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
-
Penalty for adding too much content too quickly?
Hi there, We released around 4000 pieces of new content, which all ranked in the first page and did well. We had a database of ~400,000 pieces and so we released the entire library in a couple of days (all remaining 396,000 pages). The pages have indexed. The pages are not ranking, although the initial batch are still ranking as are a handful (literally a handful) of the new 396,000. When I say not ranking - I mean not ranking anywhere (gone up as far as page 20), yet the initial batch we'd be ranking for competitive terms on page 1. Do Google penalise you for releasing such a volume of content in such a short space of time? If so, should we deindex all that content and re-release in slow batches? And finally, if that is the course of action we should take is there any good articles around deindexing content at scale. Thanks so much for any help you are able to provide. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveW19870 -
How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty. My questions are: For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spanish_socapro0 -
Showing on page 25 for url keyword/ brand, is it a penalty?
Hi I have a site which shows on page 25 in G serps for the main brand keyword which is also the url its a .com and as far as I can see has no penalties and has unique content. The keyword itself has no competition and the site should be no1 in G for it. Our site domain is 11 years old.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MoneySite0 -
Very Slow Recovery after Manual Penalty Removed - Are we missing something?
Our site was handed a manual penalty in November 2013 where exact match anchor text and low quality directory submissions seemed to be the problem. We began the process of link removal, reconfiguration and disavowing. We had already planned to change our domain in early 2014 to coincide with our SSL certificate renewal and although we were hesitant to do this with the manual penalty still there we proceeded and 301'd most of the site but left the pages that were the landing page for most of the exact match links as 302 to the new domain. We continued to work on removing the manual penalty for the old domain as we didn't want it to pass over to the new one and eventually this was removed n March 2014 Now the penalty is gone are we safe to change those 302 redirects to 301 so everything redirects. The problem we have is that six months on, a lot of the pages for the old domain are still indexed and even though we are indexed for the new domains are rankings haven't recovered. Is it just a case of needing to build up a new quality link profile to replace the links that were disregarded or removed when recovering from the penalty or we missing something else
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
.com ranked where .co.uk site should After Manual Penalty Revoked - Help!!!
Hi All, I wondered if some could help me as I am at my wits end. Our website www.domain.co.uk was hit with a manual penalty back in April 26th 2012 for over optomizing our inbound links and after 9 reconciliation request later and over a year and many links removed the penalty was revoked. Yay I hear you cry! During the year .co.uk was banned we built .com yet did not build any links to it. The purpose of the .com site was to attract an American audience for our products. .com was hosted on a US server and Geo Targeting set to United States in WMT. So here is my problem after the ban was revoke we expected .co.uk to spring back to some reasonable positions. Nope that is not the case Google now is ranking our .com site where our .co.uk should be for powerdull keywords in position 1st to 10th .com has Zero link equity and .co.uk is very reasonable, So how can I rectify this balls ups and get co.uk listed back where it should be…. I am not bothered where .com ranks. Note: To the best of my knowledge there are NO cross domain 301 or the like only an image link between the two sites. I have posted this on WMT forum and it has fallen on deaf ears! ....help me MOZ members you’re my only hope! Thanks in advance Richard PS: If anyone would like the URL’s in question PM me and I will let you know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tricky-400 -
Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces) A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since. Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season. Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability. I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog. I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT. Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword. The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users. So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty? Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scott.lucas1 -
403, 301, 302, 404 errors & possible google penalty
William Rock ran a Xenu site scan on nlpca(dot)com and mentioned the following: ...ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors. Other items found: Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragmentidentifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found Could somone give us an output of that list, and which ones of these errors do we need to clean up for SEO purposes? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0