Numerous (20K+) inbound links from ONE site in short time period
-
I'm somewhat new to SEO, but from what I understand, slow link growth can provide better results than highly aggressive link building campaigns.
A site of mine was recently featured on a 90+ DA (55 PA) blog directory, and was featured for the entire state, therefore I received almost 20,000 inbound links from the site (from every company/listing in the state). The links have been mostly recorded (17,000) in Google webmaster tools (Yahoo Site Explorer claims around 23,000). However the site dropped 2 pages in rankings for numerous SEO related keywords since webmaster tools listed the links. Many of them are PA 50+, though a majority of the linking pages are PA 1. A few other inbound links were created from other root domains, roughly 8-10 or so in the past month.
The question is, would a large amount of links like this all of a sudden trigger some kind of "penalty" from search engines (Google, especially)? And, do the PA 1 pages take away from the quality of the 55 PA links?
-
Tons of sitewide links all at once can hurt a site that has very few incoming links, they get discounted anyway so the best thing to do is to get a homepage link only since the homepage is usually the highest PR page on a site, and well crawled by Google. Also, being linked to from a penalized or bad neighborhood can hurt you so you should vet your incoming links and remove any offending ones.
Too many links at once I do not believe is a factor, because Google is not going to penalized a site just because it goes viral, it is more about the TYPES of links and diversification of those links that can trigger a penalty.
-
This is a REALLY good answer. I wish I could give more than one thumbs up.
-
Hi Jonathon,
At this point you have done nothing untoward and obviously produced a site that was seen as valuable and shared in a purely natural way. If you were to start trying to influence people to remove your links, then you would actually be manipulating the link profile, which is what the search engines don't like!
Now that we know exactly how you came by the links, I would definitely follow the steps Ryan mentioned, starting with a reconsideration request.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
The reasonable possibilities are as follows:
-
the 20k inbound links triggered an algorithmic penalty
-
the other inbound links you mentioned triggered a penalty
-
there was another change related to your site which caused the ranking drop
-
the information you are providing is incomplete or inaccurate
We are all proceeding under the assumption the information you are providing is accurate so the first three possibilities are the only options I can think of. As Sha suggested, you should file a reconsideration request to confirm you have not been manually penalized. If that is not the case, then a review of your site to determine the potential source of any algorithmic penalties would be in order.
-
-
Thank you for the response!
About the anchors, they are all identical as far as I can see "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Articles". The link is to the category (instead of my root domain name).
The reason I ask is that, if I can have people "UN-favorite" the site, I could drop off the featured list if it will help my rankings return to normal. If that were to happen, though, will the inbound links "drop off" the lists?
Thanks for the reconsideration request link too, I didn't realize Google did that!
-
My domain name was registered in 2003. In the past, I had only gotten links from websites that I designed (started 2 years ago or so). I had roughly 20 root domains as of 1 month ago.
The listing directory is bloglines.com, which seems associated with merchant circle data (or is an affiliate). "They" picked the site as a favorite blog of Texas, and therefore the featured links. It is not paid.
I can't imagine it being fair that my rankings were negatively affected by it, though..
Any comment on the PA 1 vs PA 55 links? Is it the highest that counts since they're all from the same domain name?
-
Hi Jonathon,
I would agree with James (oh and Ryan too!) that the sudden addition of that number of links may alter your link profile in such a way as to signal to search engines that there may be some kind of manipulative link building practice going on.
Something that is likely to make this appear even more like a manipulative practice would be if the Lion's share of the anchor text used to create the links to your site is identical, for an exact match keyword term etc.
One thing we should clarify is that while this may be having a negative effect upon your rankings, it is not really a "penalty" as such. Basically, the algorithm is seeing a sudden and unnatural looking change in your link profile and adjusting your ranking as a result. If Google has manually applied a penalty for any reason, they are now informing webmasters through notifications in Google Webmaster Tools. Manual penalties usually only happen if you are doing something really overt like buying or selling links. As Ryan mentioned, if the directory is part of a paid link system, it would be an issue. In that case I would expect to find a message in Webmaster Tools.
If it were me I would leave it be for a while and see what happens.
First, provided the directory is not a problem, with 20,000 targeted referral links out there, your potential for increased conversion ready traffic is greatly enhanced anyway.
Second, I would expect that with a little time and maybe some more gradual and diverse links added to your link profile (and no more major spikes), your rankings will tend to come back anyway. If they don't begin to improve (or continue to worsen) within a month, I would bring it to Google's attention by filing a Reconsideration Request. This link is the latest from the Webspam Team on the current process.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I agree with James. If you add too many links too fast to an established site, you can incur a penalty.
What is the name of the directory? One possibility is you have used a pay directory and incurred a penalty.
-
Hi,
If your website is very new and suddenly you add 20,000 pages of links it can have a impact on search engines, I have seen this on new websites in the past, hence why I do not try and gather a huge amount of links in a very short period of time.
But the thing is if you have a website which already has a huge amount of links 500,000 for example and you have 20k pages added then it will not really have a impact.
Kind Regards,
James.
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
-
Has your site ever been targeted by malicious link building executed by a competitor?
I'm pretty sure one of my client's sites has been targeted by malicious black hat link building tactics employed by a competitor site. Over the last few weeks we've gotten 100s of super low quality spammy backlinks. No one has been doing link building, so the only thing I can think of is that competitor entered our URL into some spammy backlink building sites. Has anyone else experienced this? It's the real estate industry, so I wouldn't be surprised considering how competitive it is, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
Link Building | | JBMediaGroup1 -
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
Question about inbound links
Hi! Hi have a little doubt. I'm interested in getting higher positions for a landing page with a long tail keyword. Now the page (ecommerce product page) appears in position 5 and have a low authority domain site and page. My intention is to put more original text in the page and write a blog post with a link pointing to the product page. My doubt is: What is better? Building the blog into the same domain or build it into a high authority external domain (like wordpress), what link could be better for my objectives? Thanks! (And sorry for my English)
Link Building | | Empatica0 -
Can a feeder site link directly to the main site?
I have a client that has several coupons sites. They have about 15 different URLS all of which are [city]deals.com all of the domains have coupons lists that are relevant to that area. Other than the coupons there is not any other content on the sites. There is a Main site however, that has coupons, content, store locations, blogs, news etc... The coupons on the feeder sites are displayed differently than what is displayed on the main site. They are also categorized differently. So the question is on the feeder sites can they have the coupon link directly to the store page on the main site?
Link Building | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Can copyright links to your site have a negative impact on your SEO?
many of the websites we designed have a copyright link in the footer. Like: webdesign by company name then this is made a hyperlink to our company website. Some of these websites have a high PR and other metrics but rarely are about webdesign. What is a clever thing to do? Tom
Link Building | | Onlinq0 -
Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me?
Hi All, I hope you can help. Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me? but I know for a fact there are. Why is this? I have submitted my site to a few local directories and can see my site is on their site but when I run a Link Analysis it shows that I have no links. Does anyone know why this is? Many thanks, Aidan My site is http://www.theethicalsilkco.com/
Link Building | | aidanlawlor0 -
Inbound links vs. internal links
Which scenario does more to help SEO - A) An inbound link from a low traffic/low page rank site to my site B) An internal link where one page of my site links to another page on my site
Link Building | | DVanSchepen0 -
Link to those that link to you? Worthwhile?
We have thousands and thousands of sites that link to a domain we are working on, many with low page authority and high domain (bloggers, forum posts, etc). Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? I'm not sure what method we would use, maybe some relevant blog comments or social votes. But curious if this could be an effective method.
Link Building | | iAnalyst.com0