Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Rand. Anyone ever tell you you're awesome?

I just did. Thanks bud

I'm perplexed about a couple of things.

Google says that scraping keyword rankings is against their policy from what I've read. Bummer. We comprise a lot of reports and manual finding and entry was a pain. Enter Moz! We still manually check and compare, but it's nice having that tool. I'm confused now though about practices and getting SERPs in an automated way. Here are my questions

• Is it against policy to get SERPs from an automated method? If that is the case, isn't Moz breaking this policy with it's awesome keyword tracker?
• If it's not, and we wanted to grab that kind of data, how would we do it? Right now, Moz's API doesn't offer this data. I thought Raven Tools at one point offered this, but they don't now from what I've read. Are there any APIs out there that we can grab this data and do what we want with it? (let's day build our own dashboard)?

Thanks for any clarification and input!

To me, this depends on a couple factors. How much effort can go towards this project, and is the content essentially the same, or does it vary per country.

If the content varies, and there is enough manpower to manage multiple sites in multiple languages, then have separate websites optimized for their unique content in their respective domains.

If the opposite is true, keep it all in one domain and use the /en, /fr, etc language settings afterwards. Obviously monitor anything that could be flagged as duplicate and use canonical accordingly. Keep in mind it could take more effort to get that site ranking around the world. That's my $0.02 at least, hope it helps

Just an update, the penalty was FINALLY lifted. Our client soared the rankings. WOOT

We have gobs of spreadsheets. We wanted to keep the good backlinks, so we disavowed all of the "dodgy" ones. It was a disavow on the domain level and it totaled to over 50% of all incoming domains.

As for manually checking the remaining links, the ones that we chose to keep on the spreadsheet are from relative, authoritative niches with minimal exact match keywords, so we chose to keep them. We did manually check every single one too.

We will continue to press on, and I will update here in a month to note progress if any.

Do you know of any way to see if the disavow even took? Is there a way in WMT to see what you have selected for Google not to use when looking at backlinks? http://moz.com/community/q/why-does-gwt-still-show-some-links-from-a-disavowed-domain That link doesn't give me much confidence in finding out if my disavows are even taking effect. It's almost like I have to do it, and throw my hands up in the air and who knows.

Here is the latest update.

The rankings have still not recovered. The pages that do rank in the 60-170 SERP for the bad terms are not the pages that are built for that keyword.

So, I dug even further and used ahrefs (great tool). An "ah-hah!" moment came when I noticed the % of incoming anchor text seemed to directly correlate with the SERPs that have been negatively effected. Long of the short, further proof that Penguin has stomped on this site. Those nasty anchor texts have been disavowed a long time ago obviously.

Funny, we have an old Penguin recovery post on this from our site. But we followed that to a "T", and appeared to do the right steps. We can't really disavow anymore, and the link profile that we did not touch is a good one. This site just seems so far down the rabbit hole that at times it feels like we are wasting a lot of valuable time and money. I wonder how much more time we can invest in it (Creating content, getting higher quality links to it).

Has anyone encountered a Penguin attack that they couldn't recover from? Or one that took over 10 months or something like that?

Also, to reassure you I've used the Moz on-page grader for all pages and they all rank at about an A or a B. WIthout stuffing of course.

Thanks for the tip though,

Hey Michael,

The big slam occurred in late march. It coincides with Panda Update 25. The only other thing that occurred around that time is that the site had a graphic overhaul, getting a new template on the CMS and new graphics. The content stayed the same. The site on the Moz pro dashboard continued to show no errors and a few warnings, nothing major.

For scrubbing on page content, accessibility, etc I use WMT and Moz Pro tools like campaigns, crawling, on page keywords, etc.

Are you having an inkling that there is something else at play? Please let me know, I'll take any help I can get.

Thank you,

Thank you so much for the thoughful response Wiqas. The thing is, we've done a good amount of good link building as well. There are quality links from relative industries that are just branded (no keyword insertion). There are a lot of government sites, edu, even Harvard (a small no-follow but still).

I apologize for leaving that nugget out of there. With Matt Cutts and his stance on Guest Blogging, we are treading very very carefully. She's in tons of local directories now too. This effort was done right away, and the client surprisingly had some decent backlinks as well, in which we kept.

We continue to press forward for link building, but not sure if that will lift the algorithmic choke hold that is on this site.

Thanks again,

Thank you for the response Eric. I may have mistyped, there were lots of links through hundreds of domains. It's still a smaller local client in a field with a bad stigma (attorney), but other than OSE and WMT I'm not sure what else I can do to grab all of the incoming links.

If you're suggesting that I should force Google to recrawl the nasty links after 6 months, I'll try anything at this point. How would you recommend doing that?

Thanks again,

I saw the post

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-valuable-link-building-services

and saw that MyBlogGuest seems like a good link building service, so I signed up. It really is confusing though, it almost makes me think I have to install WP Blogs on my sites which primarily run in Joomla, so linking directly to the blog is not an option.

Okay, fine, so I'll just skip the part about putting in offers on other people's posts. I really signed up for the link building part of it anyways.

So, now, I just write content in the site-used article generator? Then, go in and offer it manually to people? Doesn't really strike me as some super powerful method of linkbuilding, but there's a good chance I'm missing something.

