Have my site been penalised ?
-
Hi,
I recently hired a link builder (who works for a digital marketing agency and wanted to earn some extra cash ) to do some link building for me on keyword Carpet Cleaner Hire
Basically , May my ranking for this work has moved from 29 up to 13 , then down to 500 + and now up to 67 ?.
It's been all over the place and I am worried that maybe google thinks its unnatural or to many links etc.
I looked at some of the work this chap did and there was a log of bookmarks done , apparently to increase social awareness and some articles on random forums I never heard of but the articles didn't look to good and in my eyes were a little spammy..
I don't have any messages in WMT saying I have been penalised or anything but I am naturally worried that this chap may have caused damaged and that I was manually penalised.
I have since asked him to stop immediately..
-
does this sound normal for the ranking to be all over the place in this manner when link building ?
-
How can I tell if I have been manually penalized in any way ?
-
What;s the general consensus ?.
-
Should I contact google or leave it and see what happens ?
-
Other keywords seems to be okay though.
Any advice much appreciated.
thanks
Sarah.
-
-
Would this kid be willing to log back on to the forums and remove his links? I guess contacting the moderators might work as well
-
That;s great thank you. Some great tips here.
-
Hi,
Many thanks for this. I guess you could be right, some of the lnks did looks a bit spammy.
Guess, I need to also fill out and send them the form to see what google says.
Am I correct in asuming the only way to remove the spammy links would be to write to the forum moderators etc asking for them to be removed.
Many thanks
Sarah
-
Google has been treaking their algo for a while now and sites have been shifting up and down. Some sites have been penalized without receiving a message so that can happen. Unnatural link building on low pr sites only in blogs or on link farms can definitely get you in hot water with google. My advice is to start generating great content for your site, videos help for seo, blogging is perfect, social media interactions are beneficial, and start developing a real high quality link profile. Yahoo Directory, Better Business Bureau, dmoz, BOTW, business.com, yelp, yellow pages, manta and other sites that are google friendly. If your other keywords are ok then it might just be the algo but still means your specified keyword needs work. hope this helps. Good luck.
-
With Googles new penguin algorithm, which is meant to filter webspam, it is very possible that you have been penalized for unnatural spammy links. There's a form Google has that you can fill out if you feel you have been mistakenly penalized and i dont think it would hurt to submit it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ
Be careful when hiring an SEO because Google is getting better and better at recognizing unnatural optimization and inexperienced SEO's often try to cut corners. Link building isn't easy and it relies on patience and hard work combined with great content that others want to link to. Heres a great article that you should read before moving forward http://searchengineland.com/link-building-means-earning-hard-links-not-easy-links-123767
I hope this has been helpful
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
-
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
2 sites versus a subdomain: Which is better?
I have a client that sponsors a couple of events during the year. They currently have pages within a single website for these events but are interested in creating a separate website so they can brand the events differently. I'm not sure this is the most effective way to do it for fear of losing the "google juice" already there for these pages.Here's what I'm thinking is a better strategy: 1) Host the content both on the main domain and the sub-domain2) Make sure there is a tag on each page of the sub-domain version that points to the main version.That will give them the branding they are seeking while pushing all juice across to the main domain.What are your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
Unnatural links from your site
Hi, 24 February got this penalty message in Google webmaster tool. Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Already removed all the link on the blog and sent reconsideration request to Google spam team. But request is rejected. Please help me on this or share link with me on same case. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
301 redirect from sites closing down
Hi We have around 10 supplementary sites that have links to our site which are now closing down but are out of our control. We could have access to their domains so how could we maintain the link juice from these old sites which are going to our new site? However there will be no websites left on these old supplementary just domain names
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Moving an eCommerce Site to Wordpress
I'm evaluating moving an established eCommerce I own over to a WordPress based site with a woocommerce plugin. My question is, does the added /category/ slug hurt SEO rankings at all?
Technical SEO | | CobraJones950 -
Why is this site ranking so good?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/aBvVbm Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great? They mainly have site-wide links on 2 of their other ecommerce sites which seem to be given them their ranking power as this equals to 100's of links. Does sitewide links on 2 sites really give this much ranking power or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | Tonyy30 -
Should this site start again on a new domain
Hi We have not done SEO on this site they have used another company who looks like they outsourced and the links have been built by a third party all blog networks and this company have said they cannot get the links removed. Google flagged artificial links on this web site in February and in April it lost over 10000 visitors in a month and its just free falled ever since. The categories have been recreated and no redirects created due to the amount of backlinks from the blog sites to the original category pages but the site is not recovering its down to 1500 visitors a month and used to get 14000 a month. So should my customer ditch the domain and move this site to fresh domain? http://www.kids-beds-online.com Any answers would really be appreciated. thanks Tracy
Technical SEO | | dashesndots0 -
Adding Google +1 To My Site
This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page. I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.
Technical SEO | | brentmitchell0