Penalized for "Unnatural Links" on Webmaster Tools
-
Has anyone ever logged in to Google Webmaster tools and seen a message about them seeing unnatural links (as a warning)
Our homepage lost all its rankings. I will submit a reconsideration request. We don't engage in link buying practices (some directories, thats all.)
Any feedback, please?
Thanks
-
Thanks Robert. Yes, I believe we have a good link profile and work hard at it. This is really a shame. I don't see any reason to really waste more time and not submit a rec request to Google in the next few hours.
I will keep everyone posted and thanks for contributing.
-
I have just had the same issue on 9 of my blogs, deindexed, hardly any outgoing links, no interlinking at all. Google is getting ridiculous, it's the fact you don't know where you stand that's the worst of it.
-
Paul,
I am at a loss on this. The reason being that i don't see anything all that "unnaturaly:"You have some great high quality links to begin with.
Your anchor text is fairly diverse (Shopping cart software is what you do so..., and then the others around it are also fairly well used, etc.)TLD distribution is 74% .com with the rest spread out, about 1% .edu, etc.
Your first 20 linking root domains are ubiquitous, high DA sites.
So, I have a big, big, hmmmmm. IF yours is unnatural, then GoDaddy is the spawn of satan's links.....?????
I would still move slowly on the resubmission give yourself at least 24 hours to really survey all and then go for it with your ducks in a row.
Good luck, please let us know how it goes.
-
Yeah, I agree Paul, it is standard practice, but unfortunately that doesn't mean Google approves it. I haven't heard of Google penalizing shopping cart software footer links, however, I do know that Google has penalized sites who put their link in blog gadgets that they give away. And, really, there's not a lot of difference in the two. And if you've worked with Google much you'll know that Google isn't fair. It may be that you had a manual review and that manual reviewer gave you the ax, while another manual reviewer would not.
-
I am pretty new to SEO (or at least new to being serious about it), so use my advice at your own risk.
My guess is that this stems from situations like this:
Powered by FORTUNE3 • shopping cart software or the other keyword perfect variations of it at the bottom of your customer's sites. Would they have put that there if you didn't pre-code it into the software and charge them money to remove it?
The sites are also all unrelated. You might think they are related because they are your customers, but is ray bans, jeep parts, car covers, and homeowners rights manuals, gun lasers, and all the other sites related to shopping cart software? None of them has any other mention of shopping cart software on their whole site, except for the forced link.
Also, these are effectively paid links, since you put them into the software by default, and you charge people $50 to remove them. Thinking in reverse (sort of), you are paying $50 to them to keep the link. It's a forced, or paid link.
Think of it this way, if you offered to your customers to remove it for free, or gave them a way to do it easily and told them how (even for non-techies, like a check box in the admin panel they use for processing orders), what percentage would remove it.
I used to have a store on Big Commerce. They did the same thing, except I could remove it in the accessible code, and it is one of the first things I did right away. I really did not want to be forced to advertise for them.
Anyway, I am curious to see how this plays out, as I suspect you are not the only shopping cart provider with this situation.
By the way, here is another example of it, and it is sure to catch them too. Go Daddy Spammy Link Building
-
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your input. The fact of the matter is that THAT is standard practice with all shopping cart software companies. You can look through millions of websites and at the bottom you'll see Powered by or Ecommerce by...etc.
Design firms do this, etc. I don't believe that's the issue but that's something we may need to ask in our reconsideration request.
-
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your input. The fact of the matter is that THAT is standard practice with all shopping cart software companies. You can look through millions of websites and at the bottom you'll see Powered by or Ecommerce by...etc.
Design firms do this, etc. I don't believe that's the issue but that's something we may need to ask in our reconsideration request.
-
Pablo might it be the dofollow text links you're placing on your client's websites pointing back to you? Like the one in the footer of this page? http://www.belljewels.com/
-
this is for www.fortune3.com
we're a shopping cart software company so our link building comes from:
-Customer Websites
-Directories (Business.com and other authoritative directories)
-Blogs (our own mostly.)
-Press Releases
I did find www.aolstalker.com linking. ....what do you think?
-
Pablo, Wait. Do not submit for reconsideration yet. If you are missing something, you could create more problems than you solve. So,
Go through the site and see what is going on. If Google is questioning "unnatural links" look at all and see where they may be right. You want to try to fix this before you submit for reconsideration.
Is there any way for you to give us a domain name so that we can see what is there, that would really help with helping you. What % nofollow, how fast have you garnered the links, what directories? What paid directories, any link wheels or reciprocal links that you know of? Etc.
Hope this helps, be patient for a minute, it will help.
Best
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
-
Optimization for "Search by Photos" feature
Howdy, fellow mozzers, Does anyone know what affects a given company photos show up in the "Search by Photos" section? I can't find any decent info.. Here is the link to SEL, describing the feature (not even google themselves seem to have an announcement about it). https://searchengineland.com/google-showing-mobile-search-by-photos-option-in-selected-local-verticals-323237 Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Penalized domain, starting over. 302 or just add a link that site has moved?
Hello, our .com domain got a fred update and to be honest we need to start over. Now my first idea was to 302 the domain as the penalty should not come with this. Other option is just to have a landing page saying, we have a new address its www.example.es . What would be better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advertisingtech1 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Linking and non-linking root domains
Hi, Is there any affect on SEO based on the ratio of linking root domains to non-linking root domains and if so what is the affect? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Building "keyword" backlinks
Looking for some opinions here please. Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth. I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing. These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable... myblogguest bloggerlinkup postjoint Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth. Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed. The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site. My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days? The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!! Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Can anyone explain sudden drop in impressions. Webmaster tools screenshot attached.
I posted here recently concerned about a drop in rankings. I'm yet to figure out what happened and thought I'd post a screenshot of the loss of impressions to see if anyone can help? jeZO1r1.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools reporting a massive increase in 404s?
Several weeks back, we launched a new website, replacing a legacy system moving it to a new server. With the site transition, webroke some of the old URLs, but it didn't seem to be too much concern. We blocked ones I knew should be blocked in robots.txt, 301 redirected as much duplicate data and used canonical tags as far as I could (which is still an ongoing process), and simply returned 404 for any others that should have never really been there. For the last months, I've been monitoring the 404s Google reports in Web Master Tootls (WMT) and while we had a few hundred due to the gradual removal duplicate data, I wasn't too concerned. I've been generating updated sitemaps for Google multiple times a week with any updated URLs. Then WMT started to report a massive increase in 404s, somewhere around 25,000 404s per day (making it impossible for me to keep up). The sitemap.xml has new URL only but it seems that Google still uses the old sitemap from before the launch. The reported sources of 404s (in WMT) don't exist anylonger. They all are coming from the old site. I attached a screenshot showing the drastic increase in 404s. What could possibly cause this problem? wmt-massive-404s.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sonetseo0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0