If this is the case, I'd assume I'd have to write content that is relevant to the site that I am trying to build links for, and then place links back to that site, so basically I want my posts on competitors sites and that will help out with backlinks and authority?

It's really confusing. I just want to have my content writer write good content and get links from it, and this method just confuses me. I'd appreciate any insight from anyone who has used that service or can recommend something easier or better.

To me, this depends on a couple factors. How much effort can go towards this project, and is the content essentially the same, or does it vary per country.

If the content varies, and there is enough manpower to manage multiple sites in multiple languages, then have separate websites optimized for their unique content in their respective domains.

If the opposite is true, keep it all in one domain and use the /en, /fr, etc language settings afterwards. Obviously monitor anything that could be flagged as duplicate and use canonical accordingly. Keep in mind it could take more effort to get that site ranking around the world. That's my $0.02 at least, hope it helps

I'm perplexed about a couple of things.

Google says that scraping keyword rankings is against their policy from what I've read. Bummer. We comprise a lot of reports and manual finding and entry was a pain. Enter Moz! We still manually check and compare, but it's nice having that tool. I'm confused now though about practices and getting SERPs in an automated way. Here are my questions

• Is it against policy to get SERPs from an automated method? If that is the case, isn't Moz breaking this policy with it's awesome keyword tracker?
• If it's not, and we wanted to grab that kind of data, how would we do it? Right now, Moz's API doesn't offer this data. I thought Raven Tools at one point offered this, but they don't now from what I've read. Are there any APIs out there that we can grab this data and do what we want with it? (let's day build our own dashboard)?

Thanks for any clarification and input!

Sounds like a decent plan, but the main focus shouldn't be on disavowing, but rather getting the new, good, quality links earned back to your site. At least in my opinion. Best of luck

Hi there. We inherited a client who didn't receive a manual penalty, but holy cow they have a good sized algorithmic penalty on their site. Here is what we have done since receiving the client:

• Client arrived with a bad backlink profile and an algorithmic penalty. We knew this, but underestimated the effort in removing it.
• We researched great forum posts like http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover http://moz.com/community/q/penguin-2-1-how-to-recover
• The researched great blog posts like http://moz.com/ugc/what-a-penguin-recovery-looks-like http://moz.com/ugc/recovery-from-google-penguin-tips-from-the-trenches http://moz.com/ugc/a-theory-for-preventing-recovering-from-a-google-penguin-penalty

Outside of Moz, we researched a lot as well. We felt armed that we needed to do 3 major things.

1. Remove all of the bad backlinks
2. Create good content within the site
3. Fix any unnatural on page SEO tactics (keyword stuffing, etc)

Here is how we tackled it step by step

Step 1: For step 1, we contacted over 100 of the bad backlinks. Many of them wanted a fee for removing the backlinks. They were from sites that were literally like "freeseobacklinks.org". Crazy bad ones. But we only got a few removed. The rest either ignored us or wanted some money.

Hence our round(s) of disavow. Our SEO manager at the time of the first disavow only did 50 domains on the disavow. She was extremely thorough, followed the guidelines to a T, and performed it. We actually fell back in ranking afterward, even though I didn't think it was possible.

With nothing to lose, besides lots of time and budget, we went through thousands of links and manually compiled an extravagant spreadsheet for our next round of disavow. Again, limited to no response from site owners. So we went ahead and pushed forth with nearly 300 domains for the disavow. By this time, the site was in the abyss, so it couldn't hurt anymore. We kept all of the great links, which surprisingly there were a fair amount.

Step 2:
Our SEO manager and our content writer began to write for the website. Our graphic design created an awesome infographic, and a good slideshare too. We've been putting 3-4 articles / posts on the site monthly. Typical word range is 750+

Step 3:
We did a full site analysis and removed all unnatural location based keywords. There wasn't a ton of unnatural on page SEO going on. The bulk of the damage must have came from the bad backlinks.

Summary:
On top of this we have been doing this for at least 6 months. All of the pages that are hit by the penalty are just gone. Nowhere to be found on Google, unless you search with the site operator or search for that exact page.

We seem to make zero headway with all of this. I'm not sure what else we can be doing. We even optimized for conversions and longer time on site, as well as page speed. We've confirmed that there is no manual penalty. I'm starting to feel as if the site is permanently deemed bad or something. I also don't want to keep wasting our writers and manager's time on this one.

Any ideas on next steps? Can anyone restore my confidence in this site? Thanks for the long read and any response,

Have a great day,

If you see your rankings dropping, chances are you have some backlinks working against you. I wouldn't go hog wild and disavow everything, as the link profile could have some spots that help you. I can't be specific without looking at it.

The best thing you can do, in my opinion, is spread the good news about the new site and redesign, and not "build" links from it, but "earn" links. Share your awesome new content and get people to like it so much that you earn some new traffic and links. You are on the right track by learning how to do it right (versus the old, shoddy SEO company that didn't do much good), but now you have to put the work in and do it right.

There are plenty of good methods that work for getting you some good, organic, quality traffic that will help your SERPs. If you feel you are over your head, there are plenty of people on here that would be more than willing to help you out.

Just an update, the penalty was FINALLY lifted. Our client soared the rankings. WOOT