Unnatural Links From My Site Penalty - Where, exactly?
-
So I was just surprised by officially being one of the very few to be hit with the manual penalty from Google "unnatural links from your site." We run a clean ship or try to. Of all the possible penalties, this is the one most unlikely by far to occur. Well, it explains some issues we've had that have been impossible to overcome.
We don't have a link exchange. Our entire directory has been deindexed from Google for almost 2 years because of Panda/Penguin - just to be 100% sure this didn't happen. We removed even links that went even to my own personal websites - which were a literal handful. We have 3 partners - who have nofollow links and are listed on a single page.
So I'm wondering... does anyone have any reason to understand why we'd have this penalty and it would linger for such a long period of time? If you want to see strange things, try to look up our page rank on virtually any page, especially in the /gui de/ directory. Now the bizarre results of many months make sense. Hopefully one of my fellow SEOs with a fresh pair of eyes can take a look at this one.
-
Todd - Thanks for your message. On the bright side - a quick response to my request. Today I received a message back that Google removed the manual penalty for outbound links. Apparently they agreed with us.
Again, many thanks. M
-
Hi Michael, best of luck. I am sure that you can get the site back to where it needs to be with some clever thinking and a reinclusion that speaks about how much time and effort you have put into the website in order to make it 110% compliant (even though we know it already largely is
Let us know how it goes!
-T
-
Todd - Great answer. I do appreciate the time you've taken to compile this list. I hope I can reaward a best answer because this deserves one.
Frustration is putting it mildly but thanks for the empathy. You wouldn't know this but I've actually torn down the entire site and rebuilt it trying to find these alleged "unnatural" and "manipulative" outbound links. I removed/disabled registration on the directory for many months and that had no effect. I've killed much of the income stream and have had people question why so many parts are disabled for so long to the detriment of the reputation of the site. I've invested a colossal number of hours reading, learning and inhaling SEO.
The question unfortunately becomes whether to abandon a great site and many years of work because Google has us perpetually in the penalty box and the cost of trying to guess in the dark why this happened is far above any potential benefit. Anyway - I'll answer your chart:
1. Great suggestion: Already done but I'll run it again for the last time.
2. Will do although I know that the one way out of the site to an affiliate contains all nofollow links and I confirmed this numerous times. I'll kill that revenue stream and deindex about 80 pages to so we can kill almost every outbound link, even the pages with nofollow links too.
3. No warnings in GWT except the single one years ago about unnatural outbound links. GWT did let us know once that there was a "big traffic change" for a "top URL" on our site. No kidding Google. That's what happens when you slam a site with a manual penalty, lol.
4. We have virtually no widgets on the CMS. Most are basic functional, created by donnacha at Wordpress (who is beyond reputable), custom developed or absolutely clean.
5. Every business listing is noindex and nofollow (except mine, which has one link on one page to my own personal blog - I'll kill that one too.) If you look in a search, everything directory page is robots.txt blocked as well as noindexed. But I'm going to delete every single entry in our directory - and that's lots of them. We'll kill it again to prove the point.
6. I don't know what you're linking to. Our publishing section is dead because of my hunting this issue instead of launching yet another part of the site. I've had to cut the amount of content produced by well over 50% just to deal with this. There are only 4-5 authors on the site at the moment, almost all work is mine. None of the authors are follow links and I am absolutely sure.
7. There are virtually no website urls in the profiles in the forum. I disabled that ability and regularly clean out every profile from links (e.g. home page) using mysql queries. Nobody except super moderators can have a signature. Mine is an internal nofollow link. If there is another one or two, both are nofollow but I'll kill that link as well for this, much to my supermod's likely chagrin.
The thing that kills me is just finding out that I've made a colossal effort chasing a possible algorithm issue to find out this is a manual action - and nobody will tell me how they could possibly think I'm engaged in an outbound links scheme. So it goes. Speaking of which, I'll let you know how it goes. Many thanks.
-
Hi Michael,
I can sense your frustration but business and marketing are unforgiving. And while I do agree with your sentiments the best thing you can do is be absolutely 100% thorough in your approach to the problem.
I would recommend running the Screaming Frog and Xenu and re-evaluating.
Here is a handy checklist that you can do through to ensure you are covering bases, if you have not already.
1. Run Xenu Screaming Frog and examine in detail. Look for any pages which have outlinks and scrutinize those outlinks and ensure they are nofollowed. Be sure to include all subdomains, even subdomains you believe are noindex at the robots.txt level.
