Killed by penguin 3
-
So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site.
We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove.
Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way.
How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO?
Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business.
Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP
-
Thanks for the responses.
Looks like bit of a tough road ahead, but long term will be much for the better in cleaning up the (off)site.
The disavow exercise has been interesting in getting to review links in placed. There have been some strange links placed and very difficult to contact some websites to get them removed, but will try.
All the very best
-
-
Google is a bit secretive and hasn't let a lot slip out yet. My best guess would be when they next do an update if you have removed all the bad links you have the potential to increase, but this would be if Google thought you had cleaned up your bad links.
-
I use some software called ahrefs to get the full list of back links - even WMTs doesnt allow you to download the full list'
-
You could in theory have a link from a DA of 10 and be a great link, DA isn't really a great indicator - you could also have a link from a DA of 70+ and be a bad link. Check out these great articles:
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
But basically links need to be organic and natural, so if you have lots that are from forum signatures / comments, on websites outside your niche. If you sell garden furniture and have a lot of links sites about shoes for example, the odd one could be seen as relevant, but in general these aren't natural. You basically need to go to every page that is link to you and see if the link is relevant on the page, does it look natural and add value - or does it seem like it was just added in for the sake of a link.
- For disavow you simply upload a file, please keep this master file when uploaded as if you ever want to update this you need to include all previous bad links, as they don't keep an historical record and just use the latest file.
You only need to show evidence if you have a penalty in WMTs and are trying to have it removed.
-
-
In response to #1, unfortunately the answer is its impossible to know. We've had campaigns where disavowing links brought near immediate results, but we've also seen some that took months to correct.
As for #3, its more of a judgement call than a hard line on DA. As with all SEO, if there is good quality content on the page, then its a fine link to keep. If it looks borderline, probably better off disavowing it (better safe than sorry).
-
Thanks for getting back to us, really usefull and leads to several questions (sorry)
-
Your response implies will we only recover once links are removed/disavowed and the next update is in place. is this correct of do we see results once we have fixed the rot.
-
How do we get a FULL link list, even Open site explorer does not seem to do a full list.
-
How do we know which links affect us, i.e. is domain authority of the linking page relevant, if so what level would be acceptable. Most are above 25 DA that show in open site and would think this is OK?
-
Not having to disavow anything before, by showing evidence does that mean passing copies of email. How long after requesting to remove a link do we go and look to disavow in webmaster. getting links added can take upto 6 months so getting rid of them I am sure could take longer without fully knowing they are going to remove them anyway.
-
-
Hi
Good news - you can recover, the bad news - you have a lot of hard work to do, and when you will recover I don't know, Google hasn't yet confirmed how frequently the updates will roll.
First of all. Do a FULL link analysis and what ever links look unnatural and fake - disavow them straight away.
If you have a penalty you must show evidence you have tried to contact the webmaster's to get the links removed. Try to contact as many as possible and then do a disavow - the sooner the better.
Unfortunately, all you can do is hard work. Even if you did purely white hat going forward (and most sites I would say do Grey hat in my honest opinion, sending products out for review and a link, in my eyes is grey hat - but I digress), you still wouldn't recover.
The site is basically now on sinking sand any and good building you put on top is going to sink and be a waste of time, until you have sorted out the foundations (i.e. removed the bad links).
Sorry to say, this client is going to be taking up quite a bit of your time in the coming weeks, but you can be the good agency. Sit down with them and clearly explain everything what is wrong, what the previous agency / in house teams have done wrong and how your going to fix it. Then explain once you have fixed the issues, you are going to be good and do white hat techniques so that they never get penalised again - potential client for life. Put in the effort now and they will keep coming back.
Hope this is 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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Anyone seem anything from penguin yet?
I know its early days and even the wonderful Dr Pete said it will take a few days to notice anything, but has anyone seen anything. I've not seen any rise in traffic yet, but none of my ranking tracking tools have ran yet. Anyone seen anything, are you expecting to see any?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Unique meta descriptions for 2/3 of it, but then identical ending?
I'm working on an eCommerce site and had a question about my meta descriptions. I'm creating unique meta descriptions for each category and subcategory, but I'm thinking of adding the same ending to it. For example: "Unique descriptions, blah blah blah. Free Overnight Shipping..". So the "Free Overnight Shipping..." ending would be on all the categories. It's an ongoing promo so I feel it's important to add and attract buyers, but don't want to screw up with duplicate content. Any suggestions? Thanks for your feedback!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeffbstratton0 -
Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
My site www.sriindustries.com dropped to back page penguin 2.1
My website penguin 2.1 dropped back to page 5 and beyond, can you help me to come out from this ? My head is breaking, also I would like to know how to be on top for local business search (maps)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | synchronyinfo0 -
Preparing for Penguin: Remove, Disavow, or change to branded
For someone that has 80 root domains pointing to their domain and 10 of them are sitewide backlinks from 10 PR4+ sites. All paid for. All with the same main keyword anchor text Should I advise him to remove the links, dissavow the links, dissavow then remove or just change to branded anchor text for the 10 sitewide links. Another option is to just keep one link (preferrably editorial) from each site. The only reason not to pull them off right away is that the client could not sustain his business with a drop in sales. These are by far the strongest 10 root domains. Eventually, when he has enough good backlinks these are all coming off. There was a huge drop in sales for this site last fall, but it recovered almost completely by changing keyword stuffing and adding ecommerce content. Looking to keep his sales and also prepare for this years updates.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Impressions in Google SERP has declined from 3500 to 1600 after 5-25-2012\. Is it Penguin?
It's about the website http://www.apartments-houseboats-amsterdam.com/ The visitors had declined from 270 to 150 visitors per day. Is this caused by the Google update Penguin? If so what can I do to solve the problem? Thank you for your time and effort,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | letsbuilditnl0 -
From page 3 to page 75 on Google. Is my site really so bad?
So, a couple of weeks ago I started my first CPA website, just as an experiment and to see how well I could do out of it. My rankings were getting better every day, and I’ve been producing constant unique content for the site to improve my rankings even more. 2 days ago my rankings went straight to the last page of Google for the keyword “acne scar treatment” but Google has not banned me or given my domain a minus penalty. I’m still ranking number 1 for my domain, and they have not dropped the PR as my keyword is still in the main index. I’m not even sure what has happened? Am I not allowed to have a CPA website in the search results? The best information I could find on this is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465 But I’ve been adding new pages with unique content. My site is www.acne-scar-treatment.co Any advice would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tommythecat1