How to proceed? Older ecommerce site, unnatural link warning 2013, disavow, now what?
-
Hello all,
I have a small, older ecommerce site. It has been around since 2002. It ranked very well until a few years ago. It currently does rank for some terms, but not many. (I am trying to say that it is not completely off the map.)
-
Our domain authority is 36.
-
Our Spam Score in Open Site Explorer is a 2/10.
-
We received a notice in GWT in May 2013 re: unnatural links. That notice has since cleared from our account. I assume that it has expired.
-
We were working with an SEO consultant when we received the notice from Google in 2013. He started working on cleaning up our link profile at that point. He submitted a disavowal file to Google with all of the domains that he was not able to get cleaned up manually. He kept working and updated the file again in June 2014. He told me that we did not have to file a reconsideration request.
-
He did find that an SEO company that I hired in the past had gotten me a lot of spammy links. We got these taken down. There are still some spammy links that seem to keep cropping up.
-
I have started going through Open Site Explorer to again contact some of these spammy sites to ask them to take our links down. Of course, the emails immediately bounce back to me. I am documenting everything.
I feel like I am in a hole and can't dig out. What am a doing wrong? Should I disavow again? Should we have filed a reconsideration request a year or two ago? At this point, is it too late to do so as the penalty no longer shows up in my GWT account?
How should I proceed?
I prefer not to post my URL, but I would be happy to PM it to anyone who can offer advice.
Thanks in advance.
Melissa
-
-
Patrick,
Sorry. I am a newbie and can't find you on the PM username list. I sent an email to the address in your profile.
Thanks again.
Melissa
-
Patrick,
Thanks for your response.
My GWT account currently shows "No new messages or recent critical issues"
Does this mean that the penalty has expired? Or is it still lingering from 2013? How would I know?
I will PM you my URL in a sec.
I appreciate your help.
Melissa
-
Hi there
They told you you don't need to file a reconsideration request? Did they remove the penalty or not? If they didn't, yes, you need to file another reconsideration request - it's not a one and done deal.
It sounds like you are doing everything right - you should also check out these resources from Moz:
Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal (Moz)
Your Start-to-Finish Guide to Using Google's Disavow Tool (Moz)If you want to send your website via PM, please feel free, I'd like to take a look. But these things do take time, but I can't understand why your SEO company would tell you you don't need to file another reconsideration request - Google wants to know you are doing to remedy your issues.
Make sure you get links from Google Webmaster Tools and Majestic as well, as OSE only gives you one angle of links.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
What is this exactly? Whiteboard Friday warning about footer links.
Hi guys. I've just been watching this whiteboard Friday. At 2.01 mins Rand mentions something about a penalty that Google gives for certain internal linking practices. I'm a little confused about it. Something along the lines of... 'stuffing keyword rich anchor text in the footer and nav bar' Does Rand mean repeating keyword rich anchor text in these areas? Or just that it's stuffing by nature... because it's on every page of the site? Hope that makes sense. I've attached a screen shot of our footer. Could you let me know if this is bad form? Thanks in advance 🙂 CLYGpiI
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6631 -
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How do you handle a site with inherited negative links, but no penalty?
I'm trying to rank a new client for various key phrases that contain "it support." The problem is that about 100 of their 180 total referring domains have links that include "it support" (usually as partial match, or if exact then for uninteresting terms with low traffic), mostly on quite low quality directories. So, no penalty, and not much exact match I'm worried about, but I'm concerned that there's too high a percentage overall of partial match or simpy "it support"-based links for me to continue building keyword-optimized links to try and rank for the much harder terms we need to rank for... Despite the large number of low quality directories, a disavowal does not seem like a good idea since there is no penalty, but how does one avoid being handicapped by such bad links that came before one's time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Pingbacks and Trackbacks: A good source for Disavow links?
I am 100% new to the world of WordPress, more advanced CMS systems, and all the interesting things that have been developed over the last several years on the web. After installing WordPress I noticed options to allow pingbacks and trackbacks. Upon researching these, I found it interesting that you can very quickly and easily identify spam wordpress blog sites that mention your article in a spammy fashion if you leave this option ENABLED. Because you literally get a notification of new nonsense happening on the web that may affect you. Is this a logical, rational thing to leave enabled and use as one of many tricks to manage new additions to a disavow file? It almost seems like a Godsend because you don't have to go looking for them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk0 -
Unnatural links warning and steps to fix it
Hi there, Firstly our website is - imrubbish.co.uk Basically we were unintentionally using a rogue seo company for about 5 months who charged a lot of money and built absolute rubbish quality links. When i saw the type of links being built i immediately stopped them as i knew they were bad news but the damage had been done. I have since moved to a completely ethical seo company who for the past 6 months have tried with me to remove this penalty without success. Here are the steps we have taken. Unnatural links warning. Submitted a file with all the links we know are bad and resubmitted. Not good enough We then used disavow tool as there were so many links we had no control of. Along with a detailed write up of what has happened and who had done it. Not good enough Now the problem my seo guy thinks is because there are more and more links appearing almost daily that are still left over rubbish from the old seo company. I think there might also be other problems - maybe my anchor test distribution is spammy etc, i dont know and i am hoping someone can maybe help with a couple more pointers. I have asked a similar question before where there was a discussion about even just leaving it and concentrating on building more ethical links with brand anchor text but that was not working so we used the disavow tool. We have been stuck in this rut for over a year now and could really do with some extra help/guidance from anyone who has experience or knowledge of what we should do. I saw the post yesterday about this very subject and hope someone could help drill done specifically what could be the problem in our case. We would also look at hiring someone if they could help. Thank you Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imrubbish1 -
Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)
Hi, I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section: There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows: xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
xxx.com/articles/article2.aspx I want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way? I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to: xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx
etc. Any thoughts / recommendations? Thanks0 -
How to generate xml sitemape for an ecommerce site with more than 50000 pages?
Hi, I am new to the forum and struggling hard to work on xml sitemap for an ecommerce site. Site is dynamic and more that 50,000 pages (including product pages). Challenges I am facing should I opt for category wise xml sitemap? how to include new product pages (dynamically) I was wondering if there is any tool that can generate xml site map online (I mean as soon as a new page is added to the site it will pick up automatically). thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | posy0 -
Sitewide Header Link to Sister Site
Hi, I've just added a sitewide header image link (60 pages) from our general company site pointing to homepage of another brand site of a product that we also own (which focuses in depth on that one brand). I haven't put a nofollow on it as it's just info for those who'd like to reach our other site. Should I expect anything negative out of this for either site? Could it seem like it picked up 60 image links suddenly and raise a flag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0