I was hit bad by Penguin on 4-24-12.
-
I was hit bad by Penguin on 4-24-12. Never received a bad link warning from Google but I do have lots of bad links from a SEO company years ago. I canceled with them and they kept sending automated links with the same anchor text. I even asked Google to remove the bad links years before the penguin update
I have removed many bad links by contacting webmasters and have used disavowal tool twice. 6 Months later still no improvement.
Is it possible that Google needs more time to disavowal bad links ?
What about 301 redirect to a new domain? Anyone ever have long term success with 301.
What about 301 after using the disavowal tool any luck?
What about changing my domain, will it take months for site to move up, anyone with experience trying this?
Let me know any ideas.
Thanks
-
301 redirect to new domain likely wouldnt help, you're bringing the tainted link juice with you, assuming links is the issue.
Most 'experts' think you wont recover from Penguin until the next Penguin update. Its unclear to me if this agency 'kept sending automated links' that you would have been cleared by any update if this process was still ongoing.
Bear in mind Penguin isnt just about links.
Changing domain might be a valid option but it does depend on the site itself, authority, number of spammy links you still have etc.
Not that its much comfort but id also say, remember Google isnt the only source of traffic.
-
It depends on the PR, age, amount of content, rankings and competition, and value of your domain name etc. Sometimes it's easier to move on and start fresh after a site has been nuked, and if you have on going issues like some automation still pushing out links to your site.
I think a simple site should always have a second version ready to launch under a different domain in case they get hit, so you can begin rebuilding right away.
-
you should join the #seochat going on currently on twitter.. it's relevant to your questions. back to the chat --
-
I have had a few clients come to me about bad backlink profiles / google penalties.
Aside from manual removal and the disavow tool, I try and invert the ratio of bad links to good links. This can be a real challenge as there are often thousands of bad links to contend with, but I'm pretty sure that a link from an authoritative website helps to dilute the bad links a great deal.
If you change your domain, you're starting from scratch. But at least you're not fighting a penalty. This is something I'd suggest if there wasn't a single good link in the profile and if the change of domain name wouldn't cripple your business.
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
-
Did I get hit with a panda update?
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site. I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with. Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Replicating keywords in the URL - bad?
Our site URL structure used to be (example site) frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs-for-sale/blue-frogs wherefrogsforsale.com/cute-frogs-for-sale/ was in front of every URL on the site. We changed it by removing the for-sale part of the URL to be frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs/blue-frogs. Would that have hurt our rankings and traffic by removing the for-sale? Or was having for-sale in the URL twice (once in domain, again in URL) hurting our site? The business wants to change the URLs again to put for-sale back in, but in a new spot such as frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs/blue-frogs-for-sale as they are convinced that is the cause of the rankings and traffic drop. However the entire site was redesigned at the same time, the site architecture is very different, so it is very hard to say whether the traffic drop is due to this or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
4 websites with same content?
I have 4 websites (1 Main, 3 duplicate) with same content. Now I want to change the content for duplicate websites and main website will remain the same content. Is there any problem with my thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Content Transfer for Penguin Induced Domain Switch
One of my customers has a mature site that performs very well in ranking and traffic for major keywords, prosun.com. A few years ago we started welproma.com because they were changing their name and branding. We built up welproma.com as an eventual replacement and ramped up to 30% of the Prosun.com traffic. Penguin hit a bit in 2012 but very bad May 24, 2013 and it keeps getting worse. Now they are backing out of the name change, reverting back to prosun.com as the main website. Unfortunately the Welproma.com content is far better in quantity and quality so we would prefer not to waste it. Does anyone think it is a problem to take essentially the exact content from the newer, penalized site and move it to the older well performing site. We will use no links whatsoever between the two sites and take down the new one once we switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
How long before your rankings improved after Penguin?
Those of you that have algorithmic penalties, how long after making changes did you actually see an improvement, or have you ever? I have several sites that tanked after Penguin 2.1 and after doing Link Removal, Diasvaow files and building newer more quality links and adding content, I am STILL not seeing any change in rankings after several months. I have heard from some people it can take up to 6-months for google to even crawl a disavow file. I have also heard no matter what you do it won't matter until Google does another update. I feel like we have made a lot of changes in the right direction, but I don't want to go overboard if nothing is going to matter until another Google Update is done. What are your experiences?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Sitemap contains Meta NOINDEX pages - Good or bad?
Hi, Our sitemap is created by our e-commerce software - Magento - We are probably going to make a lot of products Meta No Index for the moment, until all the content has been corrected on them - but by default, as they are enabled, they will appear in Sitemap. So, the question is: "Should pages that are Meta NOINDEX be listed in a sitemap"? Does it matter? thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Website design agency - Penguin update could effect us?
Hi Guys, Just wanted to pick your brains here - I have a client who I have just taken on who is a small website design agency, all their clients they have built websites for over the years have the anchor text; 'website design' Will the website be effected by the new Penguin update due to the face they have thousands of links on clients websites they have built all witht he same anchor text? One idea I thought about is to build links into different pages of the website on future client websites? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated ! thank you Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Penguin Update Issues.. What would you recommend?
Hi, We've been pretty badly hit by this penguin Update. Site traffic is down 40-50%. We suspect it's for a couple of reasons 1)Google is saying we have duplicate content. e.g. for a given category we will have 4-5 pages of content (products). So it's saying pagenum=2 , pagenum=3 etc are duplicate pages. We've implemented rel=canonical so that pagenum=2 point to the original category e.g. http://mydomain/widgets.aspx We've even specified pagenum as a url parameter that pagniates. Google still hasn't picked up these changes. How long does it take - it's been about a week 2)They've saying we have soft 404 errors. e.g. we remove a category or product we point users to a category or page not found. is it best to block googlebot from crawling these page by specifying in robots.txt. because we really don't care about these categories or product pages. How best to handle? 3)There are some bad directory and crawlers that have crawled our website but have put incorrect links . So we've got like 1700 product not found. I'm sure that's taking up a lot of crawling time. So how do we tell Google not to bother with these link coming from specific sources e.g. ignore all links coming from xxx.com. Any help will be much appreciated as this is Killing our business. Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConservationM0