How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
-
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity.
Some obvious things:
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEOMy client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool.
I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up.
Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.
-
If you feel like you have done everything within your power to try and get the links removed, but there's just no way, then you should disavow the URL or domain. You should attempt to reach the owners of the domain 2-3 times before giving up. During my link removals, there have been a decent number of webmasters that finally responded on my 2nd or 3rd attempt.
As for disavowing URL or domain, if the entire domain is something you'd never want a link from, disavow the entire domain. Even if you only have ONE link from the entire site. Still, disavow the domain. Only disavow the URL if you think the site in general is good quality but you happen to be on 1 particular spammy page for some reason.
-
Hi Philipp,
I checked with Google Webmasters and there is no penalty - good news! I've also attempted to contact those sites with spammy links and I am getting no response. So - would you recommend at this point that I simply go through the disavow at this point?
Thanks in advance,
Joeaux
-
Happy to help
And I took a quick look at the backlink profile for subconsciouschange.com... definitely spammy. A nice cleanse will get you on the right track!
-
Thank you so much for your input... yes, you are all correct - I had the wrong URL. It is actually www.SubconsciousChange.com
I so appreciate your input and will start working right away on those bad links.
-
Is it really www.SubconsciousMind.com ? PR 0 and listed at domainnamesales ?
-
Philip gives good advise, I would add, that if there is no manual penalty, then the algorithm will be dismissing links at best, it would not be penalizing you for them. not for links anyhow
but as Philip said, the domain seems to be parked
-
How to see if your site has received a manual penalty from Google? Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters).
From within there you will be able to see if the website has received a manual penalty from Google. Once you've got the account setup and verified, look on the left menu for "Search Traffic" and then "Manual Actions". If there is a MANUAL penalty imposed, you'll see it there. It will either be "partial" or "site-wide". The former means that only some pages are affected. The latter means that all pages are affected.
If you have a manual penalty, you will NEED to do outreach to get links removed, and THEN you submit a disavow for the ones you were unable to remove. You're right, most spam sites won't have contact info, but you can check http://www.who.is and find an email address in most cases. You will more than likely not get the result you're looking to get if you forego the link removal process and skip straight to a disavow.
One last note, if there's no manual penalty in Google Webmaster Tools, then the site may be penalized algorithmically. If you know there are spammy links in place, you should act as if you were penalized manually, with the only difference being that you won't be submitting a reconsideration request to Google. If the site quality is poor, you will want to research Panda recovery options.
By the way, www.SubconsciousMind.com doesn't seem to exist. So either you typo'd the name, or you have an ever bigger problem on your hands now
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
-
Server and multiple sites
We have multiple sites selling similar products in different ways but have always kept them separate on the off chance that google does not like it or they penalize one site. We have always put them on different servers but now thinking for performance as they are on shared hosting to put them on a single server which would be our own but we do not know the SEO considerations. We can assign multiple IPs to a server but I am not 100% sure whether there is still a negative impact of running multiple sites on the same server even if from a different IP. Any help would be appreciated, what I am really asking is could if they are on the same server with different IP's be still linked together by google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Competitors with duplicate sites for backlinks
Hello all, In the last few months, my company has seen some keywords we historically rank well for fall off the first page, and there are a couple competitors that have appeared that use backlinks from seemingly the same site. For fairness, our site has slow page load speeds that we are working on changing, as well as not being mobile friendly yet. The sites that are ranking are mobile friendly and load fast, but we have heaps of other words still ranking well, and I'm more curious about this methodology. For example, these two pages: http://whiteboards.com.au/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JustinBSLW
http://www.glasswhiteboards.com.au/ In OSE, glasswhiteboards has the majority of links from whiteboards, and the content between the sites is the same. My page has higher domain authority & page authority, but less backlinks. However, if you take away the backlinks from the duplicate site, they are the same. Isn't this type of content supposed to be flagged? My question is about whether this kind of similar site on different domains is a good idea to build links, as all my research shows that it's poor in the long run, but it seems to be working with these guys. Another group of sites that has been killing us uses this same method, with multiple sites that look the same that all link to each other to build up backlinks. These sites do have different content. It seems instead of building different categories within their own site, they have purchased multiple domains that act as their categories. Here's just a few: http://www.lockablenoticeboards.com.au/
http://www.snapperframes.com/
http://www.snapperdisplay.com.au/
http://www.light-box.com.au/
http://www.a-frame-signs.com.au/
http://www.posterhangers.com.au/0 -
I think My Site Has Been Hacked
I am working with a client and have noticed lots of 500 server errors that look very strange in their webmaster tools account. I am seeing URLs like this blog/?tag=wholesale-cheap-nfl-jerseys-free-0702.html and blog/?tag=nike-jersey-shorts-4297.html there are 155 similar pages yet the client does not sell anything like this and hasn't created these URLs. I have updated WP and all plugins and cannot find these links or pages on the site anywhere but I am guessing they are slowing the site down as GWT keeps highlighting them as errors. Has anybody had any experiences with these types of hacks and can point me in the right direction of how to clean it up properly? Ta
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fazza470 -
What happens when content on your website (and blog) is an exact match to multiple sites?
In general, I understand that having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing. But I see a lot of small businesses (specifically dentists in this example) who hire the same company to provide content to their site. They end up with the EXACT same content as other dentists. Here is a good example: http://www.hodnettortho.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.braces2000.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/ http://www.gentledentalak.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth/ If you google the title of that blog article you find tons of the same article all over the place. So, overall, doesn't this make the content on these blogs irrelevant? Does this hurt the SEO on these sites at all? What is the value of having completely unique content on your site/blog vs having duplicate content like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MorganPorter0 -
Has Panda help this site achieve great heights? How? and Why?
Today I went about my business in trying to understand what is happening in our market, eyewear, after the last Panda update. I was interested to know if any of our competitors were effected as much as we were for a very competitive key phrase To my surprise a new kid appeared on the block, well, on page one, position two. Imagine my second surprise, when the new kid turn out to be a 3 month old domain, yes 3 months, with zero page rank and zero back links. I was in for one more surprise before I stood up, walked to the window and gazed into space to contenplate the meaning of Panda and SEO as we know it. This third surprise was the site in question is a counterfeiting site using black hat SEO with fast results. It has a Blog its a good looking site with the key phrase menstioned a hundred times. google-UK-%20Search-Result.jpg panda-help.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShoutChris0 -
Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices
I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Why are these sites so high with poor relevant links...
Hello, Keyword: TV Stands. I have been researching competitors for a client and we seem to be unable to understand why certains pages are ranking on page 1 of Google UK for keyword TV Stands. eg: http://www.furnitureinfashion.net/plasma-TV-stand.html (Google UK 8 - TV Stands) http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999542/Nr.99.aspx (Google UK 9 - TV Stands) The furniture in fashion has links from sites like: http://www.ummah.com/forum/ and http://www.muslimco.com/ which is totaly irrelevant to the site. Any ideas on other things as the tesco.com site does not have direct links to it. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0