The wrath of Google's Hummingbird, a big problem, but no quick solution?
-
One of our websites has been wrongfully tagged for penalty and has literally disappeared from Google. After lot's of research, it seems the reason was due to a ton of spammy backlinks and irrelevant anchor text. I have disavowed the links, but the results are still not rebounding back. Any idea how long the wrath of Google gods will last?
-
Just checking in here. How have things been going? Just wanted to add some info;
- did you actually receive a "manual action" from Google? If not, a reconsideration request is not needed, it's an algo not a manual penalty
- Hummingbird will not do this. The "date" of Hummingbird is not really a specific point in time, and it's definitely not the day Google announced it. The Hummingbird algo didn't act like Panda, Penguin or any other penalty.
- Disavowing links can take up to six months to have an effect. This info is straight from John Muller at Google. Google has to actually crawl the websites that are listed in the disavow file before applying the disavow.
- It's not good enough to only disavow. Google wants to see some effort to remove links as well.
- You may not bounce back unfortunately (tough to say without seeing the site). But if you were artificially ranking too high with bad links, now you might be ranking where you should have all along.
Overall the best thing to do is remove and disavow as much as possible and work on moving forward as best possible to acquire new links and make the site better overall.
-
Yiannis,
Good point. Actually it seems that since the Hummingbird update, the rankings have disappeared. So I am going through all the SEO checkpoints and it seemed that spam backlinks was the viable reason for the site suffering in rankings. There is no notice that the site has been penalized so it appears to be due to the automatic due to the algorithm update. It has been 2 months since clearing the issues, but still no luck in rebounding on the rankings
-
Reconsideration request applies on manual spam penalties and not algorithmic updates. this has been covered extensively by Matt Cutts in numerous videos.
We dont know if he is manually penalised or not. in the case you are follow advises from the two gentlemen above.
IF you arent and removed all spammy links it will take a while for you to get your rankings back. Some people say you have to wait a big update but I would say give it a month and in the meantime try to main traffic from other channels ie. social media, email marketing etc.
-
Everything that Alex said PLUS fill a reconsideration request. Wait a couple of weeks for Google's response. Your request MUST explain all the steps you made to clean up your site and be in compliance with Google's TOS (with proof and all)!
-
Since you lost those backlinks, you probably won't be able to bounce back to exactly where the site left off before those penalties. Did you get a manual action or was it done by the crawlers? Also, did you get a partial or full site penalty?
First double check your Google Webmaster Tools and see what the status of the penalty is and make sure that's removed. There's a Manual Actions area they added in the last few months which lets you see the stats and details of actions taken against your site by Google. If everything is resolved there, start improving your content and get back to link building. Since a good number of your old links are gone, they'll need to be replaced with better quality links.
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
-
Google Penguin penalty is automated or manual?
Hi, I have seen some of our competitors are missing from top SERP and seems to be penalised as per this penalty checker: http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/. Is this right tool to check penalty? Or any other good tools available? Are these penalties because of recent Penguin update? If so, is this a automated or manual penalty from Google? I don't think all of these tried with black-hat techniques and got penalised. The new penguin update might triggered their back-links causing this penalty. Even we dropped for last 2 weeks. What's the solution for this? How effectively link-audit works? Thanks, Satish
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Spamming Backlinks - doesn't seem to be detrimental enough?
Hi, We have noticed sites such as http://www.rattanfurnitureoutlet.co.uk & http://www.supremerattanfurniture.co.uk/ have huge numbers of what appear to be spam like and invaluable backlinks yet they have both maintained a great ranking for their search terms despite this. We would like to know why, does the good outweigh the bad so to speak?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | birdmarketing0 -
Its posible to use Google Authorship in an online shop?
Today I installed Google Authorship in my Wordpress Blog and I would like to know if its posible to implement it in my Opencart online shop. I am not interested in rich snippets because I have 9k of products and the 90% of them dont have sells nor reviews
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozismoz0 -
Oh sh@t Wetherby Racecourse has been de indexed by Google :-(
Dio mio! Wetherby racecourse <cite>www.wetherbyracing.co.uk/</cite> has been de indexed by Google, re indexing request has been made via webmaster tools and the offending 3rd party banner ad has been stripped out. So my question is please. How long will it take approximately to re -index?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nightwing
And is it true re submitting an updated xml site & firing tweets at the ailing site may spark it back into life? Grazie tanto,David0 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0 -
Google 'most successful online businesses'
how come this guy has all but 1 of the top ten results? (UK results - I'm guessing same in USA?) - with thin content on a spammed keyword on multi-sub domains? How can we 'white hat' guys compete if stuff like this is winning?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheInternetWorks0 -
I think my site is affected by a Google glitch...or something
Although google told me No manual spam actions found i had not received an unnatural link request notice i figured it would be a good idea to clean these up so i did. So i have submitted 3 reconsideration requests from google. They all came back with the same response: No manual spam actions found. I really doubt that anyone at google really checked those out.You will notice that i don't even appear on page 1-10 at all...its clearly google filtering the site out from the results(except for my brand terms), but i have no idea what for.What do you guys think it is? If you see anythign let me know so i can have it fixed.This has been going on for 2 months now...my company has been around for a long time...i dont understand why suddenly im not showing up in searches for the keyword si used to rank for...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CMTM0 -
Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Townpages0