Confusing penalties
-
Dear Mozzers,
I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page.
Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to:
- eliminate duplicate content
- improve site structure
- optimize internal links
- build legitimate do-follows
- add some keyword density
- fix titles and H tags
Essentially just the basics, right?
But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites.
At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it?
Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition.
Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution?
Advice is really appreciated!
-
You guys are amazing. Thanks for the quick and thorough feedback!
-
On the whole, I agree with what Will Quick says.
I do believe that even in niches that others are using comment spam, you CAN outrank them with quality work (I have done it, in fact)... and in the end, you will have a stronger backlink profile that should outlast the spam guys when G- updates roll out in the future (as they always do!).
That said, I strongly agree with Will, in that a sudden change in the style of backlink profile can in fact cause an issue and ranking drop - especially in the mid-long term.
Basically you have just suffered from 1 or 2 things, or both (in my opinion anyway!).
Number 1: You may well be suffering from an inbound link filter/penalty due to the spam. This can be due to spammy links, or over use of a given anchor text (what % of inbound links to the page that was ranking, and also to the domain, use the exact match anchor?). This could be an issue EITHER becuase of the spam links, OR because of over-optimisation of a set keyword (has the ranking suffered for other pages/keyterms???
Number 2: The link velocity to the domain as a whole, and also to the page(s) in question, has probably just taken a MASSIVE drop (by the sounds of it). Such a drastic change in itself can cause issues and ranking drops (in my opinion!). At least in the short to mid term - That said, continued, high quality SEO work 'should' re-gain you those positions, and build a better foundation for the future (safer with future big G updates).
Now, to fix Number 1, above, may take time. I feel that you need to pull off reports of the current anchor text usage to the domain, and to specific pages, and try to ensure that nothing is too 'over the top'. Try to get some nice brand links to water down any high anchor text usages (to page/domain).
To fix Number 2 may be trickier. You could either:
A) Use spam for a while, and decrease it steadily, whilst increasing the quality work (I do NOT recommend this, but that is just because it is not how I like to work, I feel it pollutes the web).
B) Ride it out! - Gain steady, high quality links via press releases, blogger outreach, articles, web 2.0 work, social media baiting. Also consider an increase in PPC in the interim, to keep the $£ coming in! Done right, this should help to regain positions.
C) Do 'B)', above, but also try to be creative in 'simulating' the sort of link velocity that the spammers, perhps some decent infographics with brand links in the embed code, social media baiting, press release syndication, and at a push, mass article submission (with decent quality articles) is still less spammy than blog comments! (although not ideal for long term tactics, it may help to simulate the link velocity). Basically check the amount of extra unique linking domains that the spam work gained the site, and try to get at least somewhere near that level using non-spam tactics, and slowly reduce the amount to a more realistic monthly amount, but with higher quality work.
I think that you should be open with the client, and tell them that although they may suffer now, it is probably much better to do this now than to wait until they get penalised.
This way, they just need to come up with an intelligent strategy to recover, whereas if they kept up with the spam work, they may well end up in real hot water!
**That is just my opinion anyway, and it is without knowing the exact situation, so should be taken as general opinion, not a well researched tactic! **
brevityworks, best of luck!
-
i'm with Ryan, you are more then likly getting the wrap for the last SEO's spam.
comment spam would not get you to page one for any keyword worth having.
-
Hey Brevity,
This may or may not be the answer you're looking for but, from my experience, it's the right answer.
Don't think of links in terms of good and bad quality. Whilst there certainly is a difference between a good and a bad link, the first thing you should be looking at is the link profiles of your biggest competitors in the same niche / vertical.
A good way to find these sites is with SEMrush if you don't know them already.
Look at the kind of links your competitors are getting and how the page / domain authority of these links is distributed in their link profile. Eg 90% of their links are on pages with 0-10 page authority, 5% 10-20 page authority 5% over 20.
Now, from my experience, Google doesn't have a model of a "good" link profile, only what's standard in that niche. If everyone else is buying shitty comment spam then you have to do that too. Fight fire with fire. On top of this you optimise the balls off your site and build up more of these high quality links ON TOP of the other links.
I certainly wouldn't just turn off a Linkbuilding method that has already proven it works for your site.
Once this starts getting results slowly wean them off this spam. Think of it like gradually cutting off a smack addict's heroin supply, haha. Obviously comment spam isn't something you want to rely on forever, but its too late now if the ball's already in motion. You just have to slow that baby down first.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I just needed some reassurance and they wanted a second opinion.
My fear is that their ranking on that keyword was hyper inflated because of the insane amount of comment spam (2 yrs worth) and now that the spam is either dissipating or being penalized, the normal duplicate content penalties are kicking in.
