Confusing penalties
-
Dear Mozzers,
I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page.
Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to:
- eliminate duplicate content
- improve site structure
- optimize internal links
- build legitimate do-follows
- add some keyword density
- fix titles and H tags
Essentially just the basics, right?
But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites.
At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it?
Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition.
Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution?
Advice is really appreciated!
-
You guys are amazing. Thanks for the quick and thorough feedback!
-
On the whole, I agree with what Will Quick says.
I do believe that even in niches that others are using comment spam, you CAN outrank them with quality work (I have done it, in fact)... and in the end, you will have a stronger backlink profile that should outlast the spam guys when G- updates roll out in the future (as they always do!).
That said, I strongly agree with Will, in that a sudden change in the style of backlink profile can in fact cause an issue and ranking drop - especially in the mid-long term.
Basically you have just suffered from 1 or 2 things, or both (in my opinion anyway!).
Number 1: You may well be suffering from an inbound link filter/penalty due to the spam. This can be due to spammy links, or over use of a given anchor text (what % of inbound links to the page that was ranking, and also to the domain, use the exact match anchor?). This could be an issue EITHER becuase of the spam links, OR because of over-optimisation of a set keyword (has the ranking suffered for other pages/keyterms???
Number 2: The link velocity to the domain as a whole, and also to the page(s) in question, has probably just taken a MASSIVE drop (by the sounds of it). Such a drastic change in itself can cause issues and ranking drops (in my opinion!). At least in the short to mid term - That said, continued, high quality SEO work 'should' re-gain you those positions, and build a better foundation for the future (safer with future big G updates).
Now, to fix Number 1, above, may take time. I feel that you need to pull off reports of the current anchor text usage to the domain, and to specific pages, and try to ensure that nothing is too 'over the top'. Try to get some nice brand links to water down any high anchor text usages (to page/domain).
To fix Number 2 may be trickier. You could either:
A) Use spam for a while, and decrease it steadily, whilst increasing the quality work (I do NOT recommend this, but that is just because it is not how I like to work, I feel it pollutes the web).
B) Ride it out! - Gain steady, high quality links via press releases, blogger outreach, articles, web 2.0 work, social media baiting. Also consider an increase in PPC in the interim, to keep the $£ coming in! Done right, this should help to regain positions.
C) Do 'B)', above, but also try to be creative in 'simulating' the sort of link velocity that the spammers, perhps some decent infographics with brand links in the embed code, social media baiting, press release syndication, and at a push, mass article submission (with decent quality articles) is still less spammy than blog comments! (although not ideal for long term tactics, it may help to simulate the link velocity). Basically check the amount of extra unique linking domains that the spam work gained the site, and try to get at least somewhere near that level using non-spam tactics, and slowly reduce the amount to a more realistic monthly amount, but with higher quality work.
I think that you should be open with the client, and tell them that although they may suffer now, it is probably much better to do this now than to wait until they get penalised.
This way, they just need to come up with an intelligent strategy to recover, whereas if they kept up with the spam work, they may well end up in real hot water!
**That is just my opinion anyway, and it is without knowing the exact situation, so should be taken as general opinion, not a well researched tactic! **
brevityworks, best of luck!
-
i'm with Ryan, you are more then likly getting the wrap for the last SEO's spam.
comment spam would not get you to page one for any keyword worth having.
-
Hey Brevity,
This may or may not be the answer you're looking for but, from my experience, it's the right answer.
Don't think of links in terms of good and bad quality. Whilst there certainly is a difference between a good and a bad link, the first thing you should be looking at is the link profiles of your biggest competitors in the same niche / vertical.
A good way to find these sites is with SEMrush if you don't know them already.
Look at the kind of links your competitors are getting and how the page / domain authority of these links is distributed in their link profile. Eg 90% of their links are on pages with 0-10 page authority, 5% 10-20 page authority 5% over 20.
