Google Webmaster Tools - When will the links go away!?
-
About 9 months back we thought having an extremely reputable company build our client some local citations would be a good idea. You definitely know this citation company, but I'll leave names out. Regardless, it's our mistake to cut corners.
Google Webmaster Tools quickly picked up these new citations and added them to the links section.
One of these citation spawned a complete mess of about 60K+ links on their network of sites through ridiculous subdomains of every state in the country and so many other domain variations. We immediately went into remove mode and had the site's webmaster take down the bad links from their site.
This process took about a month for outreach. The bad links (60K+) have not been on the spam site for well over 6 months but GWT still shows them in the "links to your site" section. Majestic, Bing, and OSE only displayed the bad links for a brief time.
Why is webmaster tools still showing these links after 6+ months? We typically see GWT update about every 2 weeks, a month tops. Any ideas? Could a changed robots.txt on the bad site prevent Google from updating the links displayed in GWT?
We have submitted to disavow, but Google replied with "no manual penalty". We even blasted the bad site with Fiverr links, in hopes that Google would re-crawl them. No luck with anything we do. We have patiently waited for way too long.
The rankings for this site got crushed on Google after these citations. How do we fix this? Should we worry about this? Any advice would really help. Thanks so much in advance.
-
Hi Sha,
Thank you for your response. I know Google can take some time to update, but the amount of time we've waited for Google to re-crawl seems a bit extreme. I went ahead and emailed the webmaster of the origin site to see if they would consider re-working their robots.txt file.
I really appreciate your response and helpful direction.
Dario
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you so much for your very helpful response. The Chartelligence app is very interesting, thanks for that nugget too! The rankings drop is right around the Panda 3/14 algo update, according to the app. We did run the entire site through copyscape just about a month ago. Maybe we need to focus some more efforts here? However, I almost positive these citations did the most damage. We will keep digging.
Really enjoyed the side note also
Thank you,
Dario
-
Thanks Shah. Dario, listen to Shah. She knows way more about this topic than I do. Her comments will be helpful I am sure.
-
Hi Dario,
Just one thing to remember - links/domains submitted via the disavow tool will not disappear from your GWMT list as long as they still exist. Google simply discounts them when ranking your site, so you shouldn't spend time checking to see if they have dropped out of the list.
If they have absolutely been removed, then yes it is quite possible that googlebot has been unable to crawl the site of origin (but if there are hundreds of sites then they would all have to have the same roadblock in place) for none to be crawled.
Dana is quite right in saying that Webmaster tools is notorious for updating slowly (and incorrectly at times) and she is absolutely on the money in advising that you need to try to nail down the cause of the rankings drop so you know what you are dealing with.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
This is one of those situations where it seems like you've done everything right, but you still lose. It's something every SEO can Identify with I am sure.
Here are some things I would think about before deciding what to do next:
- Google Webmaster Tools "Links to Your Site" is notoriously slow, and has, even in recent months, been completely wrong for more than a month at a time. There was a period of about 6 weeks in the past year alone where it was reporting "0" links to many peoples' sites. Remember, it's a free tool, not without its own problems.
- Google let you know there's been no manual penalty....regardless, that doesn't mean of course that an algorithm change or Penguin refresh didn't chew up your site and spit it out. I'm sure you've already considered this.
- Do you know the approximate date that these 60,000 links showed up? I am thinking you can narrow it down pretty accurately. Try uploading that date into Chartelligence (it's a Chrome app) and then overlay that on your Google Analytics data. Does that date correspond with any significant changes in site metrics? Can you reasonably show causation?
My point on the last thought is: you want to be absolutely certain that it's those links that caused your rankings drop. You also want to know if that rankings drop significantly affected your site performance. It's very possible that it could have been something else, or a combination of several things that caused it, not just those links alone. If you can say, after considering all of the above, that you are 95% certain those links were the sole cause of the rankings problem, and the rankings drop is significantly impacting your site performance...then you will know more clearly how to proceed. I'm sorry it's not a better answer in terms of "do x" and you will "achieve y." But this is one of those situations when diagnosis can be difficult.
(Total side note: It's funny, you know, people go to doctors all of the time who have difficulty accurately diagnosing ailments, and they are pretty tolerant of that. They'll even take prescription medication from a doctor who might even say outright they don't know what the problem is, so they are going to try treating the symptoms. Even so, medicine is a highly-respected profession. Conversely, SEOs attempting to make accurate diagnosis and treat the symptoms of a problem are often maligned as being nothing more than "crafty guessers" because no one really knows the Google algorithm. I've had stakeholders refuse to follow my suggestions because I couldn't say with 100% certainty that my diagnosis was correct because, as one continually says: "You don't know Google's algorithm, do you?" He's gone so far as to completely throw out anything an SEO, SEO company or anyone associated with an SEO site like Moz has to say. If it doesn't come from Google directly, he views it all as bunk. This was a bit of a sidebar, but I just wanted to express that it can be very difficult to get a client to accept a diagnosis that's an "educated guess." We have a long way to go in building up our profession to the point where stakeholders value and trust our expertise.)
