Any successes getting SEO/link vendors clean up Penguin-related problems they helped create?
-
Hi all,
I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create?
I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify.
There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed.
Cheers all,
Matt
-
Some good responses there, thanks everyone.
-
And now we know that EGOL does not live in NYC, because the major there wouldn't allow you to get serving sizes that big.
Might be time to invest in a slurpee machine!
-
just don't get confused and bring the popcorn bucket in there. I feel like slurpee mixed with popcorn would not taste as good as it sounds.
-
I just want the popcorn. I will donate the slurpee to whoever wants it.
-
You take a bucket into 7-eleven.
I am going to need a $10 slurpee before this discussion is over.
-
Where do you get a $10 slurpee?! That thing must be gigantic.
-
I have experience attempting to do exactly what you are talking about here with very little result. My company used to buy links from "SubmitEdge" and their link building practices are shady at best. Thousands of terribly written articles, directory submissions, message board comments, and other ridiculous penguin-tastic links built through them.
I spent a good month or two working at getting them to help me in the removal of these links. They pretty much did nothing but inform me that their practices are well-established and in-line with Google's policies.. (untrue. incredibly untrue.) So what I started doing was asking for logins and passwords of the accounts created to go onto ridiculous message boards and post terrible links. The beautiful thing is they were able to give me lists of everywhere they built a link. And for the articles, they supplied me with usernames and passwords. This meant several weeks worth of work for me to go through each one and remove the articles and links.
However I was left with all the social links and directory links. Some of the article links also did not allow me to login and upon further review the blog sites owned by Submit Edge were the ones I couldn't log in to. I went back and forth with them and they eventually stopped responding to me and would not help me log in to those. They still exist to this day... I've yet to disavow because I haven't seen results of any penalties but I have this all documented of course.
Anyway I digress... The point is, you can battle all you want and it might get you a little further but ultimately they are going to do very little and claim they have done nothing wrong the entire time. (This is my experience with only one company of course.) It is frustrating to say the least. Especially when I know they could just ask their staff member what "djnaro23" password is so I could go through forumland and remove all the stupid links. But no..
One more note -- I ended up trying to guess a lot of these passwords for the aforementioned social links I was unsuccessful with. I will say that they are incredibly lazy people and several of the logins ended up being simple passwords. I literally copied the username and used it as the password and this worked about 33% of the time.
In summation, good friggin luck getting them to do any work for you; they will most likely refer you to their paid link-removal service which is a huge scam. However you should be able to garner a bit of information and hopefully some logins which will give you the ability to go back and remove them yourself. Or at least, as in my experience, remove SOME of them...
Fun, huh?
-
I made a request for assistance in getting links that I feel weren't procured in our best interest or within Google's current guidelines. Our vendor offered to use the disavow tool on my behalf saying that was the quickest way, but from everything I've read, this was premature and could due potentially do more harm than good. I turned down their offer. I didn't want to perpetuate their lack of good sense and expertise by continuing to depend on them.
-
Depends how "well known" the agency is, I have taken one 2 clients from a local agency which is quite large they have about 40 staff locally. We asked them to remove a large number of links from their link networks and directories they own. They actually removed most of the links in question over a few weeks periods.
The process we used was to have the client contact the agency direct with some wording such as "We realized you have been using link networks to do link building (see attached report of network links) this has resulted in a serious drop in revenue and traffic. We request that you remove the attached links in the report from your network."
This worked with two prior clients, they did clean up most of the damage, but that been said some other SEO companies would not do the same.
-
- goes for popcorn and a $10 slurpie *
This is a really interesting question.
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
-
How do I get rid of sites that backlink with lots of irrelevant or spammy links to our website?
