Penalised due to links?
-
Hi,
Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links?
Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this.
Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP.
Many thanks.
Quime.
-
Only on Google, Yahoo and Bing are not effected, no updates were made in particular, especially not to every site, but it happened on the 5th around the time of a Google update. also all 4 lost sites were 3 keyword EMD's with dashes, which we are thinking might have been the cause after doing some research on recent updates? The site not effected was not an EMD and was an authoritative original version.
-
What search engines did they drop in?
Did you make any updates to the site at the time of the drop?
-
Hi there are a few things which are strange that make me unsure of the reasons for the drop regarding the links
Firstly it happened to all our 'foreign' language URLS at the same time. All were on a different URLs with different IPs but shared the same coding and template, however we thought this was fairly normal for many websites who have different language versions.
Secondly we did not receive any warnings from Google on webmasters.
Thirdly the drop happened to all our key words, there is nothing even close to 50 on the SERPS now, but the sites are all still indexed.
The original English website has been left untouched.
-
Unless you received a link spam notifications in your Google Webmasters tool i would highly suggest NOT submitting a reconsideration request. Do your homework first.
- Did the drop in rankings happen across all search engines or just Google?
- Are the pages completely removed from the indexes or just ranking out of the top 50?
- You mentioned you recently implemented a redirect. What is the new URL? How did you implement it?
- If you have your site added to a campaign in the pro tool. Navigate to Link Analysis > History. Is there any weird trends in your DA or your external link count? Any huge increases?
- Also check OSE. Enter your domain and click the "anchor text" tab. Then filter by "all pages on this root domain. Any with extremely high volume? Are you branded terms lower than non-branded?
Run through those five steps and you will have a LOT better idea of what is going on with your link profile instead of simply submitting a request that will take a long while to hear back from.
Cheers - Kyle
-
The easy way to find out is by submitting a reconsideration request. The more difficult way is to audit your backlink profile and see if you built any shady links that violate their TOS. The EMD update might have caused your traffic to drop because I notice that you have an exact match domain.
Look into your analytics and see if you can identify the specific words that dropped in traffic.
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
-
Competitors link building surely link farming ? but no punishment?
Hi there added a competitors metrics to see what they were doing and to my amazement they seem to have 1000+ links surely this is link farming considering we stay in a very remote area. also why would he be rewarded for this not punished? imgur.com/18dUqNL 18dUqNL 18dUqNL
Technical SEO | | ShauniBROWN2 -
Value of internal links like this
Hello I have a question for internal links build in the pattern below does google value these kinds of pattern of internal links... For example i have 3 pages on website A, B and C, The page A is homepage, B is cateogory page and C is product page and I am on page C, where I build internal links like this Home > Catogory > product page
Technical SEO | | tanveerayakhan0 -
Will links be counted?
We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers. The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
Quality links are beneficial, but are neutral links detrimental?
So obviously a link profile featuring quality / authoritative / relavant in-bound links is preferable, but here's my question: If I'm starting work on a brand new domain, should I build links that one would consider neutral (i.e. from a non-spammy, but unrelated site) or should I not bother and only focus on quality links? Thanks
Technical SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Link building question
ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building. We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good
Technical SEO | | goldjake17880 -
How to control link flow on a webshop
I am looking for a best practice link structure for a webshop. Say you run a webshop where the front page should rank for 1-2 keywords and then there are 5-10 categories which are more popular and has a higher profit than the remaining 20-50 categories. Will it be wise to let the 20-50 categories link to the 5-10 more profitable categories if possible or should the structure just treat all the categories as equal and hence not let any link juice flow from the less profitable categories up to the more profitable categories. I hope the question is clear enough. Also if you could share any thoughts on how you structure your webshops it would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | loevgaard0 -
Remove Bad Links Or Build New
Hello, After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links.... Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links?? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Why would you remove a canonical link?
Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0