Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
-
Hello,
We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console.
Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup?
We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago.
Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone?
Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin.
Thanks.
-
Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.
-
We've done a disavow through Marie Haynes (wonderful work!) a month ago.
I forgot to re-submit the sitemap. Just did it.
We've got a bunch of 302 redirects, btw, I'm replacing them with 301s in the next couple of days.
We've deleted all doorways and paid links
We've added a blog with 8 pretty good articles - though they need more work and we need more content
We track the changes through a Moz campaign and sales volume, which both show we're hurting.
Only one area of our site is ranking (out of 15). Our home page is not even ranking for our main term, one of our internal pages is that doesn't even provide the right results.
We've got some question marks in our internal links
We've got some 404 errors
We've got some too long/too short/missing meta and title tags
We need to improve the alt tags
We've got enough backlinks and DA to be on page 1
Any help is appreciated.
-
I've never seen a site that was "unfixable" just some that took a lot longer than others to recover.
What steps have you taken so far, and also what methods are you using to track the changes?
-
It's very hard to say for certain Bob, without looking at it. It could be that Google is still taking exception at pages in the site, despite doorway pages have been removed.
Presumably you have asked Googlebot to crawl the site again?
-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
-
My site in 2 page
my site in 2 page how can i rank with this keywords in dubai legal translation in Dubai
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | saharali150 -
Where can I find either web directories or decent sites that will link back to me...without paying thru the nose?
Hi Community! For starters, from my question, you can probably determine that I am either a novice, or very low intermediate SEO person. We all know, links are king with our friends at Google. I am a recently-retired IT person with a very small freelance IT company (just me), and I'd like to generate more leads/business. I'd be thrilled with one or two small jobs per week to supplement my pension. I've used the MOZ tools only to determine the majority of my competitors have like a thousand links, whereas Google reports me as having 97 links. My on-page grades are all upper 90s and a couple are at 100%. I am not targeting really competitive keywords, so that's not my problem. My problem is my DA, which is sitting at a mere 20...pause to laugh! I don't want to pay thru the nose for high DA links for the obvious reasons. I submitted my URLs to as many directories as I could find. Would anyone have a decent list of sites where I could submit my URL to get some more links? Thanks guys and Gals! Willy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NewSEOguy0 -
Homepage not ranking for branded searches after Google penalty removal
Hi all, A site I work on was hit with a manual action penalty some time ago for spammy links built by a former SEO agency. It was a partial match penalty so only affected some pages - most likely the homepage. We carried out a lot of work cleaning up links and disavowed suspicious links which we couldn't get removed. Again, most of these were to the homepage. The disavow file was uploaded to Google last Friday and our penalty was lifted this Tuesday. Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. I've carried out the obvious checks - robots.txt, making sure we're not accidentally noindexing the page or doing anything funky with canonicals etc and it's all good. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? I'm thinking Google simply needs time to catch up due to all the links we've disavowed and sitting tight is the best option but could do with some reassurance! Any past experiences or advice on what I might be missing would be great. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brendan-Jackson1 -
Somebody took an article from my site and posted it on there own site but gave it credit back to my site is this duplicate content?
Hey guys, This question may sound a bit drunk, but someone copied our article and re-posted it on their site the exact article, however the article was credited to our site and the original author of the article had approved the other site could do this. We created the article first though, Will this still be regarded as duplicate content? The owner of the other site has told us it wasn't because they credited it. Any advice would be awesome Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites
A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market. My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!). This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty. Ideas? Thoughts? All help appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Why are these sites so high with poor relevant links...
Hello, Keyword: TV Stands. I have been researching competitors for a client and we seem to be unable to understand why certains pages are ranking on page 1 of Google UK for keyword TV Stands. eg: http://www.furnitureinfashion.net/plasma-TV-stand.html (Google UK 8 - TV Stands) http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999542/Nr.99.aspx (Google UK 9 - TV Stands) The furniture in fashion has links from sites like: http://www.ummah.com/forum/ and http://www.muslimco.com/ which is totaly irrelevant to the site. Any ideas on other things as the tesco.com site does not have direct links to it. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnW-UK0