On site links triggering anchor text algorithmic penatly?
-
I'm trying to figure out why a drop in ranking occurred and think it may be related to an increase in on site links. I've attached images of the SEO moz report showing a jump in links from a few hundred to around 15,000 within the space of a week. I think this may be due to some on site work I did when I created categories (I use wordpress) for a large number of cities and towns in the UK. I soon realised I'd run into duplicate content issues and removed all these categories within a few days. As I added categories I also ran into 'too many on page links' warnings as each category I added created a new link and I ended up with hundreds on each page.
If you look at the analytics reports I suffered a huge drop in rankings on the 10th March and think this could be due to an on site anchor text problem that was caused by adding the categories and in turn creating many on site links. SEO moz found these links on the 11th and 25th Feb but my guess is that Google found them around at the same time but if these links are the problem then why didn't my rankings drop until the 10th March? Surely they would have dropped sooner? Would this cause a drop in rankings?
I've recieved an email from google saying that no manual penalty was applied to the site after I submitted a reconsideration request. Therefore it must be some kind of algorithmic penalty. Could this be the problem and if not what else should I look at. My baclink profile appears to be okay and I've been careful to vary my anchor text with inbound link building.
I'm at a loss as to what to do next. Any help will be much appreciated!
-
Ok thanks.
Sam.
-
I'll need to wait until tomorrow to check on this in OSE when they revert to the newer index once again. All of my link exports are currently showing link count prior to the increase. Should be able to update you tomorrow after I get a chance to look.
Ok, to update my response here, OSE is showing 14,000+ links as a result of your on-site changes. You can see that as a list of 745 top pages: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/pages.html?page=16&site=www.top-10-dating-reviews.com&sort=page_authority. Looks like those pages have at least 70 links each, which easily exceeds 14,000 possible links being found.
Open Site Explorer is updated roughly 1-2 times per month, and shows data that is roughly 20-50 days old depending on when you look at it and when the index was crawled. That's the explanation for why you're still seeing this in the search results. If it doesn't go away within the next 1-2 OSE updates then I'd look into it further.
--
Regarding the original question about whether internal links can hurt the domain, a Matt Cutts video was released yesterday partially addressing this:
Will multiple internal links with the same anchor text hurt a site's ranking?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ
That doesn't mean all of those pages of duplicate content may not have hurt rankings, but the links themselves were not the issue.
--
I'm still confused by the Analytics drop but that could be due to a number of things. I'd say the answer lies in digging through Analytics and finding out what exactly dropped that day.
-
Thanks for your reply. creating an extreme number of categories is what I did. I've deleted them now but but still on my seomoz link analysis it says over 14,000 links? I have no idea why? The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com ( there is some adult content there) . Any ideas appreciated!
-
OK, so assuming that the large jump in links is coming from internal links, here are a few ways that Wordpress might create that many pages:
- Creating an extreme number of categories (more than 20-30) while using permalinks that contain /%category%/ and applying posts to multiple categories.
- Using a theme that contains parameterized URLs such as ?reply-to-comment at the end of every comment reply button.
- Using a strange permalink setting that causes issues.
If all of those pages are really new internal URLs then I suppose it could have confused Google and affected your rankings but since I have not dealt with such an extreme amount of duplicate content added so quickly I couldn't say for sure.
There are also plenty of ways that you could have triggered that many external links. Any sidebar or footer link on a large site could easily add thousands of links. I highly doubt this type of link would have caused a ranking drop on its own - it's no different than someone adding you to their blogroll.
This is a difficult question to answer properly without looking at the site or the exact links, because all I can do is list of lots of hypothetical causes. If you'd like to include the domain or PM it to me I'm happy to look at the website itself.
-
Thanks for your reply. The urls I removed are 404'ing so should I remove these urls in webmaster tools or let them drop out of the index naturally? They keep popping up in webmaser tools as crawl errors.
-
It's a tricky situation, it seems like you were making many changes to your site, it's always risky to put links with keyword rich anchors, and when they're too many and built in a short time period that's definitely dangerous.
First of all get rid of everything you made in a "dangerous way" like your many internal links, normally google has itsrict parameters to check out a page and when you're above a certain threshold you get hit. However I think that to recover the threshold is even lower, it seems like, google is more strict with you since you've tried to game their algo.
Now these are just my ideas and nothing confirmed but I think that you should try to clean up all the new links first, then have a look at your pages, that way to create a lot of pages in such short time, seems that they're programmed pages without any valuable content so they may be toxic for your recovery. Try to make a step back, and restart creating them on a slower pace and maybe hope google to reconsider your position. However if you don't have any manual penalty you'll have to wait until you get recovered. Reconsideration requests won't help you at all.
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
-
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
How necessary is it to disavow links in 2017? Doesn't Google's algorithm take care of determining what it will count or not?
Hi All, So this is a obvious question now. We can see sudden fall or rise of rankings; heavy fluctuations. New backlinks are contributing enough. Google claims it'll take care of any low quality backlinks without passing pagerank to website. Other end we can many scenarios where websites improved ranking and out of penalty using disavow tool. Google's statement and Disavow tool, both are opposite concepts. So when some unknown low quality backlinks are pointing and been increasing to a website? What's the ideal measure to be taken?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Anchor Text Usage
Hi, I have used anchor text more heavily. I built over 80 links so far, all are quality links like press releases & social bookmarks. I used to be ranking on #7 page for my keywords, then all of sudden i am not even on 50th page. Is this is because of Anchor text usage? Now should i remove those links or dilute my anchor texts by getting more links with different anchor texts. This is because the keyword i am targetting is pretty tough. So i think 80 links is not good enough. Let me know your thoughts. Here is the screenshot of the links i got so far which i think valuable. And the rest are social bookmarks. http://screencast.com/t/TJiDOanxnfZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0 -
Site views messy in a text browser, but can see all text, is that a problem?
In Google's webmaster guidelines, they mention to view your site in a text browser to ensure all text is visible. All of our text is visible, but is very messy and is all jumbled on the page. I've noticed most sites text browser layout is clean. H How important is it to SEO that the site views cleanly in a text browser? Does anyone know of any feedback from Google engineers about this point?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0