Help Understanding GWT Message
-
Brief background: A few months ago, our firm exchanged blog posts with another law firm in Pennsylvania with followed links. Though we did exchange links, the posts weren't spammy. They wrote "A Floridian's Guide To A Car Accident In Pennyslvania" and we wrote one for Pennsylvanians in Florida. (The reason for this is that Personal Injury law varies drastically from state-to-state, and Florida has a ton of people who move back and forth).
My question: His firm got a message from google saying our link to him violated googles' guidelines. I went and removed the link, BUT I didn't get any message saying his link to our site was a violation. Shouldn't we both have gotten messages? Perhaps, mine is "in the mail" so to speak, but I would think both would go out at the same time, so I'm wondering if there is another possible reason?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Yes, I got it from Majestic SEO. View page source then ctrl+f and type in 'daisy'. A lot of the domains with a lot of exact match anchors - hidden behind giant images.
The registrant of the site probably has no idea this all happened.
-
I'm searching for that anchor text with a site:sexualproblems.net, and once the site comes up (it takes a while), I'm not seeing that anchor text on the site itself, though Google did see it at one point. I wonder if their site got hacked?
Travis, it'd be great if you told us which tool you used. Thanks!
-
Travis,
Can you show me how your seeing we got this information, so I can figure out what to do with it? I just ran our site through OSE, and I'm not seeing that. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right spot.
Thanks,
Ruben
-
We never posted on sexualproblems.com. Well, at least I didn't, but thanks for pointing that out. I'll definitely look into.
-
Your site appears to have received a little less than 70K links from sexualproblems.net in the last 90 days. The anchor text is "daisy fondant cutters". It looks like the result of a post on sexualproblems.com. I could go on, but it looks like the guest posting strategy isn't working out.
-
Hi Ruben,
Since these are "manual" messages, a Google employee had to personally review the account and decide to send the message. It is likely something about the site flagged Google, prompting them to manually review the site. We don't really have a way of knowing if what they address in the message is what flagged that site, but it is likely.
If Google thinks what this site did violated the guidelines, that means any site, including your own, that is in violation of that guideline has the potential to receive the same message.
It is likely that yours is "in the mail." You could receive it a week from now or ten months from now.
I would recommend cleaning up or "no following" the link. You might consider waiting until the other site has submitted their reconsideration request to find out if your actions to remove the link were acceptable.
-
Here's a link to the post that got flagged (the links are removed now): http://www.kempruge.com/a-floridians-guide-to-a-car-accident-in-pennsylvania/
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
-
Will properly encoded & signs hurt or help me?
Hello friends, Will properly encoding a url hurt my ranking after having it improperly coded? I want to change my & symbols to & If I go from:
Technical SEO | | sonic22
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool To:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=cool Will I get hurt if I make the leap?0 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
GWT Error for RSS Feed
Hello there! I have a new RSS feed that I submitted to GWT. The feed validates no problemo on http://validator.w3.org/feed/ and also when I test the feed in GWT it comes back aok, finds all the content with "No errors found". I recently got a issue with GWT not being able to read the rss feed, error on line 697 "We were unable to read your Sitemap. It may contain an entry we are unable to recognize. Please validate your Sitemap before resubmitting." I am assuming this is an intermittent issue, possibly we had a server issue on the site last night etc. I am checking with my developer this morning. Wanted to see if anyone else had this issue, if it resolved itself, etc. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Meta title Tag dilemma.... need help
Hey, Guys I have a dilemma that I cannot figure out how to solve. One thing that I have learned is that the meta tag is probably one of the most important factors of SEO. I work in the industry of real estate and we are located in a mid-sized market, Augusta, GA, which does not have a hugely competitive digital marketplace. So, I have told my web developer the changes that I want her to make to our major sub-domain pages on our website. I am anticipating that once she makes these changes which will allow me to make the necessary SEO changes to website, that we will see some good results. I have one dilemma that I can't figure out how to solve with the meta title tag. Check out our rental section: http://aubenrealty.com/rentals.cfm Now, click on any rental property and it will take you to that rental's page. Notice the page title " Auben Realty- real estate....." This is identical for every active and non-active property on our website. Every time we create a new property, this is what it spits out. Now, take it a step further and click on " Contact me about this property," and you will see the same page title. My dilemma is, " How do we fix this?" My assumption is that the best page title would be the address for each property( ex, 1322 Laurel Street, Augusta Ga 30904), right ? Is this some kind of simple coding adjustment?
Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
Website ranking went from page one to not in top 50 overnight. Help/suggestions?
One of our customer's websites initially ranked very well. For approximately 3 months it sat atop of Google for their optimized keywords. Suddenly, on November 17th, the ranking dropped and they were no longer in the top 50 for any keywords. We went through Google Webmaster tools and found no violations, so we emailed Google to see if we violated something and if they would reconsider. They responded "We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google." This is a site built on WordPress, so we turned off a majority of plugins in case one was somehow affecting the site. They have an incredible amount of business partners that link their website from their partner's website menus, so they have about 15,000 links all with anchor text "insurance." (every page on partner site is seen as a different link). Think this is affecting it? Maybe Google sees it as artificial? (P.S. This has been set up this way for a while before they came on with us). The site ranks on page one of Bing and Yahoo, but nowhere in top 50 for Google. Any suggestions? Appreciate the help!
Technical SEO | | Tosten0 -
New to rich snippets, help needed
Hi, I have an online store selling mens business attire in Australia. I have had my developers add the required code to allow rich snippets. You can see the result here http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjsshirts.com.au%2Fmens-business-shirts%2Fclassic-fit%2Fsky-blue-poplin-classic-fit-shirt.html&view=cse I have few questions 1.How can I change the product description? Is it possible to use the product Meta Tag as the description? 2.Under the stars and the review count is this text. The excerpt from the page will show up here. The reason we can't show text from your webpage is because the text depends on the query the user types. Should whateever product description I have used show up here? 3.Is there anything else I need to do to get SERP's to show the snippet? Many thanks for any answers, Jason
Technical SEO | | mullsey0 -
Www vs non www and understanding opensite
Hi Guys, New guy here with some questions regarding the difference between www and non www. I am helping with a site at the moment and gradually working my way through bits and learning all the time. I was watching one of the seomoz videos and it brought my attention back to www vs non www. I understand that google will treat these as two seperate sites but wanted to check what the stats are telling me. I was under the impression that www.mydummysite.com was getting most links etc as this is what I have always used. However when I used Opensite explorer it told me something different as follows: www.mydummysite.com 32/100 29/100 5 16 mydummysite.com 32/100 29/100 2 1,500 Am i correct in saying that i should be adding a redirect from www.mydummysite.com to mydummysite.com ???? I am thinking that this is telling me that I am potentially missing out on 1,500 links to my site but it could mean I am missing out on just 16. Eitherway I guess its something I should fix right? Do I just redirect that page or would all pages beneith it such as mydummysite.com/news also need redirect??? Can i use Canonical Rel links for this now? Thanks for taking the time to read and reply! 🙂
Technical SEO | | wedmonds0 -
Mod Rewrite Help
I need some help with doing the Mod Rewrite on our htaccess file. Basically I've a URL like this : www.example.co.uk/new-toy-search?keys=xbox and I want to rewrite the URL into something else (such as new-toy-search-xbox.html) Could someone please take me through the steps of how to do this? I've had a look at the Apache site but it's really confusing the way it's explained!
Technical SEO | | DanHill0