2. Check page code on 20 random pages in each subdomain to ensure that there are not hidden bits of code you might be missing that contain an external link. Check CSS and javascript while you are at it just to be certain
3. Check GWT to ensure that there are no warnings or alerts as to any hacking or suspicious page activity.
4. Thoroughly audit any and all widgets to ensure they do not contain outlinks, and if they do, assess as necessary based on authority of destination website and relevance / commercial natural of link.
5. Ensure any business listings on the website are nofollow
6. Nofollow any links (for now) from any areas where you published articles (I noticed here that you do allow for this option)
7. Nofollow signature links in the forums, if they are not already. Nofollow profile page links in the forum, if they are not already.
When you run these reports and checks, make extensive notes of what you are doing. Google is looking to see that you have put exhaustive effort into the process. Since you have control over link on your own domain, the level of scrutiny is higher.
On a side note, some of your important business pages seem to be hanging up on an internal redirect. The about us and privacy policy in particular appear to have a closed loop redirect.
Wishing you the best of luck!
Best,
Todd -
Todd - Thanks for your response.
The very troublesome aspect of this is the manual action taken by Google about something someone may have been clearly mistaken about. They have forgotten about it and the issue hasn't resolved over time like Matt Cutts insists it should as per his blog. But the kicker is this -- if more than a dozen very smart and experienced SEOs, webmasters of very large community sites and even people in the Google Webmaster Help forum can't find any reasonable problem, then we can't assume that the webmaster is always to blame.
As of right now, the only links any of us have identified are three links - yes, three links. Let's say there were seven just to be on the safe side. Let's be reasonable... do I really need to explain this? If this happened to your client's site, you probably would be thinking "are you kidding me?"
Google needs to explain exactly what issue it was that one of its employees found that was reason enough to manually decide give us a prolonged prison sentence. Until we spot truly "wrongful conduct" there isn't any crime for which to ask forgiveness. All I'd be doing is tap dancing about a handful of links that no sober person would confuse as a questionable or irregular link building scheme. I want to know what will have lifted this manual penalty, even if it's "oops".
-
Hi Michael,
I would suggest running Screaming Frog and re-running Xenu again on the entire domain and all sub directories. Ensure that outbound links that are not editorial in nature (freely given and relevant to the user) have nofollow applied (even on sections where robots.txt are set to limit / prevent indexing). Every outbound link needs to be scrutinized. Nofollow first, ask questions later.
Take 20 pages in different sections and also hand check page code. Look for iframe injections or other unusual patterns or outbound links. Nofollow any outbound widget links, or if not possible, then remove those widgets.
Once done, develop the reinclusion.
Before reincluding be sure to be extremely thorough in your explanation to Google. Explain how the outbound links you had, you felt were editorial. Document and explain in detail how you have remedied the entire situation and comply with guidelines and understand those fully.
You might consider referencing this URL in the reinclusion request, which shows more proof that you are trying to clean up any possible areas.
Panda could still be influencing the website, but taking care of the manual penalty is definitely the right place to start.
Hope this helps,
Todd -
Thanks guys, I thought those 3 links were nofollowed. I'm getting rid of our_ one singe page_ that gives credit to the three companies that help us that have a total of three outbound hyperlinks. It's absolutely insane to even think this is the problem among 100,000+ pages of unique content, carefully moderated and created over 15 years. This is why Google owes us a full and complete explanation for the manual penalty, which appears to have lasted for a very long time.
If this is considered problematic, Google might as well penalize 99.99% of websites, including moz.com - all dofollow, lol!!!
http://moz.com/community/recommended
It would appear this "manual action" against our site is an error that has never been corrected automatically and plagued us for a long, long time. I'll await to hear what Google says if they eventually get around to reconsidering our site. Thank you guys for scouring this large site in all directions and confirming what I've found and now making the argument airtight.
-
Good catch, Anders!
-
Hi!
One more final suggestion: Add nofollow to the links at http://www.thelaw.com/partners/
Perhaps they are considered to be problematic.
Good luck in getting traffic etc back to normal.
Anders
-
Sheldon - Thanks for the suggestion. I actually posted in the Google Webmaster Help Forum on this issue several months ago - both the zero page rank and loss of all +1s. The best anyone could find (from some smart SEO experts there who were generous with their time) were the handful of links I mentioned and nobody had answers. This new manual actions information from Google helps greatly in an unfortunate way - it seems to confirm an ongoing anomaly that appears to be a manual Google action for outgoing links that has never been lifted. The only warning I've ever received was about outgoing links from my site - and that was a long time ago.
I appreciate you guys giving the look over that it appears everyone has confirmed independently. Perhaps it's long overdue to camp out on Matt Cutts' doorstep, lol.
-
Michael- You're definitely facing an odd situation here... makes no sense. Have you tried posting an inquiry on the Google Webmaster Help Forum? I'd say there's a good chance you can get a Googler's attention there and maybe get a hint as to where the problem lies.
-
Sheldon - I will look into the redirect issue. Regarding the directory, no, it is not fully deindexed although virtually every entry is deindexed. Search for any name (other than one) and you won't find any of them. Robots.txt blocks those pages and every page has a "noindex" on it. But most importantly... there are virtually no outbound inks. None!
Yes... this is a puzzling issue that has hit us for many months and nobody has been able to solve it. There is a zero or no page rank at all on every page in the site - thousands of them. The primary domain was a 6.
-
Anders - thanks for spotting that but it's not the problem. That was installed 2 days ago - actually, not even that long ago. The error message predates that plugin. In addition, I think those are only 10 pages in total right now -- but thank you for reminding me that this is still there.
Apparently there is a discussion on it at Wordpress.com. Incredibly devious.
-
Hi!
In regards to the "directory"-question, I think what Todd wondered, was if it was some special part of the site that had gotten a penalty, or was reported as problematic.
It appears that you have invisible links in the social sharing plugin on the left side (at least on the article-section) that are not nofollowed. Search in the source code for
.
I found this:
_<div class="wpsr-linkback"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.aakashweb.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-socializer/">WP Socializera><a class="wpsr_linkaw" target="_blank" href="http://www.aakashweb.com">Aakash Weba>_div>
Hope this helps!
Anders
-
Odd... the first time I pasted the URL you gave in your original post, it took me to lawyers.thelaw.com
but the second time, it took me to thelaw.com. As you said, lawyers.thelaw.com and the many pages I checked had TBPR of 0. But thelaw.com shows TBPR of 2.By the way, lawyers.thelaw.com hasn't been de-indexed.
-
Anders - Thanks. Yes, I used Xenu. The penalty is on the entire site.
-
Hi Michael!
Have you tried spidering your site (with screaming frog or similar tools), to see if any of the profile pages on the subdomain contains any suspicious outbound links?
Is there a penalty for the entire domain, or just the subdomain?
Best regards,
Anders
-
Dates of noticeable traffic changes:
- Mid June 2011 (Panda - extremely significant)
- Mid August 2011 (significant)
- Mid March 2012 (slight)
- End April/Beginning May 2012 (significant)
- Mid August 2012 (somewhat significant)
The only warning was practically the same warning a while ago. That's it, nothing else. An earlier reconsideration request back in August 2011 resulted in no response from Google and was done because actions taken to combat Panda as recommended did almost nothing. All concerning outbound links from the site. Even back then we didn't have any link exchanges or anything that seemed remotely related to the warning.
The only thing that helped us - removing Google Analytics for 1.5 month's time. During that time traffic increased noticeably and traffic grew until the End of April issue.
-
Todd - Thanks for your response:
1 - Yes, I can confirm that the message is from my site, which is what puzzles me. Google just released its manual actions field in Webmaster Tools and that was my first experience with it today. I suspect that this action may have been taken a very long time ago but let's hold off on that for now:
Unnatural links from your site
Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes2 - There is only one directory on the site. http://legal.nu/kdlu
Apparently Google suppresses some of the results (and it recognizes robots.txt blocks the pages) but has included about 10K entries in its index if you add the additional results. Every page has a noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file in the subdomain also has a disallow. Regardless, there are virtually no outbound links. Other than 2 entries, most do not have outbound links to websites and, if they do, every link is nofollow. So I don't see any outbound there.
3 - There were 2 personal websites and 1 partner website - yes, a total of 3 sites - that's it. They were removed at least 2 months ago. They represented my professional personal blog, the website of our development company and the website of our hosting company. This was the most anyone could guess that might even be an issue so it was removed entirely, as innocuous as it seemed.
4. I have no idea how long but it could be a penalty since Panda. Panda came and virtually nothing made a difference. You could add good original content and there would be marginal gains although Bing and Yahoo reported gains. The odd part is that the directory grew in traffic while the best content on the site dropped. Thus the whole directory was deindexed. Go figure.
Other information:
Ranking drops - about 5 months ago all page rank from the site went to zero or unable to be ranked and now only two pages are ranked. Every +1 on the site was gone. http://legal.nu/kdlv - check this link. It gets a good number of page views every month. The pagerank cannot be determined. The site used to rank very, very well. Several pages lost their Facebook Likes too but not all across the board like the Google +1s.
