Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain

[ShawnW]

I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update.

You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%.

There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created.

There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime.

I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain.

**More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? **

The website is in the travel vertical.

90BJKyc

[GastonRiera]

Hi Shawn,

1, if you spot clearly spammy and unnatural links.. go ahead and disavow them. Keep in mind that there is the possibility to disavow entire domains. Here for more information about it. Disavow backlinks - Google Search Console.

2, No, sitewide links from a blog or in any part of your own website won't be a cause of penalty like this one. Google is able to recognize sitewide links a few years back. I wouldn't worry about that.

3, There are many areas to focus after an organic penalty. I'd suggest trying to understand which queries and URLs are the ones losing traffic and rankings, mostly from Google Search Console. Then, analyze what's going on with the User Experience and Site Speed, comparing your website with the ones that outrank you. And, last but not least, content! Check your content whether is the one that should be answering user's queries.

Hope it helps,
Best luck.
Gaston