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
-
I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?
I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | Windlass0 -
Tracking Google places (7 pack listing) traffic in google analytics
Is there a way to see Google Places traffic (traffic from users clicking through the 7 pack listings) segmented in Google analytics ? Normally is it just lumped together with the organic traffic ? Can you see the search phrases used to find your site, or do they also show up under 'not provided' when from Google Places. Im aware i can see some limited data in the Google Places analytics, but these seem to be 2 days behind when ever i view them.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sam-P0 -
Webmaster Tools vs. Google Trends data doesn't add up
I am investigating a two-month 25% drop in organic traffic from Google to a client's site. When I turned to the Webmaster Tools data for the site, there is a clear, gradual drop over the course of a couple months both in impressions and clicks. In general, the drop occurred across many pages and for a large number of queries; there wasn't a core group of keywords or pages that saw the drop...it was more sitewide. Yet, the average rankings reported by WMT were, for the top 100 or so landing pages, not significantly different. The site hosts information about medical conditions, and I wouldn't expect any time-related variations in search volume, and this was confirmed by looking at Google Trends data for a number of the top keywords. I started to look at the data by query for all the top keywords (all ranked in the top 10), and saw the following general trend: impressions were down, rankings stayed in the top 10, and Google Trends showed either flat or rising volumes. So I am trying to make sense of that. If the search volume trend did not decline and rankings held inside the top 10, then how could the number of impressions drop significantly? Am I trusting the WMT data too much? But the reality is that the volume of traffic measured by Google Analytics from Google organic did indeed drop the way Webmaster Tools show it.
Reporting & Analytics | | WillW0 -
AHHH... Google Analytics just changed!
There's now an acquisitions tab.. but I can't figure out how to sort referral traffic by referral path.
Reporting & Analytics | | S.S.N0 -
No option to connect to google analytics!
I figured it out had to click on the pencil icon. On GA looks like this http://orlandocouponsfree.com - http://orlandocouponsfree.comUA-9313894-1orlandocouponsfree.combut url is http://www.orlandocouponsfree.com/Is this an issue? When I tried to connect to google analytics yesterday. There was a connection issue with Moz & GA. I refreshed page hoping it would help. Now it won't let me choose domain. When I view campaign it says I should connect properties. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jkJ0ZdF.png[/IMG] I click link and get to this page which doesn't provide my an option. http://analytics.moz.com/settings/campaign/89561.117561 [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jkJ0ZdF.png[/IMG]
Reporting & Analytics | | touristips0 -
Will my Google sub domain filter work
Bon Pormeriggio from cloudy hot sticky & Humid Wetherby UK 😉 I have three sub domains which are reporting all the same stat traffic. Phase 1 is complete in that sub domain tracking has been configured in the analytics code for: http://en.lewispr.be/
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
http://fr.lewispr.be/
http://nl.lewispr.be/ But now i want to get traffic just from http://www.en.lewispr.be/ (Previously all three subdomains reported exactly the dame data). But its this stage I just want to double check. Ive set up a filter correcly as illustrated here:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/check-en-sub-domain-tracking_zps1b24f8af.jpg Will what ive done give me just traffic arriving at http://www.en.lewispr.be/ and not continue the problem of all three sub domains reporting exactly the same traffic?
Grazie tanto,
David0 -
Google Analytics: Multi channel funnel
Hi 🙂 I have a little problem. In Multi-channel Funnel Overview I see 50 conversions from Paid Search (screenshot 1). But when I click on Assisted Conversion and then choose Paid Search, I see 31 Assisted Conversions and 32 Last Interaction Conversion. (screenshot 2) So my question is - why the number of converstions in overview (50) is different than number in Assisted Conversions (assisted or last interaction conversion, or both together)? Probably, the answer is so simply, but I can found out it! 🙂 thanks a lot. X6UihL7.png lCNsw4T.png
Reporting & Analytics | | visibilitysk0 -
How Google handles keywords and punctuation?
How does Google handle punctuation of keywords within its search? If I have three keywords together, but on the site there is a question mark between them, does Google ignore the question mark? Or should I think of a new way of writing the content so Google likes it more? And would this apply with articles (a, the, etc) and prepositions such as (in, of, etc.)? Thanks a lot.
Reporting & Analytics | | Rocket.Fuel1