10,000 links in 2 minutes
-
Hey guys. A belated happy new year to everyone who reads this!
I had a strange experience yesterday with linking from a clients website footer.
Basically, the client currently has a serious duplicate content problem caused by a multiple language plug in. It has made Google believe that there are 10 different versions of the clients website online (one for each language). It is a real estate website and there are quite a few pages anyway, but with the error, I would suggest the page count is now around 10,000.
We are waiting for the developer who installed the plug in to repair the problem and without thinking it through really, yesterday, we made a text link to our home page in their footer.
Overnight, our rankings for the keyword we used for the text link have dropped from pos. 2 page 1 down to halfway down page 2.
Is this basically a sign that it is not good have this footer link from their site? I guess it is kind of like 10,000 weighted links being added in one day right?
For now we have removed the link, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Mark
-
Yeah this is really strange. We have now dropped out of site for all of our main keywords. Weirder still, is that for some of the keywords the contact page on our site is ranking above the target landing page.
The thing I have noticed about the new hosting is that we no longer show for 'pages from the UK' and also the site speed on analytics seems quite a bit slower.
Do you think this could have all been caused by adding that one link?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Our website is www.mysocialagency.com
-
A hosting change would not cause the drop. Especially given that is only one page. If there were a problem with hosting change, it would likely affect most or all.
If the plug in that was used is the problem, you won't need to change canonical.
-
Have the client use the cannonical tag so that the pages are not duplicated for every language! That would fix their problems as well as yours
-
You know actually Robert. We also changed the hosting of our website two days ago. Last time we did this, it made no difference at all and this time, it has made no difference to any other keyword phrases apart from the one that was the footer text link.
Do you find that swapping hosting sometimes causes drops? The new server should be faster.....
-
That is interesting. My gut says it likely did not impact you with a footer link to your page that quickly. Could have, but I am just not that convinced. Along with that, I will tell you that while early on we would link from client's footer to our site, we just don't do it anymore. One, footer links are of little value (and another reason I don't think that was the cause of the drop) and it is obvious if you host sites for clients that they are all on same server/C block.
I would go ahead with what you have done in removing the text link and see what happens over the next few days. Even if it pops right back up, it won't mean that was the cause. I have a site that was page one number 3 for a given quality keyword term that a month ago, dropped to page 5 number 9. Today (a month later) we are back at page one number 3. I cannot tell you why. (Google was SE).
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
-
Does link have any value?
I recently received a link, but upon inspecting the page source on the site I did not see the link in the coding. Is this a link with any SEO value? Is google able to see this link? Note: Upon inspecting the actual link on the page, I do see coding with a followed link, but on the page source, only the actual table in which it is listed shows in the coding, with none of the content - including our link, showing.
Link Building | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Reddit LInks
Are Reddit links worthwhile? I hear they are sometimes follow and sometimes not follow. Also what about links verses self links? I'm pretty handy with reddit so I can probably make content that would actually be upvoted a lot. Let me know, thanks.
Link Building | | RafeTLouis1 -
Getting a sitewide links from one domain as oppsed to few links from certain pages, a good, bad or horrible idea?
Hello, I have a website that is performing really well in Google for country specific Real Estate Website. I have had this site for just about 2 years and I have 4600+ indexed pages, and about 50 of my main keywords appear in top 10 results on Google. I have now started a second site with a brand new domain, its only about 2 months old. This one is a Travel website and again its country specific (same country that real estate website is performing well in) and since its still building up the content and has barely a couple of backlinks, I am thinking of adding a linkback to it from my Real Estate Site. Is it a good idea to add a site wide link back from header section of the real estate website to my travel website? Both sites has same country and most of the keywords in both relate to this country. Or will I be better off adding a few text links from few pages with best Page Authority? Or - do you suggest that I do not link the two at all? Both sites are hosted on different servers, with different IP's and one is on windows server created in asp.net while another is a magento site. Any advidce / insight will be much appreciated and thank you in advance.
Link Building | | waituk_sanjeev0 -
To Fix An Incoming Link Or Not?
I recently received a unnatural link notice from Google. The thing is, I haven't done any link building in the last two years. So, I looked at my latest links report within Google Webmaster Tools and see where one of our dealer's website has been updated recently and now includes a site-wide link to us. Site note: My brand name as the anchor text ... no keywords nearby. I think this is what may be causing the problem because nothing else within the report really jumps out at me. Also, it lines up with the timeline. It looks like they changed their site to include the link at the beginning of April. Google was noticing the links throughout April and to the present. I got the notice May 19th. Now, I have a good relationship with this dealer and can have him change anything I want at the drop of a hat. The question is, by having him change it am I admitting to Google wrongdoing and thus hurting myself by inviting further scrutiny. Should I leave it as is since it truly is a legitimate link? Google having false positives like this really muddies the water. Thanks guys!
Link Building | | tatermarketing0 -
Reciprocol Links
Am I correct in stating that linking to every article about your company is a bad idea. I see a lot of sites with followed links to the articles that link to them. Is this not devaluing the link? I've been recommending removing the links or no indexing the page and no following the links. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Link Building | | brandonschultz0 -
Finding links online that already exist as link juice based on search results
I'm curious about this, I can't find anything on the net that talks about it. I wrote an article about it on squidoo and have had no responses so I am thinking this is very rare subject. The question is I have done some backlink research with my competitors with linkdetective.com and found many links (even follow ones) related to sites that provide search results. Here are a link about what I am talking about as an example, I have found many more besides this one. http://search.lphant.com/es/webResults.html?q=free%20scrabble%20dictionary&hl=en&page=1&src=hmp_es&ref=1 My site appears in those results. When looking at the source there is no "nofollow". I found this page because linkdetective.com had this link listed pointing to my competitor. Are these valid backlinks? What I have been doing is adding these links to http://www.google.com/addurl so that Google knows about them. Is there something I am missing or are these valid?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
How might Google differentiate between an artificial link exchange and partners linking to each other?
Hi, All! Artificial link exchanges (contacting a vaguely connected site and requesting to exchange links to increase your PR) is, as far as I know, considered an outdated, not-so-smart technique, as Google might devalue them. Yet, for real business partners to exchange links seems to be an entirely accepted and encouraged technique. While that would be intuitive to a human who's viewing the pages. how might Google detect when two sites that link to each other are linking because they are trusted business associates (valuable) as opposed to when they are doing a link exchange (devalued)? Thanks! Aviva
Link Building | | debi_zyx0