No manual spam actions found - Now what to do
-
In last Panda update on 22nd January my site traffic reduced 30% to 40% but still some of my keywords are ranking on first and second page in SERP.
With latest Penguin 2.0 update all of my keywords ranking is out of 100. Both times I send reconsideration request and get message that No Manual actions found on site. I just don't know what steps are better to get ranking back. Should I use disavow tool and remove backlinks to recover from Penguin or work more on creating quality links.
My Site : http://goo.gl/sSBes
Thanks,
Steve
-
Thanks for the reply.
I will work on increasing content of sites and other suggestion you mentioned. Due to some lack of resources I am not able to update blog in timely manner I would try to post at least one post a week,
-
What Google considers garbage links has been changing for as long as I have been in search marketing. The problem here is that certain tactics that have worked in the past and might even still work today are starting to get devalued (or worse). Example: PR links, still have some value, but they will continue to get devalued. Matt Cutts continues to say (over and over) that if you do anything in an effort to build links that is not organic in nature (web directories that don't drive traffic to your site, forum posts with links, paid links, etc.) you will get smacked. It isn't a matter of if but when.
The thing that makes this even more confusing is the seemingly random nature of who these penalties affect. Did this guy get hit by P 2.0 definitively? No, but considering the date of his organic traffic drop, it is pretty easy to prove correlation. The fact that your websites have these bad links and that you haven't seen a drop in organic traffic does not prove that he did not get hit. All it proves is that you haven't been hit yet.
Proof:
<a>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg</a>
-
_Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity. _
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
Mike - I appreciate your reply and I've taken a good look at the OP's website. I want to respond to your post but add something first. The OP's website looks nice and is clean. While it does have many good case studies, the site has only 450 or so pages indexed and most of them with less than 200 words. This is very "thin" as most professional sites are - but his is on the very high end of thin. My suggestion - write a complete case study, not 2-4 sentences per page. Make it at least 2-3 quality paragraphs.
As compared to other similar sites that have a blog and generate regular content, I'd say that his penalty is probably more due to the algorithm issue you mention and the differences in the amount of text-based content is more profound. So my other suggestion would be for him to start a blog, make periodic posts concerning new projects, what they see are current trends, etc. - anything. Just show some activity once weekly at a minimum and he should see some improvements.
The backlinks issue -- I don't know if it's possible to conclude absolutely that the OP was hit due to links from forums and directories. If this is the case, than many websites like mine who have links from those places back when it was the way the Internet functioned might as well just shut down. (My forum - which is darn large - is here: http://oz.vc/2 -- it went down to a PR zero. ) This was no link building campaign - we organically collected these links during a time when this happened, e.g. the 90s and the 2000s. Much of the "junk" people have told me about our backlinks concerns dated pages from people who created long list of link resources. Many of them include competitors, who appear unpenalized (we have received no warnings.) If you could provide a source that states that Google will now punish every site that has these links from forums and directories, I think we'd all appreciate it. (And as you put it, unfortunately I might be better off putting together a resume than trying to fix what should be non-problems of a site I carefully crafted with over a decade of effort. Hoping Google isn't doing this and we're just being somewhat overly concerned.)
-
I've seen conflicting views on this coming from Google, and I refer you to the link in my answer regarding Pete's comments about reconsideration.
So it may be wrong, but there does seem to be evidence that disavow does not action without either an update, or reconsideration.
Hence passing along the suggestion in good faith.
-
That is wrong...from Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-qa-how-to-use-google-link-disavow-tool-137664</a>
Question:
Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?
Answer:
That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.
-
You might want to check out the responses to this question : http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover particularly the comments from Pete Myers regards reconsideration requests.
What I take away from all I've read on Penguin 2 is to proceed as follows:
- Clean up your backlink profile by contacting assorted webmasters asking for link removal
- Use the disavow tool on any you can't get successful removal via direct approach
- If you've used disavow, submit a reconsideration request - once you're sure your site and backlink profile is clean. (I get the definite view that data obtained via disavow is only actioned at algo update, or reconsideration request; hence a reconsideration may be needed even though you have an algorithmic penalty to actually push the disavow live).
