Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT
-
Hello,
We've been experiencing rank drop in all major keywords for the past 9 months.
I've had different people say different things here at Moz about how backlinks effect rank drop. Brilliant answers, but different opinions.
Nothing is showing up in GWT for this site.
Here's the backlink breakdown:
72 linking root domains. 20 of those are blogs. These blogs have no backlinks in and of themselves, and were created originally as easy links. Not white hat stuff. Three additional root domains are still paid links in this profile, though all but one was made to look editorial. The one that doesn't look editorial has links sprinkled throughout their website, among other paid links.
The rest of the linking root domains (49) are legitimate. Again, nothing shows up in GWT. We had 96 root domains last March but in March of 2013 we cut most of the paid links and half (20) of the blogs. This brought our ranking down immediately by 2 or 3 slots. We've been slipping every since.
I would like people to speak from experience and let me know if you think the backlinks could be causing the ranking drop and what to do about it.
Thanks!
-
I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop.
If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.
-
In most cases when your rankings are continuously going down ad you haven’t received any penalty, I would recommend to give a detailed looks to every part of the website and see where the problems are.
If the on-page is bad this is possible, especially check quality of content and make sure the content you have on your website is not duplicated or copied from somewhere else because bad or copied content can also cause this.
And similarly check the quality of links and if you doubt on the links quality, you probably have figured out where the problem is!
The good part is that it’s not a manual penalty that means even if the website facing a drop in rankings, it’s automatic. All you have to do is to collect all the links you find, GWT, Moz.com, ahrefs.com, Majestic.com and more and audit each link manually (tools like link risk might help to an extent).
Try to remove the bad links as much as you can, use disavow link feature as well and at the same time collect some good quality links that point back to your website and looks natural to you too!
Once the ratio of good links will increase the same algorithmic change will start to work in your favor J
Hope this helps!
-
BobGW, you're not the only one experience this. In the past year or so, Google has updated their internal algorithms on how they deal with links to sites. If your site has a low quality or even toxic (bad) links pointing to your website from other sites, your site's rankings will go down. And in many cases, you're not going to get any sort of warning messages or messages from Google in Google Webmaster Tools.
If you do have unnatural links that violate their guidelines, then they may send you a message, and in that case they'll ask you to file a reconsideration request after you've cleaned up the links and made good attempts to get those links removed.
The good thing is that it doesn't sound like you've received any sort of penalties--the rankings have gone down algorithmically. That doesn't mean that you don't need to evaluate all of the links to your site and get the low quality links removed.
I would look at all your links (you can use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, or Majestic SEO or a combination of those to find the links) and review them with a fine tooth comb. Not all of the bad links will be shown in Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need to look at other tools to gather the link data.
Get rid of the ones that are low quality and get new fresh quality links and your site's rankings should come back.
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 .me takes more time to rank than .com?
Hi, our company website is about freight forwarding, and im feared about .me extension they have taken. The location is for Dubai and the website is running google ads with a no-indexed landing page. I have the doubt, that our cargo company based website shipwaves.me is not receiving Google ads attention in that case. Besides, the other confusion is shipwaves.me takes time to rank for the keywords with high search or not other than .com extension. I'm confused why this company has taken, .me extension and anybody got the idea- is this .me is a top-level domain or it takes more time than .com domains.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LayaPaul0 -
New Customer spammy markup warning
I just won a new customer, yippie. Bad news after i got the full story it seems they have a google penalty against them. It could be an old malicious employee with back links. The error in GSC is spammy markup, would anyone else care to take a quick look and see what the main issues are, im not sure of the tags or all the additional info and alternate names, they are relevant but maybe too much in rich snippets. the site is aipctshop.com. Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bendh0 -
Drastic surge of link spam in Webmaster Tools' Link Profile
Hello all I am trying to get some insights/advice on a recent as well as drastic increase in link spam within my Webmaster Tools' Link Profile. Before I get into more detail, I would like to point out, that I did find some relevant MOZ community posts addressing this type of issue. However, my link spam situation may have to be approached from a different angle, as it concerns two sites at the same time and somewhat in the same way. Basically, starting in July 2017, from one day to the other, a multitude of domains (50+) is generating link spam (at least 200 links a month and counting) and to cut a long story short, I believe the sites are hacked. This is because most of the domain names sound legit and load the homepage, but all the sub-pages linking to my site contain "adult" gibberish. In addition, it is interesting to see, that each sub-page follows the same pattern, scraping content from my homepage including the on-page links - that generate the spammy backlinks to my sites - while inserting the adult gibberish in between (basically it's all just text and looks like as if a bot is at work). Therefore, it's not like my link is being inserted "specifically" into pages or to spam me with the same anchor text over and over. So, I am not sure what kind of link spam this really is (or the purpose of it). Some more background information: As mentioned above, this link spam (attack?) is affecting two of my sites and it started off pretty much simultaneously (in addition, the sites focus on a competitive niche). The interesting detail is, that one site suffered a manual penalty years ago, which has been lifted (a disavowal file exists and no further link building campaigns have been undertaken after the cleanup), while the other site has never seen any link building efforts - it is clean, yet the same type of spam is flooding that websites' link profile too. In the webmaster forums the overall opinion is, that Google ignores web spam. All well. However, I am still concerned, that the dozens of spammy links pointing to the website "with a history" may pose a risk (more spam on a daily basis on both sites though). At the same time I wonder, why the other "clean" site is facing the same issue. The clean sites' rankings do not appear to be impacted, while the other website has seen some drops, but I am still observing the situation. Therefore, should I be concerned for both sites or even start an endless disavowal campaign on the site with a history? PS: This MOZ article appears to advice so: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin "In most cases, sites that have a history of collecting unnatural links tend to continue to collect them. If this is the case for you, then it’s best to disavow those on a regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) so that you can avoid getting another manual action." What is your opinion? Sorry for the long post and many thanks in advance for any help/insight.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hermski0 -
Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html another example Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/ same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one??? thanks very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ydf0 -
Need help please with website ranking problem!
I am currently struggling with our site www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk to rank our PVC banners page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html On the UK search I have the following positions. hfe-signs.co.uk/banners.php
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
signfirm.com/banners.html
bigvaluebanners.co.uk/PVC_Banners_High_Quality_Cheap_Outdoor_PVC_Mesh_Full_Colour_Banner/
bannerprintingandroid.co.uk/pvc-banners/
printedbannersandsigns.co.uk/
your-print.co.uk/pvc-banners-special.html
bannerbuzz.co.uk/pvc-banners
bannerbuzz.co.uk/
auraprint.co.uk/products/banners/
vinylprinting.co.uk/pvc_banners.html
banners.co.uk/CustomBanners-BlankBanners.htm
use - http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html I can't decide if it is url structure of the site, to many links on the left hand nav diluting power, keywords, etc but it does not look right that we are so far down, at least 2 of the pages above us have no content at all and some have no links or social either. Any help would be appreciated.0 -
Clear out Spammy Links
I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck) I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating. Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop. We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmandaJ0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Page Rank is 0
Hi. Can you please point me in the right direction concerning a site whose default page has a PR of 0? There does not appear to be any errors in the robots.txt file (that I can tell). When I ran a duplicate content check by searching the title tag and first sentance in quotes it did not return more than 2 sites. When I ran a site: it is reporting 287,000 results. Does this mean that they purchased links and have now been penalized? Or where should I go from here? Thank you for any feedback and assistance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JulB0