Penguin Recovery Problem - Weird
-
I had an old URL and the link profile of this URL wasn't good - I had been using article syndication and Penguin threw me to the wolves.
I decided to start over with a new URL and build a new natural link profile. I specifically did NOT do a 301 redirect to the new URL and did not make any request to Google to transfer domain as I didn't want old site being associated to the new one. To redirect our old users, I put a link on the old URL index page (nofollowed) that say that we have moved.
I was very surprised to find that in GWT all the links of the old URL have now been associated to the new URL....why is that? I started over to have a clean natural profile and follow Google guidelines.Has anyone heard of this before? All I can guess is that Google itself "decided" to do its own pseudo-301, since the site was the same, page for page.This has Major implications for anyone attempting a "clean start" to recover from Penguin.
-
Nakul -
Re: "other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new?"
No - no red flags. My "new" site has only been live for about a week and is already reached page 2 or 3 of google serp for my main keywords.
But since I know those backlinks cause my old site to go from #2-3 of page 1 to past page 20, I freaked when I saw them following me.
or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?
No - I crashed on April 24 and never recovered, even though I removed all the pages that had been syndicated and asked Google for reconsideration, they said there was no manual penalty.
-
Thanks for your thoughts, Marie.
** And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.**
I am confident that they are very often wrong.
-
I personally think it is just a WMT glitch. When the link is shown in WMT it says, "Via this intermediate link..." and the intermediate link is the original page.
However, according again to Dejan SEO, if you copy a site's page and your site has a higher PageRank, you can actually outrank the original page. Here is the article on how they did this (with permission) for Rand Fishkin's blog and other pages:
http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/
That makes me think that it's possible that link juice is granted to the more authoritative of the two sites. And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.
While I still think that these links would not cause Penguin to affect a site, I wouldn't chance it!
-
**Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site. **
Oh.... do you think somebody could grab an article from your website, post it on theirs and kidnap your linkjuice?
-
Those pages can still be in the cache. That was my theory as to what was going on with the previous site. When we used the url removal tool (not the disavow tool by the way) to remove them from the cache this seemed to solve the problem.
-
Considering what's done is done and the point that your old domain is penalized, can you possibly do/try any of the following ?
1. Ignore the fact that those links are appearing in your backlink profile for the new domain. See whether this new website works/ranks.
2. If it doesn't (at all), can you possibly disavow those "article marketing" links for the old domain and do nothing at all for the new domain (since those links are not really linking to your new domain).
Coming back to point 1, what I'd like to ask is, other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?
-
Thanks Marie - I will try your suggestion.
I did a search using the regular operators to see if my old site was still indexed and Google returned a "we can't find it on this server-that's all we know" Sergent Shultz response, but knowing Google that does not necessarily mean pages are not still in their index.
-
I had this happen with a client I worked with. The client's previous site had a severe Penguin issue so he decided to start over. We did everything properly and did not do any redirects from the old site to the new. But we were surprised when suddenly the WMT console for the new site was showing all of the links that went to the old site!
What happened? It's complicated but it has to do with something that is described here by Dejan SEO: http://dejanseo.com.au/mind-blowing-hack/
Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site.
What I don't know is whether those links are carrying any link juice and also any penalty with them.
What we did was go back into the WMT console for the old site and use the url removal tool to remove every single url from the index AND the cache for the old site.
It took about 2 weeks for the links to disappear from WMT for the new site.
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
-
Sitemap with homepage URL repeated several times - it is a problem?
Hello Mozzers, I am looking at a website with the homepage repeated several times (4 times) on the sitemap (sitemap is autogenerated via a plugin) - is this an SEO problem do you think - might it damage SEO performance, or can I ignore this issue? I am thinking I can ignore, yet it's an odd "issue" so your advice would be welcome! Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Hit By Penguin...Wait for recovery or do i change domains?
Hey Guys Would very much appreciate all opinions on our following situation, we have an .uk based ecommerce sports nutrition site www.cardiffsportsnutrition.co.uk Previously we worked with an SEO, that to put it simply did not follow webmaster guidelines(money anchor heavy, bad links etc), we reached some very good ranks too quickly and subsequently after the first penguin we where hit. We didn't receive any link warning or manual penalties just what i am assuming algorithmic...Rankings and traffic drop significantly, but not business ending. Since the first penguin we have done very little to no SEO, some unique content, re-writing of product pages, lots of social activity and didnt really lose much traffic after that, some small ups and down after refresh s and a slight slow decline on some keywords. Come Penguin 2.0...things that where still ranking for have now dropped even further, impressions in webmasters is now down over 50% and we have a had a wkly but not drastic drop in traffic since then. Over the last couple of months we have obtained some good quality links, have added lots of great unique content that has been shared significantly and generated some great traffic to our blog, added more unique product pages and category pages. But organically things are starting to look pretty grim apart from our brand keywords and everything is still in a slow decline and no increase in impressions in webmasters either jsut small drops We have been working to remove the poor quality and toxic links that the previous SEO built,getting anchor text corrected and collating information on the whole process ready to submit a file of links to disavow tool. which we are planning to do within the next couple of wks. Now i have read some successful stories and some not so successful one, so im starting to think of how to deal with this worse case scenario, If our domain is too damaged by the previous SEO guys We have the same domain name but on the .com that will help us carry over our brand name directly, but my concern is even though we have not had any manual penalty and not 301'd the .com back to the .co.uk or any other form of link will the penalties be carried over to the new domain just on the basis of brand association. We wouldn't plan to redirect any of the .co.uk traffic back to the .com but rather focus on our already strong ablate less converting traffic from the likes of twitter and facebook and run a small PPC campaign for some brand keyword to help buffer the traffic loss. While we focus on building good quality links and putting up plenty of new quality content on the site on the new domain that does not have any poor quality links back to it. What im trying to avoid is carry on spending time money and effort on the .co.uk domain for the next 3/4 months and continue to lose traffic slowly and then have to switch the domain anyway. I plan to wait and see for the next 4-6wks after we run the dissavow to but October time would be time i would have to make a decision and go for it. Any advice or opinions would be appreciated marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSN0 -
Changing meta title dynamically e.g. with number of reviews in title. Is this a problem?
I would like to put the number of reviews in the meta title of a product page. I noticed that tripadvisor for example does the same. However I read in some places that people encountered problems with frequent title tag changes. Did you ever encounter problems by just changing numbers in title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Do you think it is really a problem if just the number of the reviews changes? what about putting number of reviews in the meta description instead?0 -
Can pages compete with each other? Inbound links & domain authority, How to determine problem areas?
Heyy, I'm having some pretty big SEO issues. 😞 We have had some drops in our ranking. We're 5th page or worse depending on location for a few of our keywords that we used to rank well for. There are all sorts of random non relevant sites outranking us for the term "stickley" and "stickley furniture" One thing I noticed is that we are ranking for a different page for each keyphrase. Our home page is ranking for "Stickley" and our stickley page is ranking for "Stickley Furniture" Is this normal? I guess Google is just picking what it see's as what's more relevant. Is it possible that these two pages are "competing?" Do similar phrases linking to different pages cause pages to "fight" or unevenly disperse link juice? I'm having trouble knowing which page I should send inbound links to since Google seems to be linking similar keywords to different pages. How much should I stress about which pages I receive links on? Is it true that any inbound link to a site site will help increase its overall domain authority and overall SEO? What should I be focusing on? I've added 301 redirects for non WWW as well as tried to make the pages well optimized for SEO. Should I just add more related content to the pages? I know backlinks are important but I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to get links that aren't just spammy forum post footers or junk directory submissions. The thing that bothers me is we were ranking well and then suddenly are way back. We have never done any black hat SEO of any sort. I feel a bit stuck and confused at the moment 😞 Thanks in advance for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SheffieldMarketing
-Amy0 -
Link Building Post Penguin?
I really am lost as to what to do these days.. The problem with my industry is the whole idea of link bait isn't very lucrative. There are no bloggers either, so guest blogging also isn't a very good option. Seems to me like the best thing I can do is just publish content! So, publish a lot of quality content? LOL, sounds like that's right up Google's alley. Where do you publish your content, and what would you say has shown the best results for you personally? We called an SEO company, Arteworks, a few days ago (Friday), and they really didn't go into any details about how they build links. We called them because I saw a post that you commented on, here, and it recommended a few companies at the bottom of the post. (Arteworks being one of them) Really, this is where I get so dang confused... The goal is to build links like the old days, except only use unique content, diversify your pages, and anchor text? Sound about right? Or, should I only create content on my site? Thanks in advance for your time and advice!! Sincerely, Tyler Abernethy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
In Report Card - Weird Characters in URL
We have an underscore in a lot of our links. My question is since it is difficult to change existing site architecture, is an underscore really that negative? Here is an example: http://www.winematch.com/profile_368-2005-Artesa-Vineyards--Winery-Merlot-Reserve.html Eventually we want to change this to http://www.winematch.com/wine/2005-Artesa-Vineyards-Winery-Merlot-Reserve.html but it is a big project.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Ranking problems
Hi All My site is live for a year now. I;m getting tons of traffic (alexa 54k) and business are good. The only problem is that I have 0 page rank....I have checked again and again the site;s structure to see if there is anything wrong with the site but everything seems to be ok. Google just added search links to the site (megamoneygames) which looks very nice. For example, none of my competitors have search links but they all have page rank of 4 while I have 0. In addition, for some reason the site's age (days) shows 0 although it is live for a year now... Do you have any idea of what is going on? do I have errors in the site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pariplay0