WhoIs penalty
-
Does anyone know if it's possible to get a penalty on WHOIS data and a shared IP address?
We had some bad SEO done (And at ranking demolished) on one of our company websites which has the same WHOIS data and is on the same IP address as another side which is just seems to have taken a knock.
Is it possible Google could have associated both and penalised accordingly?
-
Here's Matt Cutts on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Ka0fzyZbk
His answer is basically saying that in almost every case you could not be affected by the fact that there were other spammy sites sharing your hosting. He said that there are really rare cases whereby if one host has a crazy amount of spammy sites they may take action on all of these sites, but he made a point of saying that this is really rare.
So no, I'd be looking for some other cause for the rankings to drop.
-
Couple of things that i can think of that might have happen are -
1. Same IP address (1 signal to Google - its a big signal) as mentioned by you
2. Was the reason behind the penalty your backlinks profile? Chances are that you got same sort of backlinks for the other website too.
3. Signal 1 and 2 combined can give Google indication of 'notorious' activities conducted by the 'controller' (SEO company) of these websites (your websites)
Couple of things to ask -
1. Are these two websites in question from the same industry and serving the same market?
2. Do you have backlinks coming from same sources
3. Are there any other websites on the same IP address that have been penalized? I do know that websites on a c-block can be penalized.
4. Is there any direct relation between the two websites apart from shared IP address? ex - Links of each other on the website in partners, about us or contact us etc. pages?
-
It is possible though I have not heard of it before. Data easily scrapable by google. Where I have heard google made a penalty link is via WMT's. Could they also have also been connected via WMT's at some stage?
Hope that 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
-
Site deindexed after HTTPS migration + possible penalty due to spammy links
Hi all, we've recently migrated a site from http to https and saw the majority of pages drop out of the index. https://www.relate.org.uk/ One of the most extreme deindexation problems I've ever seen, but there doesn't appear to be anything obvious on-page which is causing the issue. (Unless I've missed something - please tell me if I have!) I had initially discounted any off-page issues due to the lack of a manual action in SC, however after looking into their link profile I spotted 100 spammy porn .xyz sites all linking (see example image). Didn't appear to be any historic disavow files uploaded in the non https SC accounts. Any on-page suggestions, or just play the waiting game with the new disavow file? Hku8I
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTI_Digital0 -
Duplicate content created by website Calendar - A Penalty?
A colleague of mine asked me a question about duplicate content coming from their event calendar. I don't think this will affect them negatively, but I would love some feedback and thoughts. ThanksOne of my clients, LifeTech Academy, is using my RavenTools software. Raventools has reported a HUGE amount of duplicate content (4.4K instances).The duplicate content all revolves around their calendar and repeating events (http://lifetechacademy.org/events/)The question is this - will this impact their SEO efforts in a negative way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill_K0 -
Best way to move the content to a different domain without inviting any SERP penalty?
Hi all, We are in a bit of a fix right now. We have around 60-70 articles (Wordpress pages / posts) that we intend to move to another domain of ours. What's the best way to do so such that we do not invite any Google penalty. Here's a detailed information about our case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stj
Let's say, our site example.com has more 2000 articles. To help us better position our content for one of the sections on example.com, we have started another website, example2.com and want to move those 60-70 articles from example.com to example2.com. What is the best way to do it such that we are not penalised by Google? Is it (a) Move all the said content (60-70 articles) from example.com to example2.com and (b) do a permanent redirect (301) of each of the older article URLs to newer article URLs. What are the other options?0 -
How to handle a pure spam penalty (from GWT) as a blogging platform
Hello, I have a blogging platform which spammers unfortunately used a few years ago to create spam blogs. Since them, we've added spam filters and even if I can't not assume there isn't any spam blog left, I can say that most of the blogs are clean. The problem is, in Google Webmasters Tools, we have a Pure spam message in the Manual actions page. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en), with a list of 1000 blog links. All these blogs have been marked as spam in our system for at least 1 year, technically it means they return a 410 header and display something like "this blog doesn't meet our quality requirements". When I've first seen the manual action message in GWT, I have asked for reconsideration request. Google answered within a week saying that they had checked again our website, but when I go went to the manual actions page, there was still a "pure spam" message, with a different list of blogs, which have already been marked as spam for a year at least. What should I do ? Ask for reconsideration requests as long as Google answers ? Thank you in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingLouis0 -
First attempt at manual penalty removal fails - all example links provided by Google not in Majestic, GWT, Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OSE.
Hello all, I am trying to recover a site from a manual penalty. I already submitted once. Here's what we did. We took the link profile from webmaster tools, majestic seo, ahrefs, link detox, and ose. We manually looked at every link to exclude good links. Then used a tool to run the removal campaign. Submitted a disavow file and reconsideration request. Google came back with a denial. When I looked at the three example links that Google provided, they were definitely spammy (forum profile and comment spam). But none of them were in any of the original csv downloads from GWT, Ahrefs, Majestic, OSE, or LinkDetox. What can I do? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NicoleDeLeon0 -
Duplicate keyphrases in page titles = penalty?
Hello Mozzers - just looking at a website which has duplicate keyphrases in its page titles... So you have [keyphrase 1] | [exact match Keyphrase 1] Now I happen to know this particular site has suffered a dramatic fall in traffic - the SEO agency working on the site had advised the client to duplicate keyphrases. Hard to believe, huh! What I'm wondering is whether this extensive exact match keyphrase duplication might've been enough to attract a penalty? Your thoughts would be welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces) A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since. Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season. Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability. I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog. I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT. Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword. The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users. So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty? Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scott.lucas1 -
Using the right Schema.org - & is there a penalty in using the wrong one?
Hi We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd reviews. We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants - should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant) or schema.org - product + agg review score? What do you do for your product listing pages? If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie1