At a Loss With What to do With This Site
-
Hi people, a friend of mine runs a payday loan site with a very valuable domain name: http://bit.ly/1lyJgME
The site was penalised by Google about 18 months ago, up until then it ranked #1 for payday loan and on the 1st page for the plural, payday loans in the UK. Now the website is nowhere in the top 200 results for either of the phrases, but he has not received any notification from Google and if he checks in webmaster tools in the manual actions section there is nothing there.
He has gone through all of the links to his site several times and attempted to remove any unnatural links, those that he could not get rid of after emailing twice he disavowed - about 800, a lot were not even built by him.
He has sent 2-3 reconsideration requests to Google and every time they said that the site had not been penalised, or something to that affect.
The site does have lots of quality organic links from websites like Wired Magazine and the National Geographic, more then enough decent links to rank somewhere on Google for its keywords.
I feel that the site may have been held to a higher standard because a lot of people think that payday loan websites are unethical.
What do you think he should do? Can you spot anything on site that is wrong? He has definitely tried to remove every single unnatural link and the ones he could not he disavowed.
-
Hi guys, thanks for the responses.
We have used the Screamingfrog tool and spotted a bunch of 403 pages so we are looking into that.
Images were all used with permission.
I have mentioned the telephone number and address thing to the guy.
I have checked about the national geographic link and there was definitely no bribe involved.
-
Perfect! You think he'd take $100 to link to me? And, do you promise not to tell Google?
EDIT: That page has a meta robots nofollow on it. That sneaky devil.
-
-
Very interesting! But the important question is how I can get a payday loans link from the pope's site. Have you mastered that yet EGOL?
-
Looks like one of the NG bloggers got some infographics from paydayloans.co.uk and posted them on the NatGeo blog
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/09/28/is-it-green-to-be-green/
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/24/great-depression-vs-great-recession/
Even though NG is a white hat site (almost up there with the Pope's site), it is possible that Google thought that the loan guys were sneaking in some spammy infographic links. One of those posts give two links to paydayloans.co.uk and to another site in the loan sector. If I was the editor at NG those posts would not have been approved.
NatGeo looks to be a favorite target of the payday loan linkbuilders.
-
Just a quick question, what have National Geographic and Wired Magazine got to do with payday loans? Obviously I haven't seen them but if they are just random links then I'd count them as spammy even though they are on highly authoritative websites. If you look at the distribution of anchor text as well it is heavily weighted to keyword anchor text links (payday loans) rather than branded links.
Exact Match Domains took a bit of hit as well so the benefits that the website would have received from having an EMD would have been devalued. I'd say to work on building some quality and relevant links because the website is lacking in them.
-
Payday loans sites are notoriously difficult to recover because of the widespread spam in the industry.
Do you have any manual action at all in Webmaster Tools? To check, go to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.
If there is no manual action then it's possible that the site is affected by the Payday Loans algo: http://searchengineland.com/google-pay-day-loan-algorithm-google-search-algorithm-update-to-target-spammy-queries-162941. Unfortunately we don't know a lot about this algorithm and how to recover.
One of the things that I think is vitally important is that in order to rank as a payday loans site you have to be a legitimate brick and mortar business. (This is just my opinion. I don't have proof of this.) When I go to the site, the fact that there is no phone number published raises flags for me. When I Googled the address I got a building that primarily has a carpet store in it. I found this site that shows me businesses near 928 High Rd and there is no mention of a Payday Loans company: http://www.192.com/places/n/n12-9/n12-9rw/
I think that Google only wants to rank Payday loan sites that are legitimate businesses and don't just exist online. Don't get me wrong - You still could be a legitimate business, but from Google's standpoint the site looks like many of the hundreds of other payday loans sites that exist only on the internet and are affiliates of well known trusted businesses.
If that's not it, then it's possible that the Penguin algorithm is affecting the site. What I have found is that recovery from Penguin is EXTREMELY hard for a payday loans site. When we have removed manual penalties from Payday loans sites, Google has given us remote example links that were nowhere to be found on any backlink checkers. Penguin is slightly different because Google won't give you example links, but if Penguin was the issue then you have to find close to every bad backlink ever made in order to see recovery and you have to have a good base of truly natural links.
We've recovered payday loans sites from manual penalties, but have learned that these cases are significantly harder than other sites. As such, we now only take clients in the loans vertical that have true brick and mortar businesses and we charge significantly more for these sites.
I wish I had more encouraging advice for you. If the site is truly a legitimate business outside of the internet, then I would work hard to establish that fact so that Google can recognize you. I'd focus next on doing everything you can to find additional unnatural backlinks that you can disavow. Make sure that you are disavowing on the domain level as well.
