I need de-spam help/advice
-
For one of my sites I am working on I outsourced SEO about 3 years ago. One of the "tricks" the SEO used at the time was to pay for several Blog posts to be "sponsored" by this web site using exact match keywords for the domain.
1 Where do I look to determine the spammy links pointing to this site?
2 Have you had success getting rid of these bad links?
-
The purpose of OSE is to show you links to your site. There is no way to accurately determine which links are organic vs manipulative without visiting the site.
DMOZ links would not be considered as manipulative.
-
Is DMOZ really a spammy link? It's the first one that came up using those filters.
-
Thanks very much for your reply, really appreciated your advise.
Now im going through Paddy blog,
Thanks for your help
-
Ryan,
This is excellent and clear:
"The message Google is sending is very clear: stop building links and start earning them."
As to expecting Penguin to keep improving over time, Google has already said it will, just like Panda.
There are a ton of ways to earn links, the first is to create great content that people want to link to. Look at how Google News works in terms of ranking articles. One of the SEO variables considered most valuable by those using Google News per Search Engine Land survey was cites (links) from other high authority Google News sources. Those sources don't link unless it is quality content.
Great point.
-
The first step is to ensure your site architecture is solid. If your site is unattractive, has broken links, is difficult to read, etc. then fewer people will want to link to it. Set up a Responsive Design mobile site, have a graphic designer improve the look and feel of your site, crawl your site to ensure your internal links are solid, gather user feedback, etc.
Next, you want to build "best on the web" type of content. Your content should be sincerely helpful, original and something readers want to share.
Find out who the influencers are in your niche. Ask them what content they need and give it to them! Each time you are likely to earn a link and be exposed to a new audience. Forget about search engines. The direct traffic value is fantastic.
There are countless articles on the subject of links. I would suggest the above advice is your best bet but if you require more direct tips, then I recommend you learn from a link building expert. Of course, great advice does not come cheap. Make sure you are prepared to pay him in the proper currency.
Otherwise, you can read some of his articles on the topic:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-power-of-using-lists-for-link-building
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/actionable-link-building-strategies
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-links-without-fancy-tools
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eight-link-building-tips-whiteboard-friday
-
thanks i will create a new questions but ,
any tips how to earn links , i do article and infographics.
-
Sharing your experience is great! It is what this Q&A is all about
Regarding your competitor's anchor text, I would suggest not spending a moment of time thinking about it. Fairness is based on perception and none of us have all the facts. When it comes to penalties, we should each focus on our sites and let Google sort out our competitors. It can be frustrating at times, but focusing on others only allows that frustration to build.
63% is still a VERY high anchor text percentage. If that site belonged to a client of mine, I would begin a manipulative link removal campaign. There is simply no way to earn enough quality links in a reasonable amount of time. I have repeatedly seen very fast recoveries after link removal campaigns. I hope this information is helpful.
-
I do Agree with you but to be honest, unfortunately clients dont have patience to wait they would like to get quick results. And to earn link you need to have some help from your client in terms of any incentive but they don't want to spend anytime just like us to get on with things,
I had the same issue with a site in april it was hit by penguin, i then started removing link , and had to request for link to be remove numerous time from sites and then wait for google to get index.
i did it till end of june nothing happen also send a request to google the reply was there is no manual penalty but it could be algorithmic penalty I checked my competitors link profile they were about 70 to 80 % direct keyword anchor then i compare it to mine and it was 63% after the analysis i start working on link building . start creating industry niche research content in our blog then some social activities and focus on guest blogging, but my anchor where all brand name or naked anchor . It work for me the SERPs are improving but still a long way to to go. sorry but im just sharing my experience.
-
That method is likely to cause more trouble then it solves.
Many site owners and SEOs seem to be confusing the Penguin mechanism with the message. The message Google is sending is very clear: stop building links and start earning them.
You are proposing to build links to manipulate the Google algorithm into not detecting the other "over-optimized" anchor text links. I have seen this advice and frankly, it is horrible. Most site owners have far too many manipulative links to "balance out" with legitimate links. Therefore you are building manipulative links without using anchor text to bypass the current Penguin detection system. I would bet a lot the next Penguin will not only continue detecting the original manipulative links (even if you change the anchor text) but also the new ones. Even if I am wrong, then the Penguin update after will. I expect Penguin to be just like Panda. It will keep improving over time.
Remove the bad links. Stop "building" links and start earning them. Site owners who follow the advice to change anchor text or bury the "over optimized" links are going to be hurting really bad, really soon.
-
Another way is to balance your link profile by creating backlinks Using generic , nacked and brand anchor links to balance things out,
-
The worst ever was my first campaign in 2011. My most recent campaign we had about a 60% response rate which was awesome.
-
What kind of success rate do you find you get Ryan? Mine really varies from niche to niche but is nowhere near 80%+
-
lol yup, if you had fun doing 8+ hours of link building, you can enjoy it even more when you have to remove them. #damnthegoogleoverlords
-
If your traffic dropped on April 25th and you know there are bad links pointing to your site, then the likely cause is Penguin. It's always important to understand the exact cause of the drop as Google makes approximately 50 algorithm changes each month. There were also Panda changes in April.
To gain an initial look at the spammy links, simply go to Open Site Explorer: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/. This tool is part of the SEOmoz tools. For most sites affected by Penguin, you can locate spammy links pretty fast. At the top of the page there are 4 drop down boxes. Set the first three drop downs as follows:
followed+301, only external, pages on this root domain
As far as getting rid of the bad links, I have had a lot of success. The process is very manual and not a lot of fun, but it works. You need to contact site owners and very politely request they remove the links. If the first attempt does not succeed, do not give up. Keep trying.
