No manual spam actions found - Now what to do
-
In last Panda update on 22nd January my site traffic reduced 30% to 40% but still some of my keywords are ranking on first and second page in SERP.
With latest Penguin 2.0 update all of my keywords ranking is out of 100. Both times I send reconsideration request and get message that No Manual actions found on site. I just don't know what steps are better to get ranking back. Should I use disavow tool and remove backlinks to recover from Penguin or work more on creating quality links.
My Site : http://goo.gl/sSBes
Thanks,
Steve
-
Thanks for the reply.
I will work on increasing content of sites and other suggestion you mentioned. Due to some lack of resources I am not able to update blog in timely manner I would try to post at least one post a week,
-
What Google considers garbage links has been changing for as long as I have been in search marketing. The problem here is that certain tactics that have worked in the past and might even still work today are starting to get devalued (or worse). Example: PR links, still have some value, but they will continue to get devalued. Matt Cutts continues to say (over and over) that if you do anything in an effort to build links that is not organic in nature (web directories that don't drive traffic to your site, forum posts with links, paid links, etc.) you will get smacked. It isn't a matter of if but when.
The thing that makes this even more confusing is the seemingly random nature of who these penalties affect. Did this guy get hit by P 2.0 definitively? No, but considering the date of his organic traffic drop, it is pretty easy to prove correlation. The fact that your websites have these bad links and that you haven't seen a drop in organic traffic does not prove that he did not get hit. All it proves is that you haven't been hit yet.
Proof:
<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg</a>
-
_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity. _
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.
As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.
The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)
-
I've seen conflicting views on this coming from Google, and I refer you to the link in my answer regarding Pete's comments about reconsideration.
So it may be wrong, but there does seem to be evidence that disavow does not action without either an update, or reconsideration.
Hence passing along the suggestion in good faith.
-
That is wrong...from Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664</a>
Question:
Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?
Answer:
That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.
-
You might want to check out the responses to this question : http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover particularly the comments from Pete Myers regards reconsideration requests.
What I take away from all I've read on Penguin 2 is to proceed as follows:
- Clean up your backlink profile by contacting assorted webmasters asking for link removal
- Use the disavow tool on any you can't get successful removal via direct approach
- If you've used disavow, submit a reconsideration request - once you're sure your site and backlink profile is clean. (I get the definite view that data obtained via disavow is only actioned at algo update, or reconsideration request; hence a reconsideration may be needed even though you have an algorithmic penalty to actually push the disavow live).
Hope this helps!
-
Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.
Here is a good article on this update by this by Danny Sullivan, including a short section on recovering:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463</a>
Other Tools Needed:
<a>http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/</a> - To locate which of your links are spammy
<a>https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal</a> - disavow tool (Use only after heavy research!!!)
Good luck!
Update: I looked through your link profile and have noticed that you have links from your customer pages. Remember that Google takes issue with links from websites that have nothing to do with your site.
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
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
-
Spam score of a website depends upon which factors?
I want to know which things increase the spam score of a website? What are the drawbacks of spam score on a website? How can we reduce our website spam score? Are backlinks from a high spam score website affect our website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hdsiwake0 -
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file. A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down. I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent. Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again. All comments greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Just found a wordpress blog duplicating main website blog - what to do?
Hello Mozzers, I am working on a website and found the social media agency, employed by the website owner, was running a parallel wordpress blog which duplicates the content on the main website's blog (200 odd pages of this duplicating wordpress blog are indexed - the duplication is exact other than for non-blog content pages - around 60 category, date pages, homepage, etc. I am planning to 301 redirect the wordpress blog pages to equivalent pages on website blog, and then 301 redirect the homepage, category and date pages, etc. to the website blog homepage, so all the blog pages redirect to somewhere on main website. _Does this make sense, or should I only worry about redirecting the blog content pages? _ Also, the main website is new and there are redirects coming in to pages from old website already. _Is there anything to be cautious about when redirecting to a main website from multiple old websites? _ Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Google Semantic Search: Now I'm really confused
I'm struggling to understand why I rank for some terms and not for other closely related ones. For example: property in Toytown but NOT properties in toytown property for sale in Toytown but NOT property for sale Toytown NOR properties for sale Toytown. My gut instinct is that I don't have enough of the second phrasing as inbound link anchor text -- but didn't Penguin/Panda make all that obsolete?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Got Hit By Google Sandbox. What to do now?
Hi, This is my website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 I am competing for high competitive keyword : Hemorrhoids Treatment But i started my link building slowly. Like i started with social engagement first. Getting Facebook likes about 500 and tweets i got about 700 retweets in a month. Later i went for building links, i personally wrote 2 squidoo lenses, and wrote about 4 articles for high popular article sites like ezine, amazines, apsense etc. and got approved. And now, i wrote a press release and submitted to prweb, sbwire and pressdoc website. Got 3 press releases. And now, i submitted my site to 2 web directories botw.org and v7n directory and got approved in them. Later i submitted my site to 10 social bookmarking sites manually. Thats it in 1 month. In the mean time, i used to rank for the term Hemorrhoids Treatment on 7th page. Now i am not even in 50th page, completely out of index for that term in the search. But i am still ranking for other keywords. My site has 100% unique content, i built my links with extreme carefull and got quality links only. I have varied my anchor text as much as possible. Still i dont understand why i am not even in top 50 pages atleast. Am i hit by Google's Sandbox?? If so, could someone help in getting out of sandbox? Will be waiting for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegit0 -
100K Webmaster Central Not Found Links?
http://screencast.com/t/KLPVGTzM I just logged into our Webmaster Central account to find that it shows 100k links that are not found? After searching through all of them they all appear to be from our search bar, with no results? Are we doing something wrong here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0 -
Has anyone found a way to get site links in the SERPs?
I am wanting to get some site links in the serps to increase the size of my "space", has anyone found a way of getting them? I know google says that its automatic and only generated if they feel it would benifit browsers but there must be a rule of thumb to follow. I was thinking down the line of a tight catagorical system that is implimented throughout the site that is clearly related to the content (how it should be I guess)... Any comments, suggestions welcome
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CraigAddyman0