Aarrgghhh...cleanup is always harder than starting from scratch.
-
It could be that the comment spam is now being punished, coincidentally after you stopped it. Run the keyword grading tool on your pages to make sure your on-site is as good as it could be, and continue building legitimate links. I would never suggest using black-hat techniques like buying comment spam.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How long before our website bounce back after Google Penalty?
One of our client websites got recently hacked. In a span of 4 days, it received random backlinks from random websites with random anchor texts. We are already in good standing for some of the keywords we are tracking and the attack got us a penalty from Google and we lost our rankings, moving out of the top 500. We already disavowed these dirty backlinks though we never really diagnosed where these came from. How long do you think our client's website will bounce back from the penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirAdri110 -
Google Disavow and Penalty lifted please help?
We disavowed 80% of our backlink profile due to our last SEO building cheap nasty links and filed a reconsideration requested (we had the Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.xxx.co.uk penalty for a year from the 24<sup>th</sup> march 2012 but thought it best to clean up before round 2 – even though we had no real penalty and we dd some decent link building that moved us up). We then received a successful penalty lifted note (on the 22<sup>nd</sup> of May 2013) but our rankings dropped (due to the crap links propping us up) since then we have built a fair few high quality links but our rankings do not seem to be moving much if at all (7 weeks clear now). has anyone had any experience with the above (are we in a sandbox type situation). Thank you for your time Thanks Bob
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
How to recognize Panda, Penguin or Unnatural Links Penalty ?
Hey guys, today I've received below message from Google, but I'm confused that there NO such message in WMT ?!??!?!?! I've login /out few times and situation is still same ?!?!? Still Nothing there ? Anybody had same issue ? Do I need to fill reconsideration request ? Pleased to hear back from you guys. NikoT Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to .com/ Dear site owner or webmaster of , We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NikoT0 -
Finding out why Bing gave page-level penalty?
In the last couple of weeks Bing has gradually removed 5 webpages of my website from their SERP's. The URL's are totally gone. They all had top 5 rankings and just got removed out of nothing. Have can I investigate what went wrong with these pages? Are here perhaps experts who are willing to investigate this for a fee? How can I restore a page-level penalty? I have no messages in my Bing Webmastertools account.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Help required as difficulty removing Google algorithmic penalty
I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty. Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | postagestamp0 -
Is there a way to check if your site has a Google penalty?
Is there a way to find out if your site has an over optimization penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Interesting case of IP-wide Google Penalty, what is the most likely cause?
Dear SEOMOZ Community, Our portfolio of around 15 internationalized web pages has received a significant, as it seems IP-wide, Google penalty starting November 2010 and have yet to recover from it. We have undergone many measure to lift the penalty including reconsideration requests wo/ luck and am now hoping the SEOMoz community can give us some further tips. We are very interested in the community's help and judgement what else we can try to uplift the penalty. As quick background information, The sites in question offers sports results data and is translated for several languages. Each market, equals language, has its own tld domain using the central keyword, e.g. <keyword_spanish>.es <keyword_german>.de <keyword_us>.com</keyword_us></keyword_german></keyword_spanish> The content is highly targeted around the market, which means there are no duplicate content pages across the domains, all copy is translated, content reprioritized etc. however the core results content in the body of the pages obviously needs to stay to 80% the same A SEO agency of ours has been using semi-automated LinkBuilding tools in mid of 2010 to acquire link partnerships There are some promotional one-way links to sports-betting and casino positioned on the page The external linking structure of the pages is very keyword and main-page focused, i.e. 90% of the external links link to the front page with one particular keyword All sites have a strong domain authority and have been running under the same owner for over 5 years As mentioned, we have experienced dramatic ranking losses across all our properties starting in November 2010. The applied penalties are indisputable given that rankings dropped for the main keywords in local Google search engines from position 3 to position 350 after the sites have been ranked in the top 10 for over 5 years. A screenshot of the ranking history for one particular domain is attached. The same behavior can be observed across domains. Our questions are: Is there something like an IP specific Google penalty that can apply to web properties across an IP or can we assume Google just picked all pages registered at Google Webmaster? What is the most likely cause for our penalty given the background information? Given the drops started already in November 2010 we doubt that the Panda updates had any correlation t this issue? What are the best ways to resolve our issues at this point? We have significant history data available such as tracking records etc. Our actions so far were reducing external links, on page links, and C-class internal links Are there any other factors/metrics we should look at to help troubleshooting the penalties? After all this time wo/ resolution, should we be moving on two new domains and forwarding all content as 301s to the new pages? Are the things we need to try first? Any help is greatly appreciated. SEOMoz rocks. /T cxK29.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tomypro0