Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
-
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text.
Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google
"Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. "
We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links.
The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _
So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? **
- Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link?
- Can we nofollow all those links?
- Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section?
- Should we just remove the links and cry?
-
Personally I'd no-follow them, you don't want them to pass on any ranking factors so no-follow the links if they are driving traffic. If they don't drive traffic then get rid of them.
Moosa is right though, you need to use other tools aside from WMT because that doesn't show a complete list of links to your website.
-
We've been disavowing links found in G Webmaster Tools and Link Detox. It took my resource 4.5 months to do 80k links.
Our business websites used our domain name to link to us. As in 'powered by domainname.com'. I can only assume that is why Google showed those examples in the latest denied reconsideration request. Because we're linking from each site back to our site and they're all on the same C class IP.
Should we still link using our domain name, or remove those links?
-
Ok, I recently revoked the penalty after receiving three rejections from Google J. Here, I am going to share my experience with you and how I get over from the penalty!
- The links that are displayed in the Google Webmaster tools are not enough, you have to search for more data from Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Moz and more.
- You can use Link Detox or Link Risk to see what links are risky for your website.
Try to remove as many links as possible and disavow rest of them.
As far as the anchor text are concern… always keep in mind that if you have lot of good websites that are linking back to you with a keyword in the anchor text, in that case you should use a strategy to diversify the anchor text or turn it in to the brand name.
In my opinion your % of brand name in the anchor text should be greater than the % of any other keyword in the anchor text (sign of a naturally looking website).
Plus at the same time plan a kick as content marketing plan that gives you natural links because this hints Google that now you are running at the right path!
Hope this helps!
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
-
Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?
Hi, We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile. We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work 🙂 After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing. Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation? Josh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoshuaKersh0 -
Could lots of links pointed to 301 & 302 redirects be a problem?
Hello, We've got hundreds of links found in screaming frog that are pointing towards 301 & 302 redirects. Could this be hurting rankings? We've got very few 404s. A lot of the problem is breadcrumbs of categories pointing to 302s, but the original category pages that are 302ed are not indexed so we may be OK. We can't change the 302 redirects, it's part of the cart. Could all these non-updated hyperlinks be the cause of continual ranking drop in Google? We've gone from the top 3 to the second page for our main terms. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google is giving one of my competitors a quasi page 1 monopoly, how can I complain?
Hi, When you search for "business plan software" on google.co.uk, 7 of the 11 first results are results from 1 company selling 2 products, see below: #1. Government site (related to "business plan" but not to "business plan software")
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tbps
#2. Product 1 from Palo Alto Software (livePlan)
#3. bplan.co.uk: content site of Palo Alto Software (relevant to "business plan" but only relevant to "business plan software" because it is featuring and linking to their Product 1 and Product 2 sites)
#4. Same site as #3 but different url
#5. Palo Alto Software Product 2 (Business Plan Pro) page on Palo Alto Software .co.uk corporate site
#6. Same result as #5 but different url (the features page)
#7. Palo Alto Software Product 2 (Business Plan Pro) local site
#8, #9 and #10 are ok
#11. Same as #3 but the .com version instead of the .co.uk This seems wrong to me as it creates an illusion of choice for the customer (especially because they use different sites) whereas in reality the results are showcasing only 2 products. Only 1 of Palo Alto Software's competitors is present on page 1 of the search results (the rest of them are on page 2 and page 3). Did some of you experience a similar issue in a different sector? What would be the best way to point it out to Google? Thanks in advance Guillaume0 -
2 sites in one niche?
Hello, Can you be penalized for having 2 ecommerce sites in the same niche? Is there a way to do it white-hat? Please explain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google Penguin for non-English queries?
Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
Using Redirects To Avoid Penalties
A quick question, born out of frustration! If a webpage has been penalised for unnatural links, what would be the effects of moving that page to a new URL and setting up a 301 redirect from the old penalised page to the new page? Will Google treat the new page as ‘non-penalised’ and restore your rankings? It really shouldn’t work, but I’m convinced (although not certain) that our clients competitor has done this, with great effect! I suppose you could also achieve this using canonicalisation too! Many thanks in advance, Lee.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webpresence0 -
Anchor text penalty doesn't work?!
How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0