No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work
-
Hi Everyone,
i hope someone can help.
Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April.
We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious.
Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration.
There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove.
It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis.
Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name.
any help is much appreciated
-
Dump the bad links like your doing but try and gain some 'super' links as well.
Find some relevant blogs, maybe there is a hub website or a few in your industry and try and sort out a guest post or 2 on a few of these.
-
It all depends on so many factors. It could be that the site hasn't been penalized but has simply lost its authority due to the bad links being ignored. If it has been penalized then it can help remove any penalty's. I have heard of one or two people trying this method and receiving responses.
Webmasters is also a useful resource for finding these bad links. Thumbs up.
-
No problems at all, Steve.
Your anchor text is only a small part of a big picture but it certainly looks like a stand out issue in your case.
You don't need to edit any internal anchor text though, it will only really matter for incoming links from external websites. It looks like most of these links are poor quality so instead of getting the anchor text changed, get them removed (if you can). If you do come across any links using that anchor text term which are from good and trustworthy sites then by all means keep the link and maybe ask them to change the anchor text.
You will need to concentrate on building good quality links from now moving forwards. A good place to start is with guest article writing, see if you can get some good content written and head over to MyBlogGuest, you will find blog and website owners all over the world who will be happy to accept good content in return for a link to your website within the content of the article. Remember to make your link natural - try things like "click here", "danbro", "here"... things that look like they aren't trying to manipulate Google's algorithm.
-
A fantastic place to find out where your links are unnatural is in the same place that told you it was unnatural: Webmaster Tools. Inside the page for your site expand Traffic then click Links to your site. This gives you links based on how Google sees your site. You can easily identify unnatural links (like sitewides) this way.
I don't know that I've ever heard of Matt's spreadsheet idea before. Does Google actually respond to such things? If he is being penalized, it's because of Penguin and Google has been adamant that there's no manual adjustments they can make to fix it (hence why re-inclusion requests don't work).
-
Hi Matt,
Great answer and thanks for taking the time to help.
So is it a matter of us going through our link anchor text and modifying some of these to make more natural?
Again, many thanks
-
I feel your pain, Steve! Unfortunately these things take time. If you havent already, whip up a spreadsheet of all the remaining bad links. Add a column to explain what steps you have taken to get the link removed. Google will understand that sometimes you are not in control but you can only try. They might help with manual interventions. You can then use this spreadsheet to send them to ask to be reconsidered. It is important not to keep sending the request, fix the problem and then ask. Remember that they don't owe you anything so don't depend on this method - chances are they might not even reply!
Google have announced that a tool could be coming out soon which will allow you to tell them which links you wish to distance yourself from. Keep an eye out... Clicky.
In the mean time, don't just work on removing these bad links, concentrate on building much more good quality links in a variety of forms. Try and make your link profile look natural - over time these things will help.
On a side note, you need to add a canonical tag to your home page. Your domain loads a different homepage for http://www.yourdomain.com as well as http://yourdomain.com.
Check out the attachment to see why your link profile is so un-natural. You have 8220 links from ONLY 78 domains for one anchor text and 4047 links for another anchor text while your domain name only has 188 links.
EDIT: You haven't actually been de-indexed (see attached) so you don't need to submit reconsideration yet. You just need to sort that link profile out BADLY first.
As a token gesture to help you out in your time of need I have added a contextual link from one of my websites to your homepage with the anchor text "click here" - its a small drop in the ocean but every little bit helps make your profile look that tiny tiny tiny bit better.
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
-
Mystery Penalty
I have a client site that seems to have been penalized with a huge drop in rankings site wide for all keywords. I would like to hire an expert that could figure out what the issue may be.
Technical SEO | | execubob
HOWEVER, I've done all the standard audit items, including submitting a huge disavow file. Nothing is reported in GSC and the site is built out in pure HTML, so not a WordPress issue. I don't need a basic audit, I need someone with expertise in finding a possible penalty.0 -
New website - not showing in Google?
This site was launched 3 days ago, bimcosupply.com and I'm trying to get it to show in Google just for a branded search for the moment (Bimco, Bimco Corporation, etc). The old site is still showing in search, bimcoplumbingsupplies.com instead. This site was taken down a while back. I set up a redirect for the domain in cPanel, and also set individual pages to redirect in WordPress on the bimcosupply.com site. I've verified the site in Google Search Console, submitted a sitemap and did URL inspection on each page. Each page is showing as indexed, though now when I search site:bimcosupply.com not all pages are there, and there are two results for the home page, one "https" and one "http." (Before today, all of the pages were showing so not sure what changed). I know this new domain does not have any (or very little) domain authority yet, but I would have thought that the site should display for branded search by now. So I'm concerned that something is wrong with the site, how the redirects are set up, etc. that is preventing it from displaying. Could anyone take a look and help me figure this out please?
Technical SEO | | browncreative0 -
Crawling issues in google
Hi everyone, I think i have crawling issues with one of my sites. It has vanished form Google rankings it used to rank for all services i offered now it doesn't anymore ever since September 29th. I have resubmitted to Google 2 times and they came back with the same answer: " We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. " How i detected that it may be a crawling issue is that 2 weeks ago i changed metas - metas are very slow in getting updated and for some of my pages never did update Do you know any good tools to check for bad code that could slow down the crawling. I really don't know where to look other than issues for crawling. I validated the website with w3c validator and ran xenu and cleaned these up but my website is still down. Any ideas are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
Why my ranking on google just disappeared
I have my website ranked on page one probably in top 6, but all of a sudden around 3-4 months before my website just disappeared for that keyword. Any suggestions? Keyword: Brass rod, brass rods webpage url: www.jayjalaramext.com/brass-rods/ and the website itself www.jayjalaramext.com Is it over optimized? or optimized more often which lead to bad history? or any panda or penguing effect ? Waiting for the suggestions.
Technical SEO | | HirenKhambhayta0 -
No Google cached snapshot image... 'Text-only version' working.
We are having an issue with Googles cached image snapshops... Here is an example: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IyvADsGi10gJ:shop.deliaonline.com/store/home-and-garden/kitchen/morphy-richards-48781-cooking/ean/5011832030948+&cd=308&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk I wondered if anyone knows or can see the cause of this problem? Thanks
Technical SEO | | pekler1 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google Pake Rank of Zero?
Hi! We've been running our website www.opzeggen.nl for a while now, but we still have a google page rank of 0. Searching for a keyword like 'opzeggen' does give us good ranking however. Should I be worried about this? And if so, is there a way to fix this? Best Regards, Pieter
Technical SEO | | greenonline0 -
Google dropping pages from SERPS
The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total. When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000. Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong? Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk
Technical SEO | | guy_andrews0