Have my site been penalised ?
-
Hi,
I recently hired a link builder (who works for a digital marketing agency and wanted to earn some extra cash ) to do some link building for me on keyword Carpet Cleaner Hire
Basically , May my ranking for this work has moved from 29 up to 13 , then down to 500 + and now up to 67 ?.
It's been all over the place and I am worried that maybe google thinks its unnatural or to many links etc.
I looked at some of the work this chap did and there was a log of bookmarks done , apparently to increase social awareness and some articles on random forums I never heard of but the articles didn't look to good and in my eyes were a little spammy..
I don't have any messages in WMT saying I have been penalised or anything but I am naturally worried that this chap may have caused damaged and that I was manually penalised.
I have since asked him to stop immediately..
-
does this sound normal for the ranking to be all over the place in this manner when link building ?
-
How can I tell if I have been manually penalized in any way ?
-
What;s the general consensus ?.
-
Should I contact google or leave it and see what happens ?
-
Other keywords seems to be okay though.
Any advice much appreciated.
thanks
Sarah.
-
-
Would this kid be willing to log back on to the forums and remove his links? I guess contacting the moderators might work as well
-
That;s great thank you. Some great tips here.
-
Hi,
Many thanks for this. I guess you could be right, some of the lnks did looks a bit spammy.
Guess, I need to also fill out and send them the form to see what google says.
Am I correct in asuming the only way to remove the spammy links would be to write to the forum moderators etc asking for them to be removed.
Many thanks
Sarah
-
Google has been treaking their algo for a while now and sites have been shifting up and down. Some sites have been penalized without receiving a message so that can happen. Unnatural link building on low pr sites only in blogs or on link farms can definitely get you in hot water with google. My advice is to start generating great content for your site, videos help for seo, blogging is perfect, social media interactions are beneficial, and start developing a real high quality link profile. Yahoo Directory, Better Business Bureau, dmoz, BOTW, business.com, yelp, yellow pages, manta and other sites that are google friendly. If your other keywords are ok then it might just be the algo but still means your specified keyword needs work. hope this helps. Good luck.
-
With Googles new penguin algorithm, which is meant to filter webspam, it is very possible that you have been penalized for unnatural spammy links. There's a form Google has that you can fill out if you feel you have been mistakenly penalized and i dont think it would hurt to submit it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ
Be careful when hiring an SEO because Google is getting better and better at recognizing unnatural optimization and inexperienced SEO's often try to cut corners. Link building isn't easy and it relies on patience and hard work combined with great content that others want to link to. Heres a great article that you should read before moving forward http://searchengineland.com/link-building-means-earning-hard-links-not-easy-links-123767
I hope this has been helpful
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
-
Awful ranking after site redesign
Hello everyone, I have a situation here and I’d like to have your opinion about it. I am working on a site which has been recently redesigned from scratch: in a nutshell, as soon as the new site went live their rankings dropped and, of course, so did their visitors and so on.. The guys who redesigned the site didn’t do any 301 redirect whatsoever, so now the old pages are just 404s and blocked by robots. My question is: if they 301 redirect now, do you think it would be possible they could get their rankings back? One more thing: when they launched the new site, the indexed pages basically doubled overnight; there were 700 and now there are 1400. Do you think this could affect their ranking as well? Thank you for you insights 🙂 Elio
Technical SEO | | Eyah0 -
Site not loading on Firefox
Hello guys, I can't get my website to be loaded on Firefox, why's that?
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Redirect to new domain.... (which is penalised)
Hey - how's things? I have a client who wants to redirect his main domain to a new one.... there are a couple of problems I see and thought I'd ask on moz. 1 - The new domain has been incorrectly parked on the old domain with no redirection in place... when you do "site:domain.com" in Google, there are no serps for the new domain (the old domain still ranks well), it doesn't seem to rank anywhere and doesn't return any results in OSE. Is it wise to redirect to this domain or will rankings drop on both? 2 - The new domain uses .mobi as its suffix and will be replacing a .com - but is much more related to the business keyword wise. Is using mobi a problem. Overall the SEO on the site is abysmal and I will be reworking everything - so there will be lots of changes going on at the same time. I'm just wondering if it is worth redirecting the new domain at all, or trying to get brand new domain and use that.... or just to stick with the original aged domain... I think that is my only concerns at the moment
Technical SEO | | agua0 -
SEO friendldy Site structure?
we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/ or
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO
www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks0 -
Internal Links on eCommerce sites
I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Seo on a dk site
hi my client has asked if we can seo their dk site , my question is does all link building and article submission have to be in danish
Technical SEO | | Westernoriental0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
Xenu Alternative for Large Sites
We're launching a new site and we're trying to crawl it to check for any problems. It's millions of pages and Xenu seems to start encountering errors as the numbers mount past 500,000. Does anyone know of an alternative, free or paid, that could handle the size better?
Technical SEO | | eLocalusa0