WhoIs penalty
-
Does anyone know if it's possible to get a penalty on WHOIS data and a shared IP address?
We had some bad SEO done (And at ranking demolished) on one of our company websites which has the same WHOIS data and is on the same IP address as another side which is just seems to have taken a knock.
Is it possible Google could have associated both and penalised accordingly?
-
Here's Matt Cutts on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Ka0fzyZbk
His answer is basically saying that in almost every case you could not be affected by the fact that there were other spammy sites sharing your hosting. He said that there are really rare cases whereby if one host has a crazy amount of spammy sites they may take action on all of these sites, but he made a point of saying that this is really rare.
So no, I'd be looking for some other cause for the rankings to drop.
-
Couple of things that i can think of that might have happen are -
1. Same IP address (1 signal to Google - its a big signal) as mentioned by you
2. Was the reason behind the penalty your backlinks profile? Chances are that you got same sort of backlinks for the other website too.
3. Signal 1 and 2 combined can give Google indication of 'notorious' activities conducted by the 'controller' (SEO company) of these websites (your websites)
Couple of things to ask -
1. Are these two websites in question from the same industry and serving the same market?
2. Do you have backlinks coming from same sources
3. Are there any other websites on the same IP address that have been penalized? I do know that websites on a c-block can be penalized.
4. Is there any direct relation between the two websites apart from shared IP address? ex - Links of each other on the website in partners, about us or contact us etc. pages?
-
It is possible though I have not heard of it before. Data easily scrapable by google. Where I have heard google made a penalty link is via WMT's. Could they also have also been connected via WMT's at some stage?
Hope that helps.
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 Penalties not in Webmaster tools?
Hi everybody, I have a client that used to rank very well in 2014. They launched an updated URL structure early January 2015, and since they rank very low on most of the keywords (except the brand keywords). I started working with them early this year, tried to understand what happened, but they have no access to their old website and I cant really compare. I tried the started optimisation methods but nothing seems to work. I have a feeling they have been penalised by Google, probably a Panda penalty, but their Webmaster tools account does not show any penalties under manual actions. Do people impose penalties that are not added to Webmaster tools? If so, is there away I can find out what penalties and what is wrong exactly so we can start fixing it? The website is for a recruitment agency and they have around 400 jobs listed on it. I would love to share the link to the website but I don't believe the client will be happy with that. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Interstitial Penalty?
We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup. Can I assume that this is a problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
Hello, I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords. Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc. Now my question is: 1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net? 2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this? 3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal? Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php. Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hpk0 -
Rotating content = Google Penalty?
Hi all. We have an ecommerce site which features various product sections. In each section you might have 60 products each displayed neatly in pages of 10. We recently added functionality, so that if a product is out of stock, it will automatically drop that product to the back of the list and bring another in stock one forward. We're just worried that Google will view the same information, repeatedly rotating on the first page of 10 products (the page that ranks) and think we're in some way trying to trick Google into thinking the content is fresh? Does anyone have a throw on this? Is it likely to penalise us? Thank you!!! Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bnknowles10 -
How to handle a pure spam penalty (from GWT) as a blogging platform
Hello, I have a blogging platform which spammers unfortunately used a few years ago to create spam blogs. Since them, we've added spam filters and even if I can't not assume there isn't any spam blog left, I can say that most of the blogs are clean. The problem is, in Google Webmasters Tools, we have a Pure spam message in the Manual actions page. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en), with a list of 1000 blog links. All these blogs have been marked as spam in our system for at least 1 year, technically it means they return a 410 header and display something like "this blog doesn't meet our quality requirements". When I've first seen the manual action message in GWT, I have asked for reconsideration request. Google answered within a week saying that they had checked again our website, but when I go went to the manual actions page, there was still a "pure spam" message, with a different list of blogs, which have already been marked as spam for a year at least. What should I do ? Ask for reconsideration requests as long as Google answers ? Thank you in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingLouis0 -
How do i know if my domain has given penalty by Google and why?
I have problems with my website to google search results. Some of the important keywords frequently and sharply rankings vary a lot lately. For example; 07-14-2012 Term1 Position #12 07-20-2012 Term1 Position #38 07-24-2012 Term1 Position #10 07-26-2012 Term1 Position #40 I wonder what is the cause of this incident? Is there any Penalties? If there is then how do i know this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ersaky0 -
Penalties for site going down often?
I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered. Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0