Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Chris,

I appreciate these links.

I can't see an option for view 'lost' links in Open Site Explorer, but ahrefs.com has been very useful so far.

Cheers!

Thanks for your answers Chris and Kevin, I really appreciate it.

Chris, please forgive my ignorance, but how should I check back links? What tools do I need and what should I be looking for?

Many thanks

Hi,

A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact).

This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage.

Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion).

The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago.

My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take?

On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be?

I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past.

Thanks

Thanks Marie,

I really appreciate you taking the time to provide your thoughts here.

I am sure you are right, and that almost all the links we created over the years are probably now considered unnatural, regardless of whether they were built in a relatively low intensity way several years ago or more high intensity by our Sri Lanakan supplier. Regardless, I fear that once they are all removed / disavowed, then we still won't rank very highly as we won't have enough natural links to provide the rankings we hope for. Of course, if take a long term view of the project then it is definitely better to 'wipe clean' our past mistakes now and start again from a low base, rather than to just leave all the unnatural links in place forever. But it is still a sobering thought to have to spend time/money on cleaning this up now with no real understanding of what to expect once the work is done.

One quick question ... can I simply disavow bad links right away, or would it be better for me to try to remove them manually first?

Finally, I would really appreciate you putting me in touch with your friend who may be able to look into this in a little more detail for me.

Huge thanks again
David

Hi Marie and Andy,

Thanks for your contributions.

Marie, your first post touches upon many very important issues.

We did rank well for e.g. "salmon recipes" on Google US and particularly on Google UK for a couple of years or more, before Penguin. At that time we did occasionally do some off-site SEO work such as paying for a batch of articles to be created and submitted, or getting a custom written press release distributed. This work seemed to make a positive difference at the time, but I can't be totally sure how worthwhile it was in terms of securing our good ranking at that time.

Then, we scaled up the off-site SEO quite a lot, hiring a company from Sri Lanka to do lots of work every month.

I am guessing that the links generated by this later and more intensive period of work are more spammy than those produced in the earlier, low-key efforts. I appreciate that the earlier work wouldn't have generated much in the way of 'quality' links, but my gut feeling is that this earlier work is probably less likely to be seen as definitely spammy.

Anyway, I guess I just don't know where we would have deserved to rank without any of this paid-for SEO work at all, and I have no idea where we'd deserve to be now if the spammy links get removed or disavowed.

I suppose there is not going to be any kind of clear answer to any of this without first doing the work to remove/disavow the links.

Maybe I should be looking at this a different way.

I am fairly sure that a high percentage of our inward links are either having no positive effect or, worse, are having a negative effect. What is the simplest/easiest/cheapest way for me to safely and comprehensively get rid of all these dodgy links so that I can start new SEO activity afresh?

Cheers
David

Thanks Andy, it is reassuring to know that no site is beyond help!

We have never received any kind of manual penalty or warning for this site. The decline in rankings was purely algorithmic, with a clear and major drop on 24th April 2012.

It you want to run a quick scan for me, that would be fantastic. I would really appreciate that.

I look forward to hearing from you whenever you have had time to do this.

Huge thanks again

David

Hello all,

I would like to get your opinion on whether I should invest time and money to improve a website which was hit by Google Penguin in April 2014.

(I know, April 2014 was nearly 2 years ago. However, this site has not been a top priority for us and we have just left until now).

The site is www.salmonrecipes.net

Basically, we aggregated over 700 salmon recipes from major supermarkets, famous chefs, and others (all with their permission) and made them available on this site. It was a good site at the time but it is showing its age now.

For a few years we were occasionally #1 on Google in the US for "salmon recipes", but normally we would be between #2 and #4.

We made money from the site almost entirely through Adsense. We never made a huge amount, but it paid our office rent every month, which was handy.

We also built up an email database of several thousand followers, but we've not really used this much. (Yet).

In the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012 the site attracted just over 500k visits.

After the rankings dropped due to Google Penguin, traffic dropped by 77% in the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012. Rankings and traffic have not recovered at all, and are only getting worse.

I am happy to accept that we deserved our rankings to fall during the Google Penguin re-shuffle. I stupidly commissioned an offshore company to build lots of links which, in hindsight, were basically just spam, and totally without any real value. However they assured me it was safe and I trusted them, despite my own nagging reservations.

Anyway, I have full details of all the links they created, and therefore I could remove many of these 'relatively' easily. (Of course, removing hundreds of links would take a lot of time).

My questions ...

1. How can I evaluate the probability of this site 'recovering' from Google Penguin. I am willing to invest time/money on link removal and new (ethical) SEO work if there is a reasonable chance of regaining a position in the top 5 on Google (US) for "salmon recipes" and various long-tail terms. But I am keen to avoid spending time/money on this if it is unlikely we will recover. How can I figure out my chances?

2. Generally, I accept that this model of site is in decline. Relying on Google to drive traffic to a site, and on Google to produce revenue via its Adsense scheme, is risky and not entirely sensible. Also, Google seems to provide more and more 'answers' itself, rather than sending people to e.g. a website listing recipes. Given this, is it worth investing any money in this at all?

3. Can you recommend anyone who specialises in this kind of recovery work. (As I said, I have a comprehensive list of all the links that were built, etc).

OK, that is all for now.

I am really looking forward to whatever opinions you may have about this. I'll provide more info if required.

Huge thanks
David

Hi,

Our client has had a disaster with their domain name registrar, where the DNS settings have been reset and it looks like the registrar won't be able to re-instate the DNS settings for four days time.  This is a nightmare for lost business whilst the site and emails are offline.  As a fallback, we've setup a copy of the client's website at an alternative domain name so that people can be directed there in the meantime via Facebook posts, etc.

Is there anything you would recommend we do in the meantime to minimise the loss of traffic from search engines, and loss of reputation with Google? eg. using Google webmasters to tell Google about the change of address?

Thank you.

Thanks Keri,

Our current experience is that search results from our site are showing up in Google results, sometimes quite high.

So, I'm reluctant to change anything too drastically - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But ... maybe we could get slightly higher rankings if we made some minor alterations?

Is there any 'best practice' guidance I could look at to learn more about this specific issue?

Thanks for your help.

David

Hello Baptiste,

I'm keen to know more about why you believe we would get penalised for this. What, specifically, should we seek to avoid in order to avoid the penalty?

Thanks for your help

David

We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for:

Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour)

Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe:

find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour

There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g.

find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30

There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations.

This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz.

I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as:

• Setting canonical tag
• Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them
• Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present

However I am not sure which of these would be best.

As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different.

Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports.

Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content.

I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind Regards