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
-
Kim,
Thanks for the update. Most people just do what ever they decide to do and never report back. So, thanks!
I'm glad you were able to get the penalty removed. I actually was just helping someone out who got a penalty and saw something similar, a bunch of blog sites that were nondescript with a ridiculously wide range of topics and even languages, which screams private link network to me. The client said they weren't responsible. It seems that negative SEO is something being done more often.
Thanks again.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
For anyone still out there reading this,here is a brief update: I took the gentle path and followed Google's advice exactly. I used the recent links from Google Webmaster Tools, instead of all the other link info out there. I checked everything leading up to the penalty, and ended up finding a network of 'bad' sites with unnatural links pointing at us. After requesting link, removal I submitted a reconsideration request, being sure to point out the link network, of course, and Google moved the manual penalty.
The plan moving forward is to keep a watch out for bad links and remove them. (which I'm sure is part of Google's master plan - other than ruling the Universe, naturally) They keep appearing, which indicates that lawyers are a target for spam and/or negative SEO!
-
One more thing...I guess I will check the anchor text again, especially as the domain is an exact match domain. I'll see why martindale.com is linking so much, too. I'm sure the firm's partners are all listed there in multiple categories, but I don't see how that disproportionately high ratio of backlinks from martindale.com can be helpful. To be clear, that site is a legal site (with lawyer listings), not an individual lawyer's site.(Thanks Jesse.)
-
Thank all of you for your helpful responses! I used the trial version of link detox from linkresearchtools.com to help me get my bearings, then moved on to ahrefs and majestic seo. There are definitely shady links that exist so I will be trying to get these removed, then disavow them with Google's disavow tool, then request a review/removal of the penalty. I understand that Google may just be ignoring them, but I'm going to play it safe. One site in particular was hiding the backlink. I could only find it by hovering over a 'more links' area and the page's content and surrounding links were totally irrelevant. Other sites were useless directories with no Page Rank and just lists of location-specific law links (like Atlanta Bankruptcy Law, Baltimore Bankruptcy Law, and so on.) The one in particular I found with Link Detox was not even indexed, a sign of a Google penalty (if not total infancy, in a best-case scenario).
I had to put the time in and manually visit the links pulled from Webmaster Tools to discover these. I guess I will try to clean up the worst of them and perhaps leave the 'gray' ones with Page Rank because I'm not sure if they are hurting and I don't want to do more harm than good. Any other advice?
It's a learning process, for sure.
Thanks Again!
-
Yeah I'd have to agree with Marie or at the very least that other domain bringing in 60,000 of your 75,000 links.. why wouldn't that be a factor? Just because it's a "lawyer's site?" What does a lawyer need 60,000 referring links for? That's pretty intense...
Still I'd look closely at your anchor text profile and do a full audit as Marie is suggesting here.
-
I would think that it would be extremely unlikely that links from one wordpress blog would cause a site to get a manual review and a partial match warning message. Any time I've reviewed a site with one of these messages the cause is always a large number of domains linking unnaturally.
-
Great point.
-
Interesting Kurt, thanks for sharing.
Yes I'm sure it can go either way that makes sense as it's basically what the message says. Something along the lines of "some rankings/keywords/pages may be affected," right? I guess if your ranking is affected though you'll be all over this.
Like I said though it's always a good idea to clean up your link profile. Even if no manual action has been taken you may be surprised what sort of improvements you could make escaping any algorithmic penalties.
-
Jesse,
I think it depends on the situation. Matt Cutts has even said what you are saying, that in some cases you don't need to do anything because Google has just taken action against those links. I have, however, seen a situation where dealing with the links that caused a partial manual action did help to improve rankings. In that case, it appeared that Google had no only disavowed the suspect links, but had also penalized the specific keywords (or possibly pages) that were being targeted. There was a clear and quick drop in rankings for specific keywords, but not all the keywords the site ranked for. Once the suspect links were dealt with, the rankings for those keywords improved.
