Penguin and Backlinks
-
I have been looking closely at my backlinks. I readily admin that I have not worked on backlinks in years since for e-commerce there is little white hat opportunity but here is what I find in doing a detailed analysis.
I mostly have back links that are pointing to our nicely ranked site (well it use to be pre-penguin) being hyjacked by crappy sites that just put us on the their site in order to try and rank. I have no way to prevent this. They are like a cancer. Point me to the Doctor.
Is Goggle penalizing us for these guys listing us in long pages list to create pages that obviously exist for one reason...... To display Adword Ads....isn't that a twist that simply sucks for use but has Google making money either way.
If they want to penalize us for them stealing our link then we should get a say in accepting the link.
Advice on dealing with this? Do I have to hire someone to create enough good links to overcome this trash that I have no control over ?
Perhaps my competitors are doing this. I simply can't tell.
Any advice is appriciated.
-
We have very little back-link profile and most of these links are from silly sites that back-link to sites trying to build Directories to game the system. So it sounds like your advice is look at them and if not suspect and not back anchor text then recover them otherwise leave them 404
-
If they're suspect, or could put you at risk of over-optimizing from anchor text, I would leave them to 404. I assume these are links that were built for you in the past.
If they're branded links and you have a strong backlink profile, I might 301 them. It all depends on what your current profile looks like and how these may affect your current standing in regards to Penguin.
-
Most point to the home page but some to category or product pages.
We are working on onpage but wondering what if anything to do with this old stale back-links
-
Hey John -
Are these links pointing to your homepage, or to other pages on your site? This makes a big difference in knowing what to do with them.
Also, might there be other factors at play here, such as over-optimization onsite? I'd love to take a look at your site. If you don't want to share the URL here, feel free to PM it to me.
-
I have discover that I have 288 back-links that 404. Many of them come from suspect sites. Do I 301 these backlinks so webmasters does not show these errors or to I leave them 404 as a vote that I don't like those unasked for backlinks ?
-
First off, I wouldn't panic. As the SEO Moz blog recommends, don't just start trying to take a hatchet to your links and assume that that will fix the problem.
Second, realize that a lot of what is going on with Penguin is algorithmic. That may not be any comfort, but I'm currently being beaten by generically popular sites, not competitors. There's nothing I can do until Google decides that they want to value quality sites again over popular ones. Did they penalize us for some backlinks? Possibly (when we started SEO years ago we did reciprocals with exact match keywords, one of the things Penguin is targeting), but the lack of highly relevant results (as in the pages getting #1 are simply popular sites with a page that mentions those words, not sites focused on them) for our primary terms means that Penguin, like Panda, penalizes first and fixes later.
Third, unfortunately, the only way to plug the hole caused by Penguin (we're down 15-20% in traffic on our #1 site over last year) is to buy Adwords. Get a budget and start a campaign. It's the only quick fix out there. If it is links sinking your ship, even nuking them all immediately wouldn't fix your drop and will probably hurt you more in the long run. Go back to SEO basics (quality content and building good links) and hope this storm passes soon.
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
-
Should backlink URLs include www, https, or both???
My business is located at remotebaba.com, and I am wanting several sites to link to it.
Link Building | | udaipabla
I am only interested in home page at this point, and we are using HTTPS for our site. Which one of these should I have other sites link to (Please provide complete justification):
remotebaba.com (my root domain)
www.remotebaba.com
https://remotebaba.com
https://www.remotebaba.com I really appreciate your help!1 -
Best free or inexpensive backlink audit tools
I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for free or inexpensive backlink audit tools? Of course I have access to Search Console and to the OSE but it seems they don't offer a complete picture of our backlink profiles. I have previous experience using Link Research Tools for this but this is too expensive for the amount of use we would get out of it so I am looking for (much) cheaper alternatives. I look after 8 websites, however very little active link building was done for these in the past so we are not experiencing any issues due to bad links, but I would still like to get a better picture of our complete backlink profile. I've considered just using a trial of Majestic or Ahrefs for this, but this would only be a one off solution. I would welcome any suggestions. Thanks!
Link Building | | ViviCa10 -
Old Spammy Backlinks but No Manual Penalty...No Results
We have taken over a site in which the client had unfortunately hired an SEO consultant who bought bad comment spam links. Webmaster Tools does not show a manual penalty of any kind but clearly this was bad practice from the former "SEO" consultant. I believe we have a good structure of the completely new website we have built for the client but I am not sure of the best way to reduce any negative fallout from the previous actions. I've read conflicting information about submitting disavow report to Google for the comment spam links. In some cases, I have read that it would be irrelevant since there is not a manual penalty. I am fairly certain rankings are being negatively effected from this action and looking for the best way to neutralize the algorithmic penalty. Not sure if this helps or not but I use GWMT "Download Latest Links" and see that the soonest Google discovered one of these links is 4/4/2013. Most of the links were generated some time during 2012. How do you even begin to try to reach out and have comment spam manually removed...when most of the sites that allowed the comment spam to begin with are spam sites themselves?
Link Building | | bluelynxmarketing0 -
Backlinks Redirected Temporarily (New to Old)
I have a website of which we are being forced to change the domain name and soon after give the control of the domain name to the corporate office. The corporate office will eventually put a new website up on it. We would like to build more backlinks without the threat of losing all of these backlinks to the corporate site. We were considering to start building backlinks to the new domain with temporary redirects to the old domain but have recently been advised against doing this (threat of Google looking down on this technique). Should we continue to build back links to the old domain, or should we 302 redirect the links to the old domain? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Link Building | | wishmedia0 -
Do backlinks take effect as soon as they are crawled?
i have got 3 really good backlinks to a site of mine in the last month, however they have had no obvious effect yet. they are dofollow, all from county council websites, and I can see the backlinks in webmaster tools. does this mean that their seo affect has already been applied?
Link Building | | lethal0r0 -
In light of penguin - what are your thoughts on widget based link-building?
Hi all, I thought it would be interesting to see if people's perceptions of widget based link building have changed. By that I mean - Do you think it's ok to give somebody a tool to use oon their website with a reference to the creator of that tool or will that count as 'manipulative or unnatural' link building? I'll start the discussion off by saying... I think this type of link building is ok and legitimate as you are merely referencing the creator of the tool whose widget you are using on your website. My only caveat would be to ensure that the anchor text is not manipulative but relevant. Looking forward to hearing what you all think about this as I'm sure many people maybe put off by doing this.
Link Building | | A_Q0 -
Backlink reports in OSE, the good and the bad!
Hi all Mozers, I have a couple of questions re the backlink reports in Open Site Explorer. In the introductory video Rand suggests that you can indentify backlinks that are a) Having a positive effect, and b) Having a negative effect on SEO campaigns. Do you identify such links using the domain/page authority of the linking page? Also, we know we have more links than OSE is reporting, does this mean that the links that are not reported are not helping our SEO campaign? Many thanks in advance, much appreciated. Lee
Link Building | | Webpresence0 -
Backlinks from embeded Wistia video?
If I use Wistia for my videos, and somebody embeds my video on their site, can I get a backlink from this?
Link Building | | gregalam0