you some more intel and a prioritised approach. Certainly though you can likely learn lots from analytics by understanding where there has been a drop in traffic, engagement etc.
Always try to base the work you do on data and analysis where possible so you are not just spinning your wheels!
-
Thank you so much. I am doing the same right now. Please let me know whether the thinking is right
-
I had 3 ads on site and i am dividing it all so that the top is not heavy. it wasnt previously heavy too, but i have modified it nonetheless.
-
I am rewriting at least 150 articles out of the 950 articles on site. I think those articles are poor in quality. And they need a boost. I am also tackling duplicate content issues and have removed multiple tags from a single post and kept 1 tag on 1 post limit.
-
If after all this, the site does not come up, then it is a backlinks problem and then i need to dig into ahrefs and check out what to do. But i am hoping to god it recovers after the content modification.
These things might take 2 months but i think they will make a slow but sure difference. My livelihood depends on this blog so the return of traffic is very essential for me.
-
-
Hey
The main issue here is that things rarely happen in isolation. Sure, you may have had a penalty for outbound links but if you are selling links or generally looking to manipulating results with the links on the site what else is going on?
You have to step back and look at the site with a quality reviewers perspective:
- Why does the site exist?
- Does it provide value to the intended audience?
- Is it the best answer for a range of targeted queries?
- Is the site an expert resource?
- Is the site an authority on the targeted topic(s)?
- Is the site trustworthy?
- Is the site technically well optimised?
- Does the site have technical or traditional SEO issues?
There are a lot of moving parts here but you need to go back to basics. It's always hard to advise without any direct context (not having seen the site) but the the two elements I would consider would be a qualitative review and a more traditional SEO audit.
This is a great overview of the leaked Google quality guidelines:
https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines
That is probably a good starting place and you can start to ask the big questions rather than look for some single algorithmic answer to why your traffic seems to be going in the wrong direction.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Linking to my Site so I should Link Back?
I remember hearing a few years ago that it was a good practice to link back to a site that was linking to you. My company's site was referenced and linked to in a news article. The news company has an above average domain authority, which is pretty good for my company's backlink profile. Is it still or was ever a "best practice" to link back to this website/domain? I feel like linking back was a best practice, but when I try to search this, all I get back is backlinking 101 and backlinking articles. Nothing really answering my question straight forward. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | aua0 -
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Links below linking (not sitelinks)
Hi All, Please can you let me know the name and / or point me at an article / blog / directory on how best to achieve additional links under a search engine listing (I don't mean site links) e.g. I do a search for 'home insurance' on Google.co.uk and under the listing for Compare the Market it has - home insurance, building insurance and landlords insurance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone0 -
Bad link profile?
Hi Mozzers! We have recently been handed this client due to the former SEO company building up a bad link profile, which resulted in the site dropping off the search results all together. Forcing them to get a new domain. This happened in July last year and we are unsure whether it would be wise to submit a reconsideration request and then 301 their old sites pages to the new domain. Basically I'm asking whether you can spot any spammy links being built in their profile. Here is the old domain: http://www.claimssolicitors.co.uk/ It would be great if you could help me out! 🙂 Thanks
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Page for Link Building
Hello Guys, My question is about a link building process. We all know that some directories/sites do require a reciprocal link. Does it make any sense to creat a page in website exclusively to reciprocal links? And what we do with this webpage in terms of indexing, do folow, crawling...etc. Any sugestions are more then welcome 🙂 Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
Canonical versus 301 for affilaite links
Affiliate links for the Volusion ecommerce shops are of the form mydomain.com/?Click=XX where XX is the affiliate ID. Volusion uses rel=canonical to redirect the affiliate links to mydomain.com. Is this a good solution? I used iDevAffiliate for another online store, and their solution was to use 301 redirects to trip off the ? string. Comments? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
No results with Link Analysis
So I have been working with a domain since November last year that still shows no improvement in regards to the link analysis. I am baffled because we have gotten them onto the first page on Google for a few of the keywords we are optimizing. Any help with this is greatly appreciated and I am a noob so definitely open to learning. Thanks in advance to all of you. Domain in question - www.modernportablerefrigeration.com Domain is currently on a shared server if that makes any difference. Cordially, Todd Richard admin@richfinn.org
Technical SEO | | RichFinnSEO0