Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
-
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?
More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.
Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..
"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality 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 haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.
Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?
What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?
Any other tips/tricks?
-
Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.
As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.
We're getting there
Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.
-
I'd hate for you to throw the baby out with the bath water - there are some good links you'd want to keep, and starting from scratch is a real pain. This is what I'd do:
-
Look at all the pages you did build artificial links to in OSE. Consider dropping (410/404 instead of 301) pages that are mostly sending artificial links.
-
Pages that you didn't build artificial links to should be fine. Continue to 301 them as you are.
-
Evaluate the pages you did build links to, and try decide which option is easier. An example would be the home page.
-
Remove the bad/article links manually. If you can't, just do your best and then disavow and resubmit.
-
Don't 301 the page (just kill it and 410 or similar), and then try to salvage any of the good links by having them changed to the .org.
There are at most 200 linking domains once you combine links from all your tools - it shouldn't be hard to see fairly quickly whether the site is a spam/article domain or a legitimate site. Also, if your friend's site is relevant there shouldn't be a problem if he links with branded (non-commercial) anchor text.
Most people only have a handfull of pages they build links to - review those and hopefully you can start over fresh with the good links you had.
-
-
Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend
-
Looking at the back links for .org, I'd think seriously about just dropping that 301 from the home page of the .com site and any other pages that have bad links going to them.
I'm not sure why OSE shows links that are pointing to the .com site as back links to the .org site. I'd go ahead and delete those accounts, since it seems all those links point to .com anyway.
I'd be working to distance myself from the .com site as much as possible.
-
Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012. Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.
But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems. One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.
-
180 days is the best practice for leaving a 301 in place. You could remove that redirect and that will leave all those links pointing to the .com unaffiliated with the .org site.
How did you do your 301s? page by page or did you 301 the whole domain to the .org site? There are still a few URLs left in the index for that domain
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
-
Homepage not showing up for Brand/Any keywords (on Google) all of a sudden
The homepage to this website is crawled and indexed, however, it's not showing up for any searches, even brand searches (eg: Klay schools). This happened overnight. Do you know what the underlying issue could be? Link to the homepage: https://www.klayschools.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vishesh10104 -
Should I delete all tags and just use my categories to organize content?
My website NorthernCaliforniaHikingTrails.com/blog has 400 or so tags, and it also has an extensive set of categories. I'm thinking about deleting all the tags, but keeping the categories and consolidating them a bit. Is there a significant SEO advantage to having tags in my case? I've seen a few very high-ranking websites actually rank for a tag, but I doubt my site will reach that level. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | John88990 -
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Backlink for Old publised Article
Hi There, Suppose if a website abc.com published an article in 2014 and that article got indexed after few days as Google normally do. If we give backlink from abc.com article published in 2014 to recently published website, Is there issue if backlink given? or If the abc.com article contented updated first and then backlink is given, that would be the correct way? because updated content will re-index and at the time of re-indexing backlink will be fount by Google bot. Rajiv
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gamesecure0 -
Are these Bad Internal Links/Anchor Text?
Hi my site www.over50choices.co.uk is 4 months old and I wondered whether my "Quick Links" section (right hand column) on 95% of my pages with the same/similar anchor text was not best practice ie should I vary the anchor text & the target locations more? ( they tend to point to my top 6 pages) They were set up originally to make the customer experience easy to find things but from what i have read Google doesnt like too many links looking the same ! I also have 3 Graphics (cross sales messages) just above the foot of most (not the home page) pages, linking to my 3 key value pages, all with similar Alt Text tags, again should i vary the alt text or is not a good idea to have this type of link on every page? What is best practice, as i am trying to balance the visual/customer experience whilst optimising for search? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
Searching for SEO/SEM with eCommerce Experience
I've debated on whether I should ask this on the Q&A forum. Many times I have started to write it, then changed my mind. So today, after sending another round of emails out to potential SEM and SEO consultants and getting zero response, I said what the heck and decided to post it. I will point the finger at myself and say I must be doing something wrong in my approach and the way I am seeking out consultants or maybe what I am not saying. However, I cannot seem to get SEO companies to return my phone calls or emails. Is my company too small? Are most of the companies recommended here too busy with other work to worry about following up? Is my company and brand not sexy enough to deal with? Am I coming across wrong in my emails and phone calls? With that being said, I decided to write a post here and clearly state some basic and general requirements in hope someone interested will respond. I would be more than happy to answer and specific questions about my company, budget, etc. in a PM. I am looking for an SEO firm or consultants who: Will deal with small businesses with revenue under $2M. I have budgeted for this and am ready to start a project immediately. Have experience and a successful track record working with eCommerce sites who sell a large number of products. Interested in a long term relationship that will produce long lasting, durable results. Try to understand my business and what it will take to make grow my ONLINE profitability. I look forward to speaking to anyone interested. Jake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jake3720 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0