Unless it's a huge pain to deal with the links, I'd take care of them just in case.
-
Yes I was going to say pretty much exactly what ChilyDigital here is saying. Check your anchor text disparity using ahrefs.com or OSE.
The thing about these partial match penalty warnings that I've found is that while it is good to try and address the root of the problem so as to avoid further problems in the future, Google doesn't really seem to be asking much of you. I'm 99% certain what happens in these situations is Google decides to "disavow" the links in question from their end and not pay any attention to them going forward.
Now if these types of links continue to get built in a major way, then you might be facing a larger site-wide penalty. But so far the "penalty" is doing nothing more than discrediting the poison-links it has identified. This is my current theory anyway based on experience with the same message.
When I got this message, I never saw any ranking or traffic fluctuations. I did some more work removing links and cleaning up my link profile and it went away.. "KIND OF." It was weird, the message still existed but when you clicked it no text was present so I'm assuming the message got bugged but either way I never had any actual noticeable/tangible penalties.
Hope this helps..
-
Hi Kimberly, The links on the wordpress.com blog may be an issue. Are there many exact match anchor text links on it pointing to the site.org domain? Do you have any other backlinks on other sites other that the wordpress.com blog that may be 'unnatural'? It sounds like a link audit might be necessary to investigate further why you've received a warning from Google.
-
It sounds like you should either redirect the old Wordpress site or delete it. Redirects are the better SEO solution, but I don't know what Wordpress charges for that, so you'd have to make that financial decision.
As to whether that would solve your problem or not, I don't know. The manual action didn't have any sample links to indicate what the issue was and I haven't reviewed your link profile. There could be other issues.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com
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
-
Location Links in Footer
Our business is in 10 cities. We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location. We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service). It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times. However, we want to improve organic results. We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer? I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page? We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9640 -
How to determine the value of these links?
Hi Guys, How can you determine the value of external links which are deep inside a website. Two examples: http://www.sheknows.com/community/home/ten-tips-buy-car-insurance Two sub-folders deep. http://www.dogfoodhowto.com/899/whats-the-best-puppy-food-for-cockapoo-puppy-at-home.html One sub-folder deep. These links are clearly far from the homepage, so was wondering if they are worthless or how can you determine the value of them? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
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 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Why the sudden link drop?
A the end of November I am showing that our total links were 118k. Current links are 22k. We changed sites early November so that was about three weeks before. What would cause the drop of about 100k links? Or where should I start investigating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Help choosing titles
Good evening guys, I changed my titles last month, in preparation for the over optimisation penalty and the result was an instant and quite dramatic loss in traffic. I believe the reason is, the change resulted in a lot of duplicate titles. My website is similar to deviant art, but for mobile phones. So the titles include the brand of mobile phone for example. The titles were: Upload name + Brand + Content type - 3 tags - FILEID So an example would be Black Nokia wallpaper - black, abstract, grey - 12345 I changed them to Black Nokia wallpaper by artist name on domain name. But this resulted in thousands of duplicate titles and a dramatic loss in traffic. For example a user could upload 20 black wallpapers. With this in mind, I need to change my titles and fast. But I don't want to make another mistake. The one I am quite keen to try is: Black Nokia Wallpaper - Tag1, tag2 wallpapers - on domain name. So the main variable would be the name of the upload and then the 2 tags, to mix things up a little. Another option would be to throw the file ID in there somewhere? As that will always be unique. Perhaps the file ID could be in the place of the "wallpapers" after the two tags? I'd like to keep the domain name, for branding reasons. Any other suggestions are warmly welcomed. Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
Natural Link Profile, low and high value links, really?
I cant really get my head around this one. I've read a few times when building links make sure you pick up so low value links as well. So here is an example (and lets say each link takes half hour to get): I got 5 hours of link building and this is what I have managed to get with the time. 1. 10 high value links all with PA/DA 50-60+ 2. 5 high value links with PA/DA 50-60+ AND another 5 low value links with PA/DA 10-. Surely #1 beats #2 hands down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0