That's about all I know. Backlinks disavowed (some are the remnant of 15 years on the web, scrapers, people with blogrolls of sites, some others were there and not our doing but we disavowed those that were gone, which was only a few hundred entries in total.)
I can't find the outbound links that it appears Google may have penalized us for a long time. Neither has anyone else, at least nothing substantial and most benign at best. Thanks for the look over.
-
Hi Michael, to start let's look at a few areas so that we have some supporting information
1. Can you confirm the message is "Unnatural links from your site"? What date did you receive this message?
2. Which directory has been deindexed by Google (url please)
3. When did you remove the links to your personal websites, and where were those links located in the website, and what were the topics that those websites represented?
4. Which penalty do you feel has been lingering for a long time?
Any other supporting information as to the history of the website (suspected penalties, ranking drops + those corresponding dates) would be helpful.
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
-
Does redirecting a duplicate page NOT in Google‘s index pass link juice? (External links not showing in search console)
Hello! We have a powerful page that has been selected by Google as a duplicate page of another page on the site. The duplicate is not indexed by Google, and the referring domains pointing towards that page aren’t recognized by Google in the search console (when looking at the links report). My question is - if we 301 redirect the duplicate page towards the one that Google has selected as canonical, will the link juice be passed to the new page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lewald10 -
Penalty Detection
Hi Experts In a Single VPS with 1 IP, I have 2 domains. two months ago, one of them was in top 10 of high Competitive Keyword but from beginning of 2017 when I use site:aslejens.com the title of main page replaced by another domain on the VPS vahidafshari.com. Is it a Google penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteBaNa0 -
DIsavow links even without a penalty?
This is a sort of follow-on question from a previous one I asked, where I was being advised to do this. I've inherited a poor client link profile from a previous provider, with tons of partial match links for "IT support" on a lot of low quality directories. It has been at least a year now since they were built, and I'm concerned that the abundance of them will make it harder to rank for any "IT support" keywords due to over-optimization. This is frustrating since "IT support London" is the main keyword for the home page. On the previous thread, I was advised to disavow these old links and move on, though I have heard from many in the SEO community (and read) that using the disavow tool unless absolutely necessary (i.e. In the case of a penalty) is a mistake, since it is effectively notifying Google that you have been "misbehaving" and you should stay away from sending these types of signals altogether. Can anyone with experience in this matter please advise on this? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg1 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
A friend was hit with a manual penalty for unnatural links-impacts links. (see attached) I'm thinking it may be because they copied their entire wordpress.com site over to site.org/blog. (without redirecting it, so they have duplicate content as well) Out of 76+k links, nearly 11,000 are from their wordpress.com blog. If that's the case is the problem solved by upgrading within wordpress.com to redirect to site.org/blog? (then making a reconsideration request?) Or do I risk negatively affecting their site somehow? They saw a significant increase in traffic when they moved the content over but I'm thinking that was more a matter of increasing content on their site than increasing backlinks. The .org site ranks relatively well, whereas the wordpress.com blog doesn't really rank at all.Worth noting: it's a partial match, not a sitewide match. Does that negate my theory about the wordpress.com blog being the cause in any way? Since many of the links from it are sitewide? The wordpress.com blog has a header link to the .org homepage, plus individual links to it in posts. There are also three links in the header to pages on their .com website which redirects to three corresponding pages on the main .org site (the whole .com redirects). There are 23 footer links from the blog to the targeted .org pages as well. In the attached screenshot of who links most from Google Webmaster Tools, note that martindale.com links most, but it's a lawyer's site so they naturally have referring content there. Could that be a problem?Thanks everyone! 🙂M8JVEI6.jpg?1 M6gYE90.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site
Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site? We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site. Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Can Linking Between Your Own Sites Excessively Be a Penguin No-No?
I have a bunch of travel-related sites that for a long time dominated google.com.au without any intensive SEO whatsoever. Aside from solid on-page content and meta tag, I did no link building. However, all of my sites are heavily interlinked, and I think they are linked with do follow links and lots of anchor texts. Here are a few of them: www.beautifulpacific.com www.beautifulfiji.com www.beautifulcooklands.com My idea in inter-linking them was to create a kind of branded "Beautiful" nexus of sites. However, when Penguin hit -- which I believe was on April 27th -- search traffic crashed, and has crashed over and over again. I've read that Penguin penalized over-optimization vis a vis anchor text links. I don't have a lot of inbound links like these, but they are everywhere among my sites. Is it possible that all of my text links have hurt me with Penguin? Thanks to everyone in advance for your time and attention. I really appreciate it. -Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0