Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
-
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?
More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.
Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..
"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."
We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.
Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?
What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?
Any other tips/tricks?
-
Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.
As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.
We're getting there Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.
-
I'd hate for you to throw the baby out with the bath water - there are some good links you'd want to keep, and starting from scratch is a real pain. This is what I'd do:
-
Look at all the pages you did build artificial links to in OSE. Consider dropping (410/404 instead of 301) pages that are mostly sending artificial links.
-
Pages that you didn't build artificial links to should be fine. Continue to 301 them as you are.
-
Evaluate the pages you did build links to, and try decide which option is easier. An example would be the home page.
-
Remove the bad/article links manually. If you can't, just do your best and then disavow and resubmit.
-
Don't 301 the page (just kill it and 410 or similar), and then try to salvage any of the good links by having them changed to the .org.
There are at most 200 linking domains once you combine links from all your tools - it shouldn't be hard to see fairly quickly whether the site is a spam/article domain or a legitimate site. Also, if your friend's site is relevant there shouldn't be a problem if he links with branded (non-commercial) anchor text.
Most people only have a handfull of pages they build links to - review those and hopefully you can start over fresh with the good links you had.
-
-
Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend
-
Looking at the back links for .org, I'd think seriously about just dropping that 301 from the home page of the .com site and any other pages that have bad links going to them.
I'm not sure why OSE shows links that are pointing to the .com site as back links to the .org site. I'd go ahead and delete those accounts, since it seems all those links point to .com anyway.
I'd be working to distance myself from the .com site as much as possible.
-
Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012. Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.
But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems. One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.
-
180 days is the best practice for leaving a 301 in place. You could remove that redirect and that will leave all those links pointing to the .com unaffiliated with the .org site.
How did you do your 301s? page by page or did you 301 the whole domain to the .org site? There are still a few URLs left in the index for that domain
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
-
Keyword Targeting / Cannibalisation
Hi Guys We're about to launch a very large website for a flooring company and would like to find out more about _key word _cannibalisation - to put my mind at rest. I know Rand posted a Whiteboard Friday early last year about this topic and mentioned using part of the same keyword was ok to use. All our keywords are specifically geared for "user intent" meaning each keyword has relevance and the content to back up the keyword. We've ensured the keywords are located within each url, placed at the start of the page title, h1 etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GaryVictory1 -
Articles | Posts or Pages
I'm looking to add a number of feature rich articles to educate, promote best practice and provide useful all round advice. My reasearch to date on the pros and cons have drawn me to writing articles as a page, as per
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#pagesvsposts My Question, etc.
I would like to get an outside opinion on the above. Additionally, how can you find out the site structure of a website.
i.e. what are blog posts or static pages0 -
Changing Domain / Site Name - An SEO Nightmare?
My company will be changing its name and moving to a new domain in about a month. What can I do from an SEO perspective to get ready for the big move? Do I just need to 301 redirect all my URLs to their new corresponding pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Sites with dynamic content - GWT redirects and deletions
We have a site that has extremely dynamic content. Every day they publish around 15 news flashes, each of which is setup as a distinct page with around 500 words. File structure is bluewidget.com/news/long-news-article-name. No timestamp in URL. After a year, that's a lot of news flashes. The database was getting inefficient (it's managed by a ColdFusion CMS) so we started automatically physically deleting news flashes from the database, which sped things up. The problem is that Google Webmaster Tools is detecting the freshly deleted pages and reporting large numbers of 404 pages. There are so many 404s that it's hard to see the non-news 404s, and I understand it would be a negative quality indicator to Google having that many missing pages. We were toying with setting up redirects, but the volume of redirects would be so large that it would slow the site down again to load a large htaccess file for each page. Because there isn't a datestamp in the URL we couldn't create a mask in the htaccess file automatically redirecting all bluewidget.com/news/yymm* to bluewidget.com/news These long tail pages do send traffic, but for speed we only want to keep the last month of news flashes at the most. What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozgeekmum0 -
Mobile Sitemap Best Practices w/ Responsive Design
I'm looking for insight into mobile sitemap best practices when building sites with responsive design. If a mobile site has the same urls as the desktop site the mobile sitemap would be very similar to the regular sitemap. Is a mobile sitemap necessary for sites that utilize responsive design? If so, is there a way to have a mobile sitemap that simply references the regular sitemap or is a new sitemap that has all urls tagged with the "" tag with each url required?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamDorfman0 -
Duplicate Content on Wordpress b/c of Pagination
On my recent crawl, there were a great many duplicate content penalties. The site is http://dailyfantasybaseball.org. The issue is: There's only one post per page. Therefore, because of wordpress's (or genesis's) pagination, a page gets created for every post, thereby leaving basically every piece of content i write as a duplicate. I feel like the engines should be smart enough to figure out what's going on, but if not, I will get hammered. What should I do moving forward? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Byron_W0 -
301 or 302 - www.yoursite.com/uk/content
If your website CMS forces you to redirect from the homepage should it be a 301 or 302 Example includes www.direct.gov.uk which 302's it My view is that it should be a 302 in this instance and almost all others should be a 301 - the reason for this is that you want the www.direct.gov.uk to be the "primary" and one that is displayed in Google, whereas for anything else you want the URL of the location. Yes I know that ideally you don't have any redirection at all...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxonnMedia0 -
Is publishing a large quantity of content at once a bad idea?
If you plan on doubling the size of your site with original, unique content, is it better to publish it all at once or over a period of time? Is there any penalty for publishing it all at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1