This site http://herwigphoto.com/bs/ and other like it have thousands of similar links containing the word adidas We are not in the sports shoes business, therefore the links are irrelevant and many and can hurt our rankings, correct? | Page Title/URL of Linking Page | Link Anchor Text | Page Authority | Domain Authority |
Link Building | | Madlena
| Christopher Herwig Photographer » Soviet Bus Stopshttp://herwigphoto.com/bs/ | adidas Yeezy Boost 750 Grey For Sale | 48 | 47 | Below are some links to our geographics.com website that have URLs that are not ours. They will redirect to our homepage. How do we remove these links and how do we deal with the websites that send such links to us? There are thousands of inbound links to our website with anchor text containing irrelevant keywords such as these: yeezy-750-boost-light-grey-cheap or adidas-yeezy-boost-750-light-grey-sale; pirate black sale, etc Page Title/URL of Linking Page Page Authority LRDs Total External Links HTTP Status http://www.geographics.com/new/yeezy-750-boost-light-grey-cheap.html 46 120 1800 -- http://www.geographics.com/new/yeezy-350-pirate-black-sale.html 44 106 1829 -- http://www.geographics.com/new/yeezy-750-boost-gum-brown-sale.html 42 114 181 -- --- --- --- ---0 -
Will linking to very similar (or duplicate content) hurt SEO
One of my clients started working with a traditional PR company to get media placements and they've placed articles on some very excellent and relevant sites. However, the article's content is nearly identical on each site. We would like to link my client's site to these articles, but will the duplicate content hurt SEO? Because there are some very minor variations within these articles, will that be enough of a difference where we don't need to be concerned if we did link our site to each article?
Link Building | | Liggins0 -
Need referrals on expert to clean up "unnatural links" and submit reconsideration request
I just received a manual unnatural links penalty. I was shocked because other than maybe five links many years ago, I've not done anything to get links. The site is very powerful in it's own right and buying links is unnecessary. My first thought was a competitor has done the link spamming on my behalf, any my site is very profitable and the competitors are plentiful and ruthless (i.e. steal my content and use it) since we are #1 for our search term. I took a quick look at my links (via webmaster tools) just now and yes, in the last few months there are tons of links from very bad looking sites that are I've never heard of. It's obvious I've been purposefully hit by a competitor. (What's it called when they do this?) Does Google understand at all that this stuff goes on? Do they even care? On the eventual reconsideration request, if I say that I honestly didn't do those links, would they even believe me or even care? I have read several articles on what to do now. But this is so important to my income stream that I don't want to screw anything up trying to fix it, and I want to get it right the first time. Every day is very expensive to me. So, I'd like to get some recommendations on any experts that can handle this professionally and swiftly. Please let me know of anyone trustworthy that won't rip me off, and if you are such a professional yourself, please let me know. Thank you
Link Building | | bizzer0 -
How to get a ecommence website ranked without creating any article
I have a website selling mobile accessories. The keywords for our items are very competitive: iphone 4 case, iphone 5 case ... etc I have customized meta titles and descriptions for every page but i never get to rank. Any idea how my site can rank on google? p.s. we don't want to write any article.
Link Building | | ringochan0 -
Footer Links And Link Juice
I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register /privacy /terms /search /sitemap /disclaimer /blog /register So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together? This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5
Link Building | | Ubique0 -
My site has more than 1,341,796 total links but only 500 external links after months of SEO. Please help me ,not sure what went wrong.
My site has more than 1,341,796 total links but only 500 external links after months of SEO. Please help me ,not sure what went wrong.
Link Building | | rsethia1230 -
Ideas for structuring contest to get links?
Hi Mozzers, So I'm getting all set to run a contest. The prizes are great and I've developed a good way to promote it via paid and natural venues. I'm just not sure how to structure the actual contest so the end result is more links than mentions. One idea I had was to make this a story telling contest where the contestant blogs about a good/bad experience within the niche industry and adds a link back to us to enter. Does this seem like to much effort for the user? Prices are worth about $250 each, and I plan to have 3 winners. Any ideas on how to better gear this towards link building is appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | ErikDster0 -
Is there a way to leverage paid advertisements placed in industry specific publications to get SEO benefits?
Is there a way to leverage paid advertisements placed in industry specific publications to get SEO benefits? I am looking to advertise in publications like trade journals or magazines, but want to also reap SEO benefits by getting a link. So I am avoiding buying banner ads, but instead trying to find opportunities for links from editorial mentions, quality article or editorial submissions, etc. Advice on the link proposition, or best way to approach editors, please? Many of these publications are traditional print publications, and their sites are really seo'd. Thanks.
Link Building | | larahill0