Delayed Penalty...
-
I received the 7/23/12 Unnatural inbound links warning but nothing changed, if anything my traffic and rankings improved well over the next 2 - 3 months.
But last week a couple of the better (maybe slightly over) optimized pages suddenly dropped out of the rankings completely, is it possible that these two events are related but three months apart?
A change I made close to the time of the rankings dropping was completely overhauling the homepage. I realized this would impact the internal "link juice" flow but never expected the kind of drop in rankings I received. I have restored the homepage to its former glory but it hasn't helped get my slightly over optimized pages ranking again.
Any ideas? Suggestions?
Exact date of drop in rankings is 18 - 19 October (site has lost roughly 50% of its organic search traffic)
-
Hi Bryan,
Thanks yip I have put together the list of the low quality links and contacted most of them. Many I don't even know how we got... they are asking us to pay them to remove the links.
I guess this is the perfect opportunity for me to test the disavow tool... Thanks for the response.
Cheers,
Stan -
Hi Stan,
I'm pretty sure the messages that were sent out were warnings. It was up to you to clean up your link profile and ask for a reconsideration request from Google. Perhaps you took too long and now you are being penalized for it?
I would recommend fixing your link profile by sending the low quality linking sites a message. Even if you cannot get all the bad links removed, you can disavow them, just remember to request reconsideration after you have attempted to clean up the mess.
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
-
Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction
Will content inside an "accordion" module be ranked as non-hidden content? Is there an official guide by google and other search engines addressing this? Example of accordion element: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/#accordion-example Will all elements in the example above be seen + treated equally by search engines?
Technical SEO | | houlihanlokey1 -
Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty
Hi , over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda). We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool. now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2.. is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1? we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links. also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1.. this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Is it panda, pengiun, ad penalty?
I'm trying to figure out why my google traffic is going down... I see that back in Feb and then March 2011 it started to drop, which I assume was pengiun. I saw a gradual comeback in traffic until March 2012, which I assume the second drop was another pengiun update. The decline continued gradually until I saw a big drop in October 2012 which is completely dropping off in the past month today. I recreated my website on wordpress, improving content and removing google ads. Relaunched a few weeks ago and still see a big drop. Any idea what happened? I only got a message from google about a large traffic drop in march 2012 and a 404 error increase recently when I launched the new site which I fixed with 301 and removing media attachment pages that were indexed that gave a 404. Once concern is I have no idea if I have a problem with pengiun. Could I have a problem with too many links coming from my blog or soicial network? What's acceptable number of back links to not be spam? If you add pages in the blogroll is this thought of as spam with pengiun? website: http://www.dashinfashion.com Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | dashinfashion0 -
Ads above the fold penalty. Should I request reinclusion?
HI! My site has been losing traffic slowly for about 18 months. But it was in January 19 that was hit big time. My site has a lot of ads, including two 300x250 above the fold ads that were very lucrative for me. After January 19, I decided to remove only one ad of those two, but no change was reflected in the traffic. It is obvious that I needed to remove the other ad, but I didn't do it for two reasons. I still earn money from that ad and removing it would result in serious problems. A webmaster friend of mine that was hit too by this penalty, removed the ads and tried all sort of stuff to regain the lost traffic with NO LUCK in several months. He has unique and excellent content. So, after seeing his experience I didn't want to touch my biggest source of income and leave it as it is. My site has other problems that concerns Panda and maybe Penguin, and since yesterday I've been starting to fix them. Is it a good idea to request a reinclusion to check if I was manually penalized, without being previously notified by GWMT of any problem in my site? Thanks in advance, Enrique
Technical SEO | | enriquef0 -
No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work
Hi Everyone, i hope someone can help. Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April. We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious. Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration. There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove. It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis. Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name. any help is much appreciated
Technical SEO | | Townpages0 -
Google penalty
Anyone have any success stories on what they did to get out of Google penalty?
Technical SEO | | phatride0 -
We have been hit with the "Doorway Page" Penalty - fixed the issue - Got MSG that will still do not meet guidelines.
I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES / NO
Technical SEO | | LVH
My site's URL (web address) is:www.recoveryconnection.org
Description (including timeline of any changes made): We were hit with the Doorway Pages penalty on 5/26/11. We have a team of copywriters, and a fast-working dev dept., so we were able to correct what we thought the problem was, "targeting one-keyword per page" and thin content. (according to Google) Plan of action: To consolidate "like" keywords/content onto pages that were getting the most traffic and 404d the pages with the thin content and that were targeting singular keywords per page. We submitted a board approved reconsideration request on 6/8/11 and received the 2nd message (below) on 6/16/11. ***NOTE:The site was originally designed by the OLD marketing team who was let go, and we are the NEW team trying to clean up their mess. We are now resorting to going through Google's general guidelines page. Help would be appreciated. Below is the message we received back. Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.recoveryconnection.org/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Any help is welcome. Thanks0