Now, from my experience, Google doesn't have a model of a "good" link profile, only what's standard in that niche. If everyone else is buying shitty comment spam then you have to do that too. Fight fire with fire. On top of this you optimise the balls off your site and build up more of these high quality links ON TOP of the other links.
I certainly wouldn't just turn off a Linkbuilding method that has already proven it works for your site.
Once this starts getting results slowly wean them off this spam. Think of it like gradually cutting off a smack addict's heroin supply, haha. Obviously comment spam isn't something you want to rely on forever, but its too late now if the ball's already in motion. You just have to slow that baby down first.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I just needed some reassurance and they wanted a second opinion.
My fear is that their ranking on that keyword was hyper inflated because of the insane amount of comment spam (2 yrs worth) and now that the spam is either dissipating or being penalized, the normal duplicate content penalties are kicking in.
Aarrgghhh...cleanup is always harder than starting from scratch.
-
It could be that the comment spam is now being punished, coincidentally after you stopped it. Run the keyword grading tool on your pages to make sure your on-site is as good as it could be, and continue building legitimate links. I would never suggest using black-hat techniques like buying comment spam.
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
-
Got Google Manual penalty full Spam on my website
Here are Moz Metrics: http://prntscr.com/as3fp6 Site Url: www.financialprospect.com DA- 40 PA- 48 Spam Score - 0 RD- 68 Links No Loss in Backlink Profile I think my site is having much more spun content so can you suggest me the ways to re-index my site? How can i get my site back to google? Can you suggest any tool which give number of links already spun and then we may delete those posts. Looking for positive reply...!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | morisshibu1 -
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
80% of traffic lost over night, Google Penalty?
Hi all.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hemjakt
I have a website called Hemjakt (http://www.hemjakt.se/) which is a search engine for real estate currently only available on the Swedish market. The application crawl real estate websites and collect all estates on a single searchable application. The site has been released for a few months and have seen a steady growth since release, increasing by 20% weekly up to ~900 visitors per day. 3 days ago, over night, I lost 80% of my traffic. Instead of 900 visitors per day I'm at ~100 visitors per day and when I search for long, specific queries such as "Åsgatan 15, Villa 12 rum i Alsike, Knivsta" ( <adress><house type=""><rooms><area> <city>), I'm now only found on the fifth page. I suspect that I have become a subject of a Google Penalty. How to get out of this mess?</city></rooms></house></adress> Just like all search engines or applications, I do crawl other websites and scrape their content. My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value by giving them the possibility to compare houses, get ton of more data to compare pricing and history, giving them extra functionalities that source site do not offer and so on. My analytics data show good user engagement. Here is one example of a Source page and a page at my site:
Source: http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964
My Site: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/ So: How do I actually confirm that this is the reason I lost my traffic? When I search for my branded query, I still get result. Also I'm still indexed by Google. If I am penalized. I'm not attempting to do anything Black Hat and I really believe that the app gives a lot of value to the users. What tweaks or suggestions do you have to changes of the application, to be able to continue running the service in a way that Google is fine with?0 -
Partial Manual penalty to a URL
Hi Mozers, I have a website which has got a partial manual penalty on a specific url. That url is of no use to the website now and is going to be taken off in 3 months time as the website is going to be completely redesigned. Till then I dont wont to live with the partial manual penalty for this url. I have few things in mind to tackle this: 1. take out the url from the website now (as the new redesign will take 3 months) 2. take out internal links pointing to this url in question 3. file for reconsideration with google stating we have taken off the url and have not generated any backlinks and the backlinks are organic. (no backlinking activity has been done on this website or the url) Please let me know if this works or i will have to get the backlinks removed then the disavow then the reconsideration. Looking forward for ur response 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Is there a way to check if your site has a Google penalty?
Is there a way to find out if your site has an over optimization penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Content box (on page content) and titles Google over-optimization penalty?
We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!
On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains. On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues. When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys. We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight. I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/" It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong. I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty. Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down? We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content. The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects. Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page. The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem. I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem! It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content. As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoreyTisdale0