Site received penalty, Traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour
-
Dear all
We received a penalty notice at webmaster tools 2 months ago, in that stated "your pages violate our quality guidelines" and "contain some inorganic links to your site". Ours is a Coupon website and tried to follow all quality guidelines given in webmaster central. Also we tried to identify and remove spam kind of links and still we are working on that. Suddenly from yesterday website traffic restricted to 3-4 visits/hour, but website main keyword SERPs are not changed much and still ranking at good positions. my question if any website is under manual penalty, it's traffic will be restricted by Google???. Every link we build manually and not gone for any paid links or reciprocal links. But the sites given some links as sitewide, example we tried to get a back link & submitted url at once only, but it was showing in webmaster Total links 468 and linked pages 1. Can any one please explain, how it can happen?. We are trying to remove these spam kind of links, but from directory owners response is a bit disappointing, kindly any one suggest that, will Google Disavow tool help in this regard and how much time it will take to nullify the links?.
Kindly help us..Thanking you all in advance
-
So do you think this had any impact as of sep 2013? Im curious to know if this method works at all or removal or modification of other links will still beat it. thanks
-
Thank you for the time & valuable advice.
Sir, If we stopped link building completely, what will be the impact on website ranking ability?. From last 2 months we already reduced link build-up speed and trying to get some quality back links.
We received manually penalty, due to the previous SEO work done by Free lancer & we received the submission report from him. Many of previous submissions targeted to get back link from Directories and the Linking anchor text is almost similar to the Title/keywords we targeted for ranking.
Kindly guide us to overcome this penalty, without or minimal traffic/ranking drop. Our website age is about 2years.
-
Yes Alan, on what we are working from last 2 months is diluting the link profile, mostly trying to link with 'brand name' 'click here' or 'read more'/view more kind of anchor texts.we checked with opensite explorer for the anchor text and found around 350 links are having keyword on the anchor text, by diluting the link profile we reduced the keyword based link profile to 1.4% of total back links. In this case can we go for reconsideration request, with out removing the back links. Thanking you in advance.
-
Alan pretty much summed it up. ONLY go for quality backlinks that happen naturally. If you link profile is over optimized for your keywords you could dilute it with other keywords such as 'click here' or 'read more'.
However, if this is a manual penalty, then you're going to need to get those links removed as best as you can and then submit a reconsideration request to Google.
-
My advice don't do any link building let them grow organically, and grab the occasional quality opportunity.
One of my sites was hurt by penguin update, I have been too busy to do anything about it. it had a lot of footer links from clients and a lot of forum signature links. I finally removed a lot of them and my site that used to dominate and had dropped off the radar came back to life this weekend almost as well as ever so their is light at the end of the tunnel.
Google does not stop traffic, only affects your ranking, you say that your main keywords have dropped only a little, but your long tail has probably dropped a lot.
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 is this site ranked so high on Google?
How on earth does "southeastasiatravelblog.com" rank No 3 on Google for "Asian travel blog"? It's just a collection of basically PR type travel articles. I have profiled its backlinks using Open Site Explorer and 71% of them are dead. The rest seem to be mostly "run of site" links from his other websites, which aren't particularly travel or Asia related. The highest PA for a live backlink to this site is a link from within his own website (PA 27, DA 15). Most of his backlink anchors are URLs and look fairly EMD to me. The site has few shares (6 FB shares, 7 FB likes, 1 Twitter share). So what makes it rank so highly for this phrase? My site I'm comparing against is "travelnasia.com" which is a fairly new domain with a DA 23, PA 31 and about the same amount of shares but far fewer backlinks at this stage because I recently changed URLs to shake off what might have been an algorithm penalty from Google. I am now receiving a growing level of Google search traffic again, but it's a long climb back. I'm looking at strategies, which is why I was checking out the site above.
Link Building | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Penalty? NoFollowed Link Profile
Could an abnormal ratio of nofollow links cause a drop in rankings? Our "Followed Linking Root Domains vs. NoFollowed Linking Root Domains" is 50/50... while our competitors have an average ratio of 90/10. The reason for our abnormal ratio is that: A) We're a relatively new site, with a small link profile so far. B) We have a WordPress plugin that allows other publishers to add our content to their site (which has a nofollow backlink included). And, as a followup question... if we removed the nofollow backlink completely, but still left the branded text there... could we potentially still benefit from it (our brand name being near targeted keywords that appear in the plugin content)?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Should you avoid links from infographic sites?
Suppose you have an interesting infographic that you are promoting. Should you be cautious about having it published on sites that only publish infographics? Do you think these sites pass any link value?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Links from Related Sites with Low PR or semi-related sites with High PR?
Is it better to get a link from a site with lower PR but related content or higher PR but semi-related or unrelated content? For example, if I sell shoes, would a link from a PR1 or PR2 shoe or apparel site be better or a link from PR4 website that sells books be better? I'm not talking about sites with completely unrelated content, but how relevant is PR in obtaining relevant links if I am trying to raise the PR and rankings of my own site?
Link Building | | applesofgold0 -
Submitting my URL on web/business/service directories
Does it make sense to submit a business URL in as many relevant web/business directories as possible when kicking off a link building campaign? Submitting a free listing is obviously better than nothing, but when does it make sense to pay extra for a premium listing profile on some of these directories? There are just so many and a lot of them appear spammy, even though some of my competitors are getting traffic from them. Any advice on this would be great!
Link Building | | TheSquareFoot1 -
If I write a PR release on a site such as PRweb with anchor-text links that is picked up and published by other news sites, do the engines consider this duplicate content or additional, beneficial links?
I recently wrote a news release on PRweb that was picked up identically by 8 other news websites, with the same anchor-text links as the original. Is the reproduction of duplicate content and links across different websites like this to the benefit or detriment of SEO and ranking power? Some of the links are: http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/view/pressrelease/eventa-new-eventa-christmas-parties-website-is-launched-648923?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Alert&utm_content=pressrelease http://www.prweb.com/releases/christmasparties/neweventasite/prweb8562064.htm Many thanks!!
Link Building | | RobertHill0 -
Google penalizing sites because of press release pages?
Does anyone know of situations i can look up where Google penalized a site because of press release pages (hosted on a non owned major site like prweb or whatever), where the prweb page obtained back links from a group of sites that Google felt was part of a "farm"?
Link Building | | joemas990