Devalued links or negative affect?
-
Hi there,
I'm looking into an issue with a site that was hit after Penguin was introduced.
The site lost 70% of traffic over night.
The site in question seemed to have a large number of backlinks with over optimized anchor text which seems to most likely be the reason for drop in rankings.
But there is also some links from blog networks here too unfortunately, so my question here really is do Google just devalue these links and discount them from consideration in their ranking algorithm or do the links still count but instead of adding positive affects in SERPs add a negative affect?
My reason for this question is I'm trying to determine whether it's worth saving this website or just starting fresh with a new domain.
That does bring me to another question, if I have to start fresh on a new domain is it a possibility to reuse the content from the old site? (providing I remove the URLs from Google via Webmaster tools).
Any help/advice/answers here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools
_Honestly speaking I did not know that
thanks for the update .. _
-
If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools.
Now, if a website didn't have webmaster tools, you could set it up and then file a reconsideration request. If there was no manual warning to start with you will get a notice from Google telling you so.
However, when you ask for a reconsideration request you are opening yourself up to potentially have a manual review from Google. So if you're not squeaky clean you could end up attracting yourself a manual penalty on top of the algorithmic issues you have.
As far as diagnosing Penguin, here is some information on how to diagnose Penguin, but it's not always a simple diagnosis.
-
_But how do you know that your website is hit by penguin? I hope there is no way to tell whether a website is hit by penguin or manual penalty. _
-
Hi Marie,
That's a great response and inline with our thinking here. The links are not within our control and we've decided to start a fresh.
The site content ranked really well before Penguin so I am hoping it will recover fast.
Thanks and best regards,
Jason
-
A reconsideration request will not help if there is no manual warning in WMT. Penguin is algorithmic.
-
Ok, Here is the thing.
Did you send a reconsideration request?
_If not, please send reconsideration request after getting rid of some spammy links. Make sure you have listed all the URLs where the link references are still available in a separate Google Spreadsheet File along with the reconsideration request. If you get a response that no manual action is taken, we can be sure of one thing that your website is hit by algo shuffle and this will make things murkier.
Now if your website is hit by manual penalty, you will get a response that the manual penalty is partially removed or not removed at all._
_Now, as some reputed online marketers say if you have not built those links, you would not have to care for them at all but if you have done it themselves, you need to get them down. _
-
I really do think that sites with bad links are penalized as opposed to just losing the link juice from those links. I am working on a site right now that was ranking well for years. Then they hired an SEO to try to rank even better. The SEO built a bunch of anchor texted links and on April 24 (Penguin) their rankings plummeted.
No one knows exactly what is necessary for recovery from Penguin. I think a site can recover if the backlink issue is an easy one to fix. For example, the SEOMoz article on WPMU recovery showed that they were able to remove a pile of footer anchor texted links and regain their rankings with the Penguin refresh on May 25. But for most sites, if you've got anchor texted links in a bunch of places, recovery is pretty much impossible.
In doing unnatural links penalty removal I have found that maybe 15% of webmasters respond to my requests to remove links. For some niches that number is higher. But in order to recover from Penguin I'm guessing you'll need 85-95% of bad links removed and that is probably not going to happen.
I'd start fresh. Definitely don't redirect the old domain to the new.
You can noindex all of the content on the old domain and reuse it on the new domain. It may help to go into webmaster tools for the old domain and ask Google to remove the old urls from the index.
Of course, you'll be starting fresh and have to earn good quality backlinks. Good luck!
-
Hi Alison, thanks for your help with this.
We started contacting webmasters initially however this proved to be a waste of time for the most part as the majority of webmasters didn't respond to requests.
A new site is looking like the way to go, thanks again.
-
Thanks Deb Dulal Dey, unfortunately there are too many links to make this worth while doing. On the other hand the content on the site is very good though.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
-
Thanks Baptiste, you've given me a lot to think about there.
-
Well, @Jason Brooks
Sorry to say but you need get rid of these crappy links otherwise your website will never be able to recover from Penguin update. And in the mean time, you need to make your website awesome by publishing great content that will help you earn some quality links the natural way.
-
Hi Jason,
To answer the first question, low quality links can have a negative effect on rankings, particularly those associated with link networks or if the links look manipulative. That being said, most sites have some sort of spammy sites linking to them for reasons beyond their control, and Google don't seem likely to penalise a small amount of these - they will probably just ignore the links and discount any value that they would have passed.
Have you tried to clean up your link profile by contacting the webmasters of the blog networks and asking them to remove the links?
Starting completely from scratch seems a little extreme, but if you feel that the links are very extensive and hard to rectify, and if the current domain isn't ranking and doesn't have much authority, then it might be the easiest way to "start fresh". Bear in mind that a new domain is likely to be sandboxed and will take a substantial amount of time to gain trust and authority. It would be fine to reuse the content provided that the original content is removed and deindexed.
Good luck.
-
Hi Jason,
With infos from the latest slideshare of Ian Howells, http://slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin, I think some of these links are devaluated, and some are penalizing the site. You may remove them and confess to Google, or start on a new domain, or maybe use a new URL for every page, including the homepage.
This is a though question, penguin recovery is still an unknown process and nothing is guaranteed.
About content re-use, Howells did put the same content on another page, without 301 and it worked. Maybe you can put 404 or remove the content and put it on a fresh domain.
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
-
A large number of high spam links are negatively affecting my DA, how do I remove them?
I have identified a large number of very high spam score links to "free wallpaper" coming into my site.
Technical SEO | | beckygh
I am running a wordpress blog and would like some advice on the best course of action. There are thousands of spam domains linking to various images on my site with the anchor text "get free high quality hd wallpaper" The webmasters for these domains are not contactable so I am planning to submit a disavow file to google. I am aware these links have negatively affected my DA so would like to do more to remove them. My questions are: will deleting the images they link to help?
As this is on a wordpress site deleting the images will result in a soft 404, should I force a hard 404 to properly break the link?
Will this positively improve my DA?1 -
Helping finding a link
Hi So Ive done a crawl of the site using screaming frog. There are a few old category and sub category pages which don't exist any more but somehow the crawler is finding them. An example is below: http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Home-Appliances/cat/Health-&-Beauty/subcat/Male-Grooming Just wondering if anybody had any ideas about how I could go and find these urls and remove them off the site. Any ideas would be really appreciated. Thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
All of my Image Looks like as a Link
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I know I ask so many questions these days 😄 but you know ...
Anyway;
I have a website which has only 22 pages and today I try to crawl it with screaming frog and then I face with many image internal link.
But the problem is I dont see any of them when look at the site and source code of the site.
So why does it happen ?
Is there any idea ?
Please share with me.
Thank you .
http://i.imgur.com/dtj7Ws7.png dtj7Ws7.png0 -
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
Does Having Links on this blog Hurt or Help?
Hello, I created a wordpress blog a while back, http://plastic-bins.com/ If you go into one of the pages on the blog (for example: http://plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ ) you will notice a link after the text/content telling you where you can purchase the stuff that is talked about on that page. There is one link back to the e-commerce site on every category page on the blog. Does anyone know if these links will help me or hurt me in terms of ranking in the SERPS? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Canonical Link Quesiton
I wrote an article that is a page article, but would also be a very good blog post - So my question is two things: 1. If i post it as a static page and syndicate it as a blog post and have it as a canonical link to the page, google will read see the blog and read the page _url as the one with credit correct? In turn not dinging me for duplicate content. 2. Given if the above statement is correct, should I write the blog and put it on my static page referencing the blog or the way i have it as a static page with the blog using a canonical reference back to the page. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
Removing links from another site
Hello, Some site that I have never been able to access as it is always down has over 3,000 links to my website. They disappeared the other week and our search queries dramatically improved but now they are back again in Google Webmaster and we have dropped again.I have contacted the site owner and got no response and I have also put in a removal form (though I am not sure this fits for that) and asked Google to remove as they have been duplicating our content also. It was in my pending section but has now disappeared.This links are really damaging our search and the site isnt even there. Do I have to list all 3,000 links in the link removal to Google or is there another way I can go about telling them the issue.Appreciate any help on this
Technical SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Exchange Links - Problem or Not ?
There's a company that sells a real estate portal sites ready for several companies.
Technical SEO | | imoveiscamposdojordao
And when they install this system they always leave each site in a file calledimobiliarias.php that lists all properties that use your system, so there is a hugeexchange of links between the same sites.
So you can see with the Open Site Explorer that all sites have the same Backlinks.
This would not cause problems with regard to exchange links?
Loss of position or something? Thank you guys.! Sorry. 😛 Google Translator.0