Hope this helps!
-
Unfortunately, you got hit with an algorithm update and not a manual penalty. A reconsideration request does not do anything for an algorithm update. The good news is that there are things that you can do, the bad news is that it might take a considerable amount of time to get your rankings back. Considering that your penalty is based on spammy links, you will need to review your back links and start requesting those links to be removed or disavowing links. This process (depending on your link count) can take just between forever and an eternity.
Here is a good article on this update by this by Danny Sullivan, including a short section on recovering:
<a>http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463</a>
Other Tools Needed:
<a>http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/</a> - To locate which of your links are spammy
<a>https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/url-removal</a> - disavow tool (Use only after heavy research!!!)
Good luck!
Update: I looked through your link profile and have noticed that you have links from your customer pages. Remember that Google takes issue with links from websites that have nothing to do with your site.
Additionally, I see a ton of links from forums and directories. You definitely got slapped.
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
-
Google Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?
Hi there, I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue. Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page) After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later. I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate. There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as: Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links, There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound. Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover? Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbutler9120 -
"Unnatural links to your site" manual action by Google
Hi, My site has been hit by a "Unnatural links to your site" manual action penalty and I've just received a decline on my 2nd reconsideration request, after disavowing even more links than I did in the first request. I went over all the links in WMT to my site with an SEO specialist and we both thought things have been resolved but apparently they weren't. I'd appreciate any help on this so as to lift the penalty and get my site back to its former rankings, it has ranked well before and the timing couldn't have been worse. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ishais
Yael0 -
Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing. We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain. We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014 Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered. Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Change domain whilst under a partial manual links penalty
Hi there We're currently under a manual penalty for some unnatural links to our domain and have been working on fixing that but had our first re-consideration request rejected so we're doing a second round of link removals The issue we have is that we were planning to change our domain before the SSL certificate expires in a couple of weeks and renew the certificate with the new domain but are unsure whether to stop working on the reconsideration request, change the domain and wait until the manual penalty moves to the new domain before continuing the link removal. Alternatively try and use the domain change to select which links are 301'd to the new site and leave behind the bad links in the hope that the manual penalty wouldn't be applied to the new domain Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
.com ranked where .co.uk site should After Manual Penalty Revoked - Help!!!
Hi All, I wondered if some could help me as I am at my wits end. Our website www.domain.co.uk was hit with a manual penalty back in April 26th 2012 for over optomizing our inbound links and after 9 reconciliation request later and over a year and many links removed the penalty was revoked. Yay I hear you cry! During the year .co.uk was banned we built .com yet did not build any links to it. The purpose of the .com site was to attract an American audience for our products. .com was hosted on a US server and Geo Targeting set to United States in WMT. So here is my problem after the ban was revoke we expected .co.uk to spring back to some reasonable positions. Nope that is not the case Google now is ranking our .com site where our .co.uk should be for powerdull keywords in position 1st to 10th .com has Zero link equity and .co.uk is very reasonable, So how can I rectify this balls ups and get co.uk listed back where it should be…. I am not bothered where .com ranks. Note: To the best of my knowledge there are NO cross domain 301 or the like only an image link between the two sites. I have posted this on WMT forum and it has fallen on deaf ears! ....help me MOZ members you’re my only hope! Thanks in advance Richard PS: If anyone would like the URL’s in question PM me and I will let you know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tricky-400 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Google Semantic Search: Now I'm really confused
I'm struggling to understand why I rank for some terms and not for other closely related ones. For example: property in Toytown but NOT properties in toytown property for sale in Toytown but NOT property for sale Toytown NOR properties for sale Toytown. My gut instinct is that I don't have enough of the second phrasing as inbound link anchor text -- but didn't Penguin/Panda make all that obsolete?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0