Backlinks that we didnt place, killing our SERP rank and PR
-
I am in need of advice regarding back links that we did not place, and which are hurting our search engine results. How and why they got there I cannot explain.But they have appeared recently, and are damaging our SERP ranks.
For several years, I have been a member with SEOmoz, and we have done our search engine optimization in house. I am the owner of a personal injury law firm, which is a competitive field in search engine optimization.
Recently, in the spring, we updated our website, added significant content (over 100 additional pages), we set up a better site structure, and we completed a significant back link campaign from white hat sources. As a result, we were the strongest law firm in search engine results in the state of Arizona, and the page rank from our home page went from a 4 to 6, and from our next highest level of pages, they went from a 3 to 6. This happened in 10 week period. Our search engine results were fantastic.
We were getting a significant amount of business from out Places page and our Organic results. That has almost completely dried up.
Approximately 6-8 weeks later, we started having some serious problems. Specifically, our search engine results decreased significantly, our page rank reduced from a six to a four. So we started using SEOmoz tools to see what the problem was, and when we created an open site Explorer report, there are approximately 1000 different links from very shady websites they are now linking to our home page. Some of these linking URLs prompt a download to video and other files. Other of the linking are simple on junk sites.
Obviously, some other person placed these links. First and foremost I am interested in maintaining the integrity of our site, and if there were a way to remove these links, and protect against that in the future, that is what I want. Secondly, if there were a way to find out who did this, I would like to know that also.
What options and/or actions should be taken. I am thinking that I may need to employ a professional/consultant. Will I have to transfer content to another domain?
Your thought and help are appreciated.
Thanks,
-
Just wanted to let you know that the links that are prompting a download are a bug in OSE and not real links. Check out the post by a Linkscape engineer at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains. So sorry for not catching this thread earlier, hope it helps explain some of the problems.
-
I am wondering if your site got penalized because of your backlink campaign.
If you normally don't acquire links during a large span of your business, but suddenly start a large scale backlink campaign, even if it is 'whitehat', Google might get suspicious for the jump of links during the short span.
It would be much better to have a gradual addition of links.
-
Since you did your link building inhouse, let's rule that out as a factor. The next step would be to follow on EGOL's suggestion to investigate your site for any other issues or recent changes.
-
You seem to be focused on those spammy links and I can understand that. They are disturbing. However, before I would blame them for the problem I would want answers to these....
-
is there any problem with the update of your site... were there URL changes, dynamic content assembly, java links in your persistent navigation?
-
the new content that you produced... has it been grabbed by others and posted on their sites... Search for unique sentences in quotes
-
the whitehat links that you obtained... did you have to give any links back to obtain them... are they paid or links that could have been devalued?
For me the spammy links rate my attention only after the potential problems above are ruled out. Lots of sites have these types of links. They are ubiquitous on the web and the sites that hold them usually do not persist for a long time. I believe that duplicate content, linking back to other domains and design problems are more common causes of damage to rankings.
Also, consider that both Ryan and I suggest that the spammy links or the white hat links could have been helping for a short period of time before being devalued.
As for finding an available SEO, I would look for generous and competent contributors here and ask if they are available.
-
-
Ryan, we did not place those links. We went to great lengths to get while hat links.
These 1000+ spammy harmful links (many of which prompt downloads of various files) appeared without our involvement. We did not hand off any link building to anyone. We do it in house based on the techniques we learned on SEOmoz videos and learning materials,
The big issue is as you tracking down and having those links removed. I am looking for either the process of how to do that, or preferably hiring a pro, but dont know where to look for a reputable one
-
We did not acquire the 1000 spammy links, Our backlink campaign was done in house and was painstaking to ensure that they were white hat. Our additional content was 100% original written by us.
The 1000+ links are not only spammy, they prompt downloads of various types of files. we did not place these.
believe me, i am not a conspiracy theorist, but It appears that our site was sabotage with harmful links that we did not place, but obviously someone did with the intent to harm our site
I dont know what part of the county you are in, but I imagine where ever it is, like here, attorney advertising in omnipresent. We were by far the dominant Personal Injury law firm in organic results and also Google places listing results. Probably 50% or our business came from online searches -- which we don't have costs for anything like TV, Radio, outdoor advertising,
I agree that at this point we need a pro to look at it. I want someone who can do forensic type analysis, to find the unwanted and harmful links that we did not place, and have those blocked or removed, and possibly traced,
where should I look to find a reputable pro that can help us
-
Ive seen spammers build links to pages they have placed UGC links on, to boost the value of the links they are getting from your site. Any way they are getting links (even no follow) off your homepage?