Best of luck!
-
A lot of things happened in April. There were Panda refreshes on April 19 and 27 and Penguin hit on April 24. I'd be wary about cutting links until you are sure what you are dealing with. You could do more harm than good.
If this is a Penguin issue then no one knows exactly what has to be done to recover. Many webmasters will advocate getting spammy links removed. But the problem is that in order to beat the algorithm you may have to get 85-95% of the links removed and in most cases that is near impossible.
If you'd like me to have a look at your site I do a diagnosis package for a very reasonable fee. I have a good look at your analytics data and webmaster tools to give you an idea of what you are dealing with. You can contact me through my profile page.
-
Good rule of thumb, if you're getting links from:
- .info
- .ru
- .biz
They are usually poor links and should be avoided of removed.
Check your site's links in OSE (Open Site Explorer)
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
If they are:
Directory links or article submission links it should be easy to log in and delete them, assuming you were provided with the credentials.
-
The site hasn't received any unnatural links warning. I just know that rankings dropped DRAMATICALLY in April.
I also know that the mozTrust of this site is pretty low compared to the competition. I attribute it to this.
-
Have you been hit with an unnatural links warning? Penguin? Not sure?
It's important to know what you are dealing with before slashing links.
If I'm trying to get an unnatural links warning penalty reconsidered then I generally try to get removed any and all links that an SEO may have made. So, if it's an anchor texted link from an article, 98% of the time it's unnatural. I find though that most website owners are too lenient on themselves when they are trying to decide which links to remove.
I have had success in getting some webmasters to remove links like these - but you won't be likely to get them all.
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
-
Inbound links to internal search with pharma spam anchor text. Negative seo attack
Suddenly in October I had a spike on inbound links from forums and spams sites. Each one had setup hundreds of links. The links goes to WordPress internal search. Example: mysite.com/es/?s=⚄
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arlinaite470 -
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
How does Google handle product detail page links hiden in a <noscript>tag?</noscript>
Hello, During my research of our website I uncovered that our visible links to our product detail pages (PDP) from grid/list view category-nav/search pages are <nofollowed>and being sent through a click tracking redirect with the (PDP) appended as a URL query string. But included with each PDP link is a <noscript>tag containing the actual PDP link. When I confronted our 3rd party e-commerce category-nav/search provider about this approach here is the response I recieved:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The purpose of these links is to firstly allow us to reliably log the click and then secondly redirect the visitor to the target PDP.<br /> In addition to the visible links there is also an "invisible link" inside the no script tag. The noscript tag prevents showing of the a tag by normal browsers but is found and executed by bots during crawling of the page.<br /> Here a link to a blog post where an SEO proved this year that the noscript tag is not ignored by bots: <a href="http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/" target="_blank">http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/<br /> </a> <br /> So the visible links are not obfuscating the PDP URL they have it encoded as it otherwise cannot be passed along as a URL query string. The plain PDP URL is part of the noscript tag ensuring discover-ability of PDPs by bots.</p> <p>Does anyone have anything in addition to this one blog post, to substantiate the claim that hiding our links in a <noscript> tag are in fact within the SEO Best Practice standards set by Google, Bing, etc...? </p> <p>Do you think that this method skirts the fine line of grey hat tactics? Will google/bing eventually penalize us for this?</p> <p>Does anyone have a better suggestion on how our 3rd party provider could track those clicks without using a URL redirect & hiding the actual PDP link?</p> <p>All insights are welcome...Thanks!</p> <p>Jordan K.</p></noscript></nofollowed>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eImprovement-SEO0 -
Thin Content Pages: Adding more content really help?
Hello all, So I have a website that was hit hard by Panda back in 2012 November, and ever since the traffic continues to die week by week. The site doesnt have any major moz errors (aside from too many on page links). The site has about 2,700 articles and the text to html ratio is about 14.38%, so clearly we need more text in our articles and we need to relax a little on the number of pictures/links we add. We have increased the text to html ratio for all of our new articles that we put out, but I was wondering how beneficial it is to go back and add more text content to the 2,700 old articles that we have just sitting. Would this really be worth the time and investment? Could this help the drastic decline in traffic and maybe even help it grow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Detective needed to investigate a mystery lack of ranking
My URL is: www.graduate-jobs.com/graduate-schemesAfter ranking on page 1 for the search term 'graduate schemes' for over 4 months, the page then disappeared completely from the SERPS for over 6. I've been assured it isn't a Penguin/ Panda problem, as this is the only page on our site that has seen this sort of drop. When checking backlink profiles of the ranking pages, our page is as strong if not stronger and it receives a good amount of traffic with decent user metrics.If anyone could take a look at the page and have a guess at why it isn't moving anywhere, it would be really appreciated.Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whis0 -
Link Building on Blog Posts w/ Ads & Mostly Pictures
I found a group of similar websites that offer anchor text links with good to great domain and page authority (30 to 75), but I'm not sure how "safe" they are. Most of their posts are compilations of images/logos and there are a lot of ads on the page. Would links from sites like TutorialChip.com help or would Google discount them because of the nature of the site? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt0 -
How is this different than Go Daddy Spam?
Out of boredom, I googled up "SEO Company". #1 result is qualifiedimpressions.com. Taking a look at their link profile it seems they are utilizing anchor text on all their clients' websites. Moreover, it appears they have multiple sites for each of their phrases (which they cross link). Qualified Impressions - SEO Company WeBuildRankings.com - SEO Service VisibilitySquad - SEO Companies Some of their clients are rocking multiple anchor text links. How is this not any different than what Go Daddy did recently?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ErikDster1