Is It Possible to Be Punished By Google For Getting Too Many Links?
-
Hello,
My team and I have been trying to get high-quality back-links by seeking other sites and blogs. We were ranking really well and then all of a sudden, our rankings dropped dramatically.
We were only using backlinks and good ones at that, yet, our rankings have dropped. Is it possible for google to punish us for getting too many too fast? If not, what could be some of the other problems?
-
Yes, some time google gives plenty to your site when you made harm backlinks. Learn more here about it.
-
Thank you all for your responses.
Over the course of the last few weeks, my site has continued to further be slipping in rankings locally.
My question is, where do I start to detect the issue and regain my previous rankings?
-
We're in the middle of Google's May 2020 Core Update that still takes a few days to finish rolling out. Many pages have lost a percentage of overall traffic, there's a very high chance your drop might not be link related.
Here's a few theories based on initial research + feedback from other SEOs on the update:
- Google seems to prefer bigger brands
- Freshness seems to be more important
- Check your site's usability / design / loading speed / accessibility
Links are important but there's a huge amount of other things that can affect your rankings.
-
Hi Everyone,
So I've done some investigating on search console and we don't have any manual actions against us but my search traffic is down by 33% from last week. That said, could we have been punished by google from an algorithm update?
I'd love someone's expertise to discern why we've dropped dramatically when we get high-quality backlinks and have a very low spam score and our domain authority is much higher than our competitors. Thank you.
-
Too many, as in:
- Relation to site age
- Relation to others in your industry
- Relation incremental velocity
- Relation to the quality of links
Google's seen at least 10s of thousands of websites in your industry and is aware of every site that has ever linked to other sites in your industry. It knows how fast those others have acquired links, at what age they've acquired links, how quickly they've developed links, when and why spikes in link acquisition have occurred, and what percentage of links tend to be low quality.
Think of a link as a hand shake between you and a businessperson in an industry complimentary to yours that you had a good conversation with over lunch at an industry conference. If the relationship between you and the linking site isn't at least as close as that, it's possible it may be counterproductive.
-
There's no established figure that would mean TOO MUCH, I'd aim for matching what could be natural based on the social signals Google might pick up about your site, and at what competitors of a similar size are getting in terms of backlinks.
-
Got it.
So how long does google punish you?
Should I stop getting backlinks or just slow down the rate that I'm doing it?
Will my ranking eventually go back up?
-
"Is it possible for google to punish us for getting too many too fast?"
Absolutely. Maybe you didn't read the sentence after the one you read that told you getting links to your site is good. That following sentence said.. "If you are not familiar with how google's algorithm values links, do not engage in link building and do not purchase links because there is a good chance that all of a sudden your rankings could drop dramatically at some point in the future.
Did you miss that sentence?
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
-
In Google search console all of sudden a lot of backlinks have disappear at "Link To Your Site"
Hi after update in Google search console yesterday a lot of backlinks in "Link To Your Site" have disappear, before we had 43x domains now we have 12x domains linking to the site. I have checked the sites where we had link do-follow before and they are OK. Can you please tell me the reason what has gone wrong. And also please guide me in fixing the issue , Hope to hear from you soon..! URL: https://www.finanstopp.no/
Link Building | | heleneolsen3 -
Grr SEO linking.. I am not understanding why I wouldn't have lots more links.. Please help. Thanks
I have done the whole moz open exploer and I am not understanding why my site wouldn’t have more links registering to my website.. I have lots of sites(directorys and 3rd party) with my website domain in them. The only one that is linking to my site is BBB.com and my advertsing with saint paul press. www.somerersetautodealer.com But if I have links with all kinds of automotive directories why wouldn’t they register? I am sure this a simply answer or that I am not understanding something. Thanks for your help! Scott
Link Building | | Scott12340 -
Manual Links Vs. Smart Links
Hey Everybody, Is there any downside to the smart link plugins that I see all over wordpress? Basically in short I enter a keyword and where I want that link to go (primarily internal) and set the parameters of repetition etc and it automatically adds the link to that. Now other than the obvious situation where it might put a link in an awkward place, is there anything wrong with this sort of software? Part of me things that this sort of software would not be liked by Google, and that it isn't really getting counted as a true link, but i wanted to see if there were other thoughts or experience with this.
Link Building | | HashtagHustler0 -
When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building, is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it?
When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building (i.e. pushing out content that my client has created), is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it? Or should I create a landing page with the whitepaper included on it? I’m not sure if the client will be ok with this b/c I know they use the whitepaper for sales purposes to gain leads. For example, my pitch email would include a line such as this, "the whitepaper can be found at LINK and I'd love if you could share it with your readers." I think it may be weird/a little wrong to ask a webmaster to include a link on his site to a landing page with a form to get the whitepaper. Does this make sense? What have others done with whitepapers as Push Content for link building?
Link Building | | ArketiGroup1 -
Link building during link removal
We were advised by out outsourced link removal vendor not to build any links while they are removing links pointing to our site. I am worried that our site will lose significant traffic if we dont build any new links while waiting for them to remove links that caused our site to be penalized. What are your thoughts?
Link Building | | WizardOfMoz0 -
What are inbound links worth after Panda and Penguin, since a site ranks for the NATIONAL keyword "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS!?!?
ARE INBOUND LINKS TODAY ALMOST WORTHLESS??!!? After having been the KING of SEO, down to the toilet? Today I got a great sample from a fellow SEO professional showing a site, rockymountainfurniture.com rank for "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS FROM 3 DOMAINS and a domain trust of 14!!!! ON A NATIONAL, VALUABLE, HIGH QUERY VOLUME KEYWORD!! I was stunned, but is this the "NEW SEO WORLD" we live in, so we should skip spending hundreds of hours on link building? There are over 32 different types of inbound links but this is much MORE than a radical change, this is turning SEO as it was up-side-down. Any input, thoughts, ideas?
Link Building | | yvonneq0 -
Etsy.com --Getting link juice through other pages on search results?
My sister has a store page on etsy.com where she sells home made crafts. And I want to help her rank higher on google with some of the other etsy stores. So i started to look at the other etsy store pages that are ranking well on google and found that they have a page authority between 48 to 52. So i looked at the backlinks of the ones ranking well on google with high page authority and found that many of their best links came from the internal search results page on etsy.com, and some only had one link from just an arbitrary etsy.com search page. I'm thinking this is because another product being listed on the seach page has a high page authority which then passes some of its link juice onto every other product on the page. But what is interesting is products are always being sold or getting added so even though you are on a search results page that happens to benifit from the link juice of another product the next time the page gets crawled you will be on a different search page. So i am thinking in order to maintain high page authority to you just have to have a lot of products listed so that there is a greater likely hood that you will find yourself on the same search page as another high authority page. I have not been doing SEO very long so i would love to hear what others think. I really have no idea, am i on the right track with this? (edited post) Thanks
Link Building | | doug5650 -
Creating profiles just to get a link is black hat?
Hi, i have a competitor that is creating profiles in sites that passes ranks in links and putting some links with good anchor text in the bio field. This can be considered a black hat seo? This competitor is getting good rank up with these pratices and i dont know if i can use these same sites too. link to profile: http://interact.webstandards.org/member/89166/ There are a lot of more sites with profiles with no content and just a link to the site. Thanks in advance, Denis
Link Building | | de.tierno1