BTW I and a mates sites have had exactly the same TBPR increase and then big decrease over about the last month. Nothing seems to have changed in traffic tho
-
we completed a significant back link campaign from white hat sources.
when we created an open site Explorer report, there are approximately 1000 different links from very shady websites they are now linking to our home page.
I hate to state the obvious but it seems most likely the links you gained where not from white hat sources.
Without being able to view your site and the links involved, a likely guess is that your site received paid links which have been devalued.
The first step I would recommend is signing in to Google WMT and submitting a request to determine whether your site is under a penalty. If your site is under a penalty, perform whatever cleanup is necessary to remove the penalty.
If your site is not under a penalty, it is likely those 1000 links from questionable sites gave you a boost, and those links have been devalued which has negatively impacted your overall stats and rankings.
I recognize your site is for a law firm so feel to correct me if you feel I am in error. My understanding is anyone can legally create a link to your site. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. You can track down each site and request them to remove the link. Keep in mind OSE only shows approximately the top 25% of links on the internet. There may be many other links which you are not seeing. Another helpful tool is Google WMT which may display more links.
These "bad" links should not hurt you in any way unless they are paid links and you receive a penalty for buying links. Otherwise they are outside of your control.
I would recommend contacting whomever you used for your link building campaign. Another tool is to take a look at who else these sites have built links for. Can you determine if all of Agency X's clients (or whomever built your backlinks) receives similar links?
-
Most websites that become highly ranked in their niche accumulate a lot of links from spammy domains. My sites have lots of them too. I didn't place them, I can't control them and I don't worry about them.
There are many factors in your question that could relate to your rankings drop.... 1) site was updated, 2) big backlink campaign, 3) added lots of content, 4) one thousand spammy links. Any one of them could be the cause of this drop.
The updated site might have a crawl, indexing or some other problem.... the backlinks you acquired might not be as good as you think.... the content that you uploaded might be duplicated elsewhere or have been spun for other sites... and those spammy links could be the problem.
If you are confident about your updated site, the quality of the backlinks and the uniqueness of your content then my bet would be placed here..... that the 1000 spammy links that were quickly acquired actually helped your rankings temporarily and then were devalued.
If you have any doubts that you can't answer yourself about the first three factors you might get a pro to look at them carefully for you.
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
-
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to SERPs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
International SEO | | Alex_Pisa
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Goal
We want local domains (be, ch, fr, etc.) to appear in SERPs and also comply with Google policy of local language variants and/or canonical links. Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Issue
After Googlebot crawled the websites we see lot of “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Coverage/Excluded report (Google Search Console) for most domains. When we inspect some of those URLs we can see Google has decided that canonical URL points to (example): User-declared canonical: None
Google-selected canonical: …same page, but on a different domain Strange is that even those URLs are on Google and can be found in SERPs. Obviously Google doesn’t know what to make of it. We noticed many websites in the same scenario use a self-referencing approach which is not really “kosher” - we are afraid if we use the same approach we can get penalized by Google. Question: What do you suggest to fix the “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in our scenario? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
Wants to Rank Well in Multiple Countries
We have been using moz subscription from last few months & are quite happy so far. We just wanted to explore more out of it & wanted to understand how to approach the optimization for having us rank well in US. At the same time we don't wanted to lose upon what we have achieved till now. I have read through some blog posts & found that changing the international targeting in GWT can also hurt. My vision is to rank well in multiple countries but at the same time do not lose rankings in India. Any help here would be appreciated so whatever we do, we do it right.
International SEO | | fourseven0 -
Backlinks issue
Hi guys So I have 3 top level domains - I'm seeing backlinks that point to each other. Is this something that I need to fix? I'm not too sure if this practice is ethical, but I'm not entirely sure how all the links are pointing towards each other and if this is something I will get pulled up for how do i go about fixing it? My 3 domains are as follows: zenory.com, zenory.com.au and zenory.co.nz I would appreciate some advice around this! Cheers
International SEO | | edward-may0 -
Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools - Is there an expected ranking benefit in the geotargeted region ?
