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
-
Site hacked and now being spammed and rankings dropping
I have a client's site that was hacked in December and a whole bunch of spam pages were created. We've since removed those pages and they serve a 404 error now. But I pick up a new link almost every day from a another spammy site linking back to the pages that were created. I'm updating the Disavow as I see the new links reported in ahrefs but what else can I do to stop these buggers and how can I recover rankings other than building links and creating content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Do XML sitemaps need to be manually resubmitted every time they are changed?
I have been noticing lately that quite a few of my client's sites are showing sitemap errors/warnings in Google webmaster tools, despite the fact that the issue with the the sitemap (e.g a URL that we have blocked in robots.txt) was fixed several months earlier. Google talks about resubmitting sitemaps here where it says you can resubmit your sitemap when you have made changes to it, I just find it somewhat strange that the sitemap is not automatically re-scanned when Google crawls a website. Does anyone know if the sitemap is automatically rescanned and only webmaster tools is not updated, or am I going to have to manually resubmit or ping Google with the sitemap each time a change is made? It would be interesting to know other people's experiences with this 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamie.Stevens0 -
Main Keyword penalized. And now?
Hello SEO comunity. In one of the sites that I work, our team won numerous keywords in the first searching results. Unfortunately, on june we lost the most important site keyword. It was a general Word, very disputed, that generated a lot of traffic to us. The problem: it droped from third to fifty position. I’d like your help to identify the possible punishments and than find the solutions. What could happened? Where do we start? Is there any checklist to verify the punishments? What do you suggest to me? PS: We always do a clean job, getting away form the blackhat techniques; We didn’t received any notification from Google; During two year, the keyword was in the first ten positions. Actually, I'm looking for an explanation for what happened to me, to get my top10 again. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webg0 -
Stellar Content - Calls to Action - Link Building
Hello, How do you place calls to actions, links back to your products/pages, and praise for your products in articles about your main products without looking bad to people who might give you a backlink. We want these things but we want our articles to be perfect for backlinks, natural and through a backlink campaign.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Magento Hidden Products & Google Not Found Errors
We recently moved our website over to the Magento eCommerce platform. Magento has functionality to make certain items not visible individually so you can, for example, take 6 products and turn it into 1 product where a customer can choose their options. You then hide all the individual products, leaving only that one product visible on the site and reducing duplicate content issues. We did this. It works great and the individual products don't show up in our site map, which is what we'd like. However, Google Webmaster Tools has all of these individual product URLs in its Not Found Crawl Errors. ! For example: White t-shirt URL: /white-t-shirt Red t-shirt URL: /red-t-shirt Blue t-shirt URL: /blue-t-shirt All of those are not visible on the site and the URLs do not appear in our site map. But they are all showing up in Google Webmaster Tools. Configurable t-shirt URL: /t-shirt This product is the only one visible on the site, does appear on the site map, and shows up in Google Webmaster Tools as a valid URL. ! Do you know how it found the individual products if it isn't in the site map and they aren't visible on the website? And how important do you think it is that we fix all of these hundreds of Not Found errors to point to the single visible product on the site? I would think it is fairly important, but don't want to spend a week of man power on it if the returns would be minimal. Thanks so much for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
How should I go about cleaning up link spam from an acquired domain?
I recently acquired a domain and the previous owners practiced some very shady link practices. The current backlink profile is flooded with link spam with foreign anchor text, amongst links from spam directories. What are some good practices to help clean up the backlink profile of this domain so it will not hurt me in the long run?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
Top 3 actions I should immediately take.... ?
Site: bussongs.com I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of kids songs. kididdles.com is my archnemesis. Slight edge in PVs with better ranking on many long-tail KWs (song names mainly). What are the top 3 things I should do to knock out my competitor? I feel I've nailed the on-page stuff - I have checked all the major items and produced superior content. The big thing that shouts out to me is that my competitor just has many more backlinks, especially from unique domains and that's lifting up everything. Thoughts? Can't wait to hear your ideas!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kmander0 -
Should I be deleting spam trackbacks/pingbacks?
I'm getting spammy trackbacks/pingbacks on my Wordpress site. Should I bother deleting these or do these count as backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10JQKAs0