-
just sayin.....
This site is displaying a lot of images that they probably do not own... images owned by companies who are really really aggressive in going after infringers. In 2012, Google said that they were getting millions of DMCA notices EVERY MONTH and were taking action against sites that get repeated complaints. The Pirate Update. More here.
This might not be the problem you are seeing at this time... but if they don't have permission for the images would be a good thing to get under control.
-
He needs to start with the obvious first. Take a look at Webmaster Tools to make sure Google is indexing his pages. Do a Fetch on some pages to see what Google sees. Next move would be to have a full, in depth site audit done to review all the elements of the site. Screaming Frog is a good tool for that. Then he needs to go back and explore his links again. Adding some new, relevant links will help.
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
-
SEO value of 301 redirects from non-existent sites.
I have a question about an SEO tactic. There is this site that has purchased three domain names, and has redirected them to their main site. The three domains are: Spokaneduilawyer org, Spokaneduilaw com, and Spokaneduilawfirm com and the website has all three domains redirecting to their main site. What is the SEO value with this? I looked at those three domains on Majestic and they have no backlinks that I could find, and when I looked on archive.org I didn't see any history of those domains being actual sites that might bring traffic. What is the webmaster trying to do, and what is this tactic called?
Link Building | | RandyHT0 -
Do links from such sites as TripAdvisor give any weight or support for SEO
And what about other sites like quora or other niche forums/blogs where one might leave answers, with a link to their profile, which has a link back to the owner's website? _Cindy
Link Building | | cceebar1 -
Looking for critical review of site
I am looking for a lot of insight into my gaming site hiddentriforce.com We have been growing a ton on our social networks, but the site is not growing as quickly as we would like. We have a pretty decent back link portolio from being the first to break news, some unique pieces, a scholarship, etc. But I would love another set of eyes on things.What could I do to drastically improve the site? To most improve its seo?
Link Building | | Atomicx0 -
Is a lot of inbound traffic coming from site a problem for SEO?
We have a site which is going to deliver content to a big news site and in return we will receive a lot of traffic from the news site. Estimates are that it will be about 50% of our daily traffic. Before this we have about 2000 daily visits, where 50% is from organic traffic. How will this affect our rankings? (It should be pretty obvious to Google that an increase like that in reffered traffic is bought - which I assume will ahve a negative impact on our organic rankings) What is the best tactic to use - regarding SEO - if (when) we proceed to deliver content/recieve traffic from that news site? (we have a lot of decent rankings on several branch keywords, and we don't want to risk those rankings. On the other hand - if we could improve our rankings from this deal - we would like inputs to that as well? Best regards, Chris
Link Building | | sembseo0 -
Too many links from one site?
In webmaster tools in 'links to your site' I have a totla of 819 links but 580 have appeared from one site. Is this bad for SEO?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Link building for a product review site
I'm doing SEO for a product review website, and I'm curious what link building opportunities are best for this category. Assume only the following: The website is basically a blog Most of the articles are reviews on cosmetic products, though there are also articles regarding news, product roundups, tips&tricks and similar content The website is in a local, non-english language Disregarding low-value opportunities such as directories, what kind of websites should I aim for outreach purposes? So far, I'm thinking the following: Product manufacturers (very low success chance, as the review site is fairly new and in a localized language) E-commerce sites selling the products (average to low success chance, since a lot of them use CMSes that might not allow integration of a review) Other cosmetic blogs, particularly for guest blogging (average to low success chance, since the website is fairly new) Any ideas would be appreciated, thanks!
Link Building | | mihaiaperghis0 -
Do Follow- Social Media sites
Does anyone have a list of do follow social media network sites. I am looking to list some of my customers on social media network sites, but having the bonus of do follow to pass link Juice is an extra bonus. Most of my customers have Twitter and Facebook profiles- but these happen to be no follows. I am looking for more social media sites that are do follow. I did see an article on this- on SEM MOz I believe but I cant find it. Any suggestions?
Link Building | | WMA0 -
How to Add Content to a Product-Focused Site
I recently took over management of the SEO work for the following site: http://www.grovercorp.com/rings-and-seals/. I want to do link building, but don't have a ton of experience with it. From what I've read, offering linkable content is the best way to get links. However, this site -- like many in industrial B-2-B -- is focused primarily on promoting their products. I'd like tto offer an article or add an infographic, but am not sure where I would put it? It doesn't seem like the architecture offers a good place to add linkable content. Anyone have thoughts or suggestions?
Link Building | | EricVallee340