Hi Is there an expected ranking benefit from geotargeting regional focused subfolders or domain mapped TLDs' in the target countries ? Or does it just prevent these pages from showing up in other regions search results ? For example i have a client with a main .com site targeting english worldwide generally, then a /tr subfolder in turkish to target Turkey. Then another subfolder /de targeting german in germany (but the de has also been domain mapped to .de top level domain too). Im leaving the main .com site non geotargeted since its job is to achieve english language results wherever possible and wandering whether to geotarget the turkish subfolder & german tld The Turkish regional subfolder & the German tld are achieving some ranking results already in their target countries googles, but also getting traffic from other countries too (which im happy to get, dont really want to stop this traffic unless there really is a local region ranking benefit for the main target country by gwt geotargeting). So should I use GWT international targeting tool or not ? Since the tld site is clearly on a german domain with german language pages and the Turkish subfolder /tr site is in Turkish the i presume Googles got no probs working this out which is demonstrated by the regional & language ranking results So I presume if achieving results in target countries already then no real need to set international taregt in GWT especially if it may stop traffic from other regions too. BUT if its likely to improve those rankings further in the main target countries googles significantly then i would happily cut off or reduce the other region traffic in favour of higher rankings and hence targeted traffic from the main target country .All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate product description ranking problems (off-site duplicate content)
We do business in niche category and not in English language market. We have 2-3 main competitors who use same product information as us. They all do have same duplicate products descriptions as we. We with one competitors have domains with highest authority in this market. They maybe have 10-20% better link profile (when counting linking domains and total links). Problem is that they rank much better with product names then we do (same duplicate product descriptions as we have and almost same level internal optimisation) and they haven't done any extra link building for products. Manufacturers website aren't problem, because these doesn't rank well with product name keywords. Most of our new and some old product go to the Supplemental Results and are shown in "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ... already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.". Unique text for products isn't a option. When we have writen unique content for product, then these seem to rank way better. So our questions is what can we do externaly to help our duplicate description product rank better compared to our main competitor withour writing unique text? How important is indexation time? Will it give big advantage to get indexed first? We have thought of using more RSS/bing services to get faster indexation (both site will get products information almost at same time). It seems our competitor get quicker in index then we do. Also are farmpages helpful for getting some quick low value links for new products. We have planed to make 2-3 domains that would have few links pointint to these new products to get little advantage right after products are launched and doesn't have extranl links. Sitemap works and our new product are shown on front pages (products that still mostly doesn't rank well and go to Supplemental Results). Some new product have #1 or top3 raking, but these are only maybe 1/3 that should have top3 rankings. Also we have noticed problem that when we index products quickly (for example Fetch as Google) then these will get good top3 results and then some will get out of rankings (to Supplemental Results).
International SEO | | raido0 -
Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking). By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues... What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
Keyphrase ranking a geo-redirected site in Google
Hi all This is the situation. I have a client who runs a number of ccTLD sites (all exact match brand name domains), including a .com which they use for the US. This is a hair care product and due to Advertising Standards Authority (UK) restrictions, they cannot use a certain phrase to promote their products - 'hair loss' on the domain.co.uk site. However, in the US, there is no such restriction and can use wording this on the site. A brand name search in google.co.uk brings up .co.uk as 1st result and .com as 2nd result, so the .com is indexed in google.co.uk. Any non-US user visiting domain.com will be redirected to their ccTLD site. Here's my question - could I feasibly get the domain.com site ranking in google.co.uk for certain 'hair loss' based keyphrases, considering the fact that I can mention it in the copy on there but not on the domain.co.uk site. Would I need to remove any Geographic Target in the WMT account for domain.com? Or is this a form of Google cloaking and could see the site penalised? Thanks
International SEO | | Coolpink0 -
How can I replicate India SERPs from US
I was recently checking out our analytics keywords stats and I am seeing traffic noted as google organic traffic coming from India. When I do a search on http://www.google.co.in/ for those terms using a "incognito" browser with no cookies, and not logged in I don't see our site in the first 100 results. The same thing happens on google.com if I try to set the account in india. I am trying to see if this might be an issue with an adwords campaign not getting auto-tagged (auto-tagging is turned on in adwords), or if there is something else going on. The keyword campaign gets many more clicks than analytics shows for this organic option so perhaps it is an odd rare occurrence. I am glad to have the traffic, but I want to be sure it is actually tracking correctly as organic, or if PPC is not tagging for some reason 😉 Any suggestions or thoughts?
International SEO | | SL_SEM0