Help Understanding GWT Message
-
Brief background: A few months ago, our firm exchanged blog posts with another law firm in Pennsylvania with followed links. Though we did exchange links, the posts weren't spammy. They wrote "A Floridian's Guide To A Car Accident In Pennyslvania" and we wrote one for Pennsylvanians in Florida. (The reason for this is that Personal Injury law varies drastically from state-to-state, and Florida has a ton of people who move back and forth).
My question: His firm got a message from google saying our link to him violated googles' guidelines. I went and removed the link, BUT I didn't get any message saying his link to our site was a violation. Shouldn't we both have gotten messages? Perhaps, mine is "in the mail" so to speak, but I would think both would go out at the same time, so I'm wondering if there is another possible reason?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Yes, I got it from Majestic SEO. View page source then ctrl+f and type in 'daisy'. A lot of the domains with a lot of exact match anchors - hidden behind giant images.
The registrant of the site probably has no idea this all happened.
-
I'm searching for that anchor text with a site:sexualproblems.net, and once the site comes up (it takes a while), I'm not seeing that anchor text on the site itself, though Google did see it at one point. I wonder if their site got hacked?
Travis, it'd be great if you told us which tool you used. Thanks!
-
Travis,
Can you show me how your seeing we got this information, so I can figure out what to do with it? I just ran our site through OSE, and I'm not seeing that. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right spot.
Thanks,
Ruben
-
We never posted on sexualproblems.com. Well, at least I didn't, but thanks for pointing that out. I'll definitely look into.
-
Your site appears to have received a little less than 70K links from sexualproblems.net in the last 90 days. The anchor text is "daisy fondant cutters". It looks like the result of a post on sexualproblems.com. I could go on, but it looks like the guest posting strategy isn't working out.
-
Hi Ruben,
Since these are "manual" messages, a Google employee had to personally review the account and decide to send the message. It is likely something about the site flagged Google, prompting them to manually review the site. We don't really have a way of knowing if what they address in the message is what flagged that site, but it is likely.
If Google thinks what this site did violated the guidelines, that means any site, including your own, that is in violation of that guideline has the potential to receive the same message.
It is likely that yours is "in the mail." You could receive it a week from now or ten months from now.
I would recommend cleaning up or "no following" the link. You might consider waiting until the other site has submitted their reconsideration request to find out if your actions to remove the link were acceptable.
-
Here's a link to the post that got flagged (the links are removed now): http://www.kempruge.com/a-floridians-guide-to-a-car-accident-in-pennsylvania/
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
-
Can you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website please?
Stopping a redirect from one URL to another due to a 404 error? Referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D) Referring URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/)
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Help with 301 redirect code
Hi, I can't work out how to make this one work and would apreciate if someone could help.
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
i have a series of folders from a old site that are in the structure:
/c/123456/bags.html (the "123456" changes and is any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" changes depending on the product.
I need that to be 301 redirected to the following format:
/default/bags/bags.html0 -
Domain Forwarding Help
A friend of mine is a domainer and he wants to forward 21 parked niche specific domains to my site for extra type-in traffic. This will turn out to be 30 extra hits a day. Obviously, since these are parked domains, the SEO benefits are none, we just want the traffic. My questions is how to do it. These are his parked domains, and will not be redirected forever, is a 302 redirect the best plan here? He planned on just going into his hosting/domain admin and selecting "forward domain" -- is this ok too? Also, he would prefer to forward these domains to a single domain he owns, and then forward that single domain he owns to my domain. So someone who types in one of these 21 domains will go typindomain.com ---> hisredirectsite.com ---->mysite.com any implications here? What is the best option and how to do it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | terran0 -
301 help, whats the best way
Hi all right now i have 301 redirects setup in my htaccess file i recently redesigned our site so i have been redirecting all the old urls to the new ones. I saw a post about having all your urls the same format, so i updated my htaccess file to redirect all urls from http://www.mysite.com/food to http://www.mysite.com/food/ (added a forward slash). Now on my latest seo crawl i see all my site urls, redirecting to the forward slash url. am i doing this right, thanks will
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
Do Backlinks to a PDF help with overall authority/link juice for the rest of the domain?
We are working on a website that has some high-quality industry articles available on their website. For each article, there is an abstract with a link to the PDF which is hosted on the domain. We have found in Analytics that a lot of sites link directly to the PDF and not the webpage that has the abstract of the article. Can we get any benefit from a direct PDF link? Or do we need to modify our strategy?
Technical SEO | | MattAaron0 -
How does Ping services help your site
Hi i am trying to understand how services such as pingler.com help your site. I think i understand about the google ping service which tells google that you have updated a page but how does pingler work. Pingler claims that it sends traffic to your site but i do not understand this. Any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848861 -
Help internet archive
Hi can anyone help me. I am trying to track information from sites. I am at the moment got solicitiors involved ref trade mark of a name and we are trying to prove that this name was being used before the trade mark application. A company has gone ahead with a trade mark in full knowledge that this is a common name and we have been told if we can prove that the name was being used before it was registered then we can knock out the trade mark. We have been told there is an internet archive but i cannot find one, can anyone please let me know how i can look at sites from before 2010 and see about if they were using this word to help our case.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does removing product listings help raise SERP's on other pages?
Does removing content ever make sense? We have out of stock products that are left on the site (in an out of stock section) specifically for SEO value, but I am not sure how to approach the problem from a bottom line conversion stand point. Do we leave out of stock products and hope that they turn into a conversion rate via cross selling, or do out of stock products lower the value of other pages by "stealing" link juice and pagerank from the rest of the site? (and effectively driving interest away) What is your perspective? Do you believe that any content that is related or semi-related to your main focus is beneficial, or does it only make sense to have strong content that has a higher rate of conversion and overall site engagement?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30