How long does a Google penalty last if you have fixed the problem??
-
Hi
I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'. I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this. Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages.
I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty. I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted.
Anyone got any ideas?
ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.
-
So do you say if I got penalty by Google then they must mail me about why I got penalty. If none mail comes then it's not a penalty.
-
If it is an algorithmic penalty, it will just bounce back, but it can't hurt to file the reconsideration request in the meanwhile. This can take a bit of time though as mentioned above.
We had a weird one recently where the site was seemingly filtered down to like the 6th page of results for queries it was first and second for. We found lots of other sites had stolen content from the site. We rewrote the pages in question on our site as it was easier than dealing with the content thieves, put a recon in and before we knew it, we back, stronger than ever before.
I have seen a bunch of weird variations, filters and penalties so without a link it's tough to comment further but my email is on my profile if it helps. Can never learn enough about google penalties and the like so happy to take a look my friend.
Cheers
Marcus -
The website has thousands of quality links and these are added on a weekly basis as it is in a very competitive category....Even more so in the last month since this happened.
Let's hope that it bounces back but in my opinion this feels like a penalty.
-
I doubt very much that it's an actual penalty. You may find that it bounces back up if you build a couple of good links
-
Hi Shelly
Yes I'm definitely thinking about sending a re-consideration request. I guess my main issue is why the hell don't Google tell you if you've done something wrong!
To answer you questions the site is still on Google just dropped considerably. It has a healthy page rank of 52.
-
You can fairly easily check what sort of penalty has been applied by checking the below;
-
Does your site appear on google's first page for your domain name? If no then you may have had a penalty
-
Does your site appear if you search for an exact phrase of about 5-6 words? If no then you probably have some sites linking in which have been devalued
You say that you've added a page of links; if these are spammy links then this could have a negative effect on your rankings. If google sees that you are in effect 'voting' for spammy sites it may devalue your sites status in itself (especially if your link profile isn't top notch).
I would work on creating some more, high quality links into your site and you should see the rankings restore to normal.
Google sometimes takes a few weeks to put your site back to where it belongs after something like this happens, and so you may need to wait a bit longer for it to bounce back.
If not you can always send a re-consideration request, even if your site isn't penalised; explain you made a mistake with the low quality links and you've now removed them. and they may restore value to your site
-
-
Cheers for that. I can't post the link as don't want to give out my clients details. However if you give me your email I can send it to you.
Thanks
-
If you have seen a sudden and stark drop in traffic, like a cliff in your analytics, then it is more likely to be penalty of sorts. Though, prior experience has taught me, these are not always for what you think they are for.
If you want to post a link I will try to give you a 10 minute review and see if we can spot anything else that may be causing problems.
Marcus
-
Hi thanks for replying.
Yes the website has very strong content and the backlink profile is very good. The site was ranking well for about 6 months in roughly the same position so this has came out of the blue on the only thing I've done differently was set up the links page.
It has also came to my attention that the sites I was linking to may be bad neighbourhoods.
On your point about devaluation - yes the site has 2 or 3 sites linking with sponsored links. They provide a large number of links.
-
Google doesn't directly penalize you for bad links. Even JC Penney, who was caught in a massive link buying scheme, didn't get a direct penalty. They experienced what it sounds like you're experiencing: link devaluation. Keep in mind, however, that reciprocal links aren't worth a lot to begin with so I'm hesitant to pin all your drop on that.
Have you looked at your Linkscape profile for your site or looked at Open Site Explorer to see how your backlink profile looks?
Does your site have strong content?
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
-
Duplicate Homepage - How to fix?
Hi Everyone, I've tried using BeamUsUp SEO Crawler and have found one warning and two errors on our site. The warning is for a duplicate meta description, and the errors are a duplicate page and a duplicate title. For each problem it's showing the same two pages as the source of the error, but one has a slash at the end and one doesn't. They're both for the homepage. https://www.url.com/ And https://www.url.com Has anyone seen this before? Does anyone know if this is anything we should worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rswhtn1 -
Google Indexing of Images
Our site is experiencing an issue with indexation of images. The site is real estate oriented. It has 238 listings with about 1190 images. The site submits two version (different sizes) of each image to Google, so there are about 2,400 images. Only several hundred are indexed. Can adding Microdata improve the indexation of the images? Our site map is submitting images that are on no-index listing pages to Google. As a result more than 2000 images have been submitted but only a few hundred have been indexed. How should the site map deal with images that reside on no-index pages? Do images that are part of pages that are set up as "no-index" need a special "no-index" label or special treatment? My concern is that so many images that not indexed could be a red flag showing poor quality content to Google. Is it worth investing in correcting this issue, or will correcting it result in little to no improvement in SEO? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Google not taking Meta...
Hello all, So I understand that Google may sometimes take content from the page as a snippet to display on SERPs rather than the meta description, but my problem goes a little beyond that. I have a section on my site which updates everyday so a lot of the content is dynamics (products for a shop, every morning unique stock is added or removed), and despite having a meta description, title and receiving an 'A' grade in the MOZ on page grader, these pages never show up in Google. After a little research I did a 'site:www.mysite.com/productpage' in Google and this indeed listed all my products, but interestingly for every single one Google had taken the copyright notice at the bottom of the page as the snippet instead of the meta or any H1, H2 or P text on the page... Does anyone have any idea why Google is doing this? It would explain a lot to me in terms of overall traffic, I'm just out of ideas... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Meta NOINDEX... how long before Google drops dupe pages?
Hi, I have a lot of near dupe content caused by URL params - so I have applied: How long will it take for this to take effect? It's been over a week now, I have done some removal with GWT removal tool, but still no major indexed pages dropped. Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Do these results indicate a problem with my seo?
I've entered my the following search query into Google.co.uk related:mywebsite.co.uk However the resulting website that are brought back are on the whole nothing like our website, nor do they offer similar services to us. If I run this same query on my competitors websites they all bring back similar websites to each other. I read somewhere that gaining links from the websites that Google believes are similar/related to our own website is beneficial. But looking at our results it would seem that Google can't place what our site is about and which sites are similar. So I'm guessing this is a more pressing matter than link building right now!? Other info about our website: We rank fairly well for a lot of our target keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adamlcasey
Domain age = 11 years
PA =38
mR= 4.77
mT= 5.74
DA:= 31
DmR= 3.78
DmT= 3.84
PageRank = 3 Example of how random the results are the 1st website that comes back in our related websites search is for Doctors GP Practice. Our website sells GPS Telematics Solutions. Can anyone shed any light on this or just to confirm how much of a problem this is?0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
What is a good content for google?
When we start to study SEO and how google see our webpage, one important point is to have good content. But, for beginners like me, we get lost on this. Is not so black and white: what for you is a good content? the text amount matters? there is any trick that all good content websites need to have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0 -
Getting a site to rank in both google.com and google.co.uk
I have a client who runs a yacht delivery company. He gets business from the US and the UK but due to the nature of his business, he isn't really based anywhere except in the middle of the ocean somewhere! His site is hosted in the US, and it's a .com. I haven't set any geographical targeting in webmaster tools either. We're starting to get some rankings in google US, but very little in google UK. It's a small site anyway, and he'd prefer not to have too much content on the site saying he's UK based as he's not really based anywhere. Any ideas on how best to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital0