Should We Pull The Plug On This Site?
-
I am helping a retailer out with their site. They were hit hard with the Penguin update, and traffic has dropped by about 75%. Here are the stats:
-
It is fairly new, has been up for about 3 years.
-
Has partial match domain name
-
Is nearly fully indexed with over 4K pages
-
Has NOT received an unnatural link message from Google, so no manual penalty.
-
Has had most keywords BURIED in the search results.
-
Link profile: Has done about 50-100 blog comments, 500 directory submissions, 800 social bookmarks, 5-6 press releases, 300 article submissions (most removed), about 30-50 guest blog posts.
I am thinking it may have just been hit because of aggressive use of anchor text as opposed to massive spamming. Then again, the site has never really added great content and the product pages have no unique content.
Any thoughts?
-
-
Thanks. I've watched the video before but it's worth reviewing. Still seems a bit strange that someone can violate terms of service which G never bothered to enforce for years and get slammed with "Double Secret Probatiion" while a malicious site can clean up and eventually get the penalty lifted. No doubt a malicious site manual penalty should result in a long time in the penalty box but at least it's obvious what to fix. There doesn't seem to be a reliable consensus or even many case studies on garden variety Penguin recoveries yet. Not knowing what Dean Wormer wants me to change is irritating.
-
InHouseSEO - It's not an e-commerce site. (It's a blog with a couple of hundred posts many of which need pruning but many of which are high informative and written by someone with substantial experience in the subject.)
Sounds like you're telling me the best gamble is put in the work on this blog to try to grow the legit links so that the bad ones dip below the "tipping point" which prompts the Penguin attack. Have you had success with this tactic?
The home page appears to be penalized b/c of keyword rich text from relevant blog comments on mostly relevant blogs/pages. (It's also quite possible it's just a rather severe devaluation 30 or so spots in the SERPs for the EMD keyword). Other pages are hit or miss but the stronger pages (high bounce but very high times on pages) are beginning to return to some of their former strength (probably 50% of peak traffic).
Site traffic declined just before the 25th (the date that is associated with Panda 3.5) and resulted in a 20% hit. After Panda 3.5, the G traffic dove steadily (which I assume is Penguin added to the mix). Traffic is now off by around 2/3 without excluding the Bing traffic. (Have probably seen 15 -20% improvement recently with no new posts and only added one authorative directory link (Nat'l Trade Assoc. picked up the blog).
I just reread all of the comments in the thread you linked to. (Never received a warning in WMT so I assume the penalty is algo.)
Reading your comments, it sounds like you recomment attempting to remove any blog comments that I created. (I don't expect much success based on what people are sharing.
If my pet Penquin is algorhythmic and isn't scheduled to lift anytime in the next several months, should I try to guest blog my way out of the penalty? (Assume I have access to decent releveant indy blogs that are low authority but extremely legit.)
Thanks for the reminder to re-read the thread with you and Egol.
-
Do you have an e-commerce site? Is the site as a whole hit, or is it certain keywords/pages?
I would be careful with removing links, unless they are really spammy. You might do more harm than good.
I wrote about this here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-dripable-to-build-url-links-too-dilute-link-profile
Anyways, good luck.
-
InHouseSEO - this is a GREAT question. I wish there were more discussion of realistic case studies like this one rather than so much "focus" on negative SEO and a handful of high authority sites that were probably hit by mistake.
The consensus seems to be that you can file for lifting a penalty IF you can show you removed bad links AND document the efforts you made to remove the bad links that remain despite your efforts.
Matt Cutts appears to say you're more screwed if the penalty is algorhythmic. Huh? Buy BMR links, remove them and escape the penalty G imposed on your site for 50 -100 presumably manual and relevant blog comments? Gimmee a break!
The 50 - 100 blog comments are probably going to be the worst of the lot to attempt to remove. Have you had any sucess removing the trash directories? You might be able to out grow the penalty by developing new links so that the number of suspicious (or bad) links falls below the tipping point. On a recent WBF, Danny Sullivan opined that Penguin is just a devaluation of the bad links. (Not my opinion but it's an interesting opinion.) No one has shared results but some people have suggested combining removing links with developing new strong ones.
Penguin is bizarre. Some of my pages are (very) slowly returning to their former top positions even when some of the bad links point to them. New pages with extensive content (think 2,000 words of unique/expert content) were among the first 2 - 3 to cover the event but now rank around 120. (Ouch).
I share your suspicion that for many of our sites, it's aggressive use of anchor text. Developing non-aggressive links may dig us out. Would love to hear from anyone who had tried this and what results they acheived.
-
if it was an algorithmic hit check out this video
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
-
My site just dropped significant!
Just noticed that my website onlinecasting.co.za just dropped 50+ places on basically all the keywords I'm following.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KasperGJ
I can also see, that today there almost havent been any new sign-ups so something happened.
I didnt change anything. On issue, which might have something to do with it, is that I own several "copies" of the same site, just in different countries (domains). I host the websites myself, and they are all on the same server. The text and design in the same in some of the countries except that "jobs" are unique for the country. I also have:
onlinecasting.ae (english)
onlinecasting.sg (english)
onlinecasting.mx
and more coming So, could that be the reason, that google somehow now decided, that it wont accept the "allmost same site"?0 -
Are links on sites that require PAD files good or bad for SEO?
I want to list our product on a number of sites that require PAD files such as Software Informer and Softpedia. Is this a good idea from an SEO perspective to have links on these pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnapComms0 -
Linking Authentic Sites Together - Semi-PBN?
Recently I've had a lot of ideas of sites to build that all would have some sort of relevance to each other, all that would be relevant to my current business. For example, say you have sites for: bars/clubs, music festivals, cinemas, etc, one site for each. While these aren't all directly related to each other, they all kind of fall within a category of entertainment and having fun. Now, I'm not thinking about this as if I were to build a Private Blog Network, but instead each site would actually be valuable to visitors, be content rich, have regular updates and thriving social media etc, as if each were its own individual business. What would be your opinion on actually linking these together at some point down the line? I must stress that these would not be like typical PBN sites where the themes are the same, content is spun or badly written, no human touches or actual value, anything spammy etc, these would actually be authentic quality sites that you would reasonably expect to have a thriving community. Personally, after changing my ways from blackhat to weary-of-linkbuilding whitehat when Penguin 1 was released, I'm aware of what a bad linkbuilding strategy can do and would rather steer clear, however when I compare the plan of these authentic sites I have in my head to the obvious, low quality PBNs that I find competitors use to rank well all the time, I'm coming around to the idea that they may not pose a threat with the way I intend to implement them. Can I get some thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Leads.Bz2 -
Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
Hi, I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT. Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s. The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore? The linking domains are listed below: http://www.basalts.cn/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | crescentdigital
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/ Thanks Steve0 -
Seeking Top Notch Marketing Company with experience in growing sites post manual penalty
Does anyone know of a company who has direct experience with growing websites AFTER a manual link penalty has been lifted? Any referrals would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Getting sites unbanned in bulk
Prior to the Panda update we had 1 main site, and 300 or so satellite sites. The satellite sites all had an identical template with identical content. The satellite sites all got flagged, and the main site persevered. We'd like to TRY to get all of these sites unbanned in bulk. My question is...how 'DIFFERENT' should these sites be? I know that a real google employee will be looking. All of these sites will be in the same industry...so how 'different' can the content really be? I am going to try to do this in sets of 10 and purchase a different template for EACH city/satellite site, as well as having varying categories, but realistically how doomed/successful do you think this endeavor will be? Any advice? realistic timeline?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites
A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market. My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!). This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty. Ideas? Thoughts? All help appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RodneyRiley0