Google Manual Penalties:Different Types of Unnatural Link Penalties?
-
Hello Guys,
I have a few questions regarding google manual penalties for unnatural link building. They are "partial site" penalties, not site wide.
I have two sites to discuss.
1. this site used black hat tactics and bought 1000's of unnatural backlinks. This site doesn't rank for the main focus keywords and traffic has dropped.
2. this site has the same penalty, but has been all white hat, never bought any links or hired any seo company. It's all organic. This sites organic traffic doesn't seem to have taken any hit or been affected by any google updates.
Based on the research we've done, Matt Cutts has stated that sometimes they know the links are organic so they don't penalize a website, but they still show us a penalty in the WMT.
"Google doesn't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. However, because we realize that some links may be outside of your control, we are not taking action on your site's overall ranking. Instead, we have applied a targeted action to the unnatural links pointing to your site."
"If you don't control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google's perspective, the links already won't count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you're able to get the artificial links removed, submit areconsideration request. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action."
Check that info above at this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604772?ctx=MAC
Recap: Does anyone have any experience like with site #2? We are worried that this site has this penalty but we don't know if google is stopping us from ranking or not, so we aren't sure what to do here. Since we know 100% the links are organic, do we need to remove them and submit a reconsideration request?
Is it possible that this penalty can expire on its own? Are they just telling us we have an issue but not hurting our site b/c they know it's organic?
-
Hey There
I would download all of your link data from;
- webmaster tools
- ose
- majestic
- maybe ahref too
And pull it together and comb through it for bad links. I think you'll really have to look through them to see what's going on. Maybe something was missed? First you need to confirm there actually are no spammy/bad links
In a removal / disavow situation the goal is to remove/disavow ONLY bad links - which there could only be 10 out of 100's - so you should sort through them.
-Dan
-
You say that all the links to the second site are "organic". What do you mean by that? Do you mean that the client never purchased links, did blog comments, did forum posts, engaged in article syndication, has followed links in guest blog posts... The list could go on and is pretty extensive. Are you saying that none of the links have been manipulated in anyway?
Also, have you analyzed the link profile for the site? Something is causing Google to think you are trying to manipulate things. Have you figured out what they may have an issue with?
Did you have question about the first site? I don't see one.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
In my opinion if you get a warning about action to specific links and you have Basically a clean backlink profile and your rankings are not hurt you dont need to do anything. You should focus your energy instead on creating great links with natural anchor texts and providing a great web experience to your users.
-
Even if the penalty doesn't seem to be affecting things right now, I would definitely go through the "sustained effort" Matt talks about in the video and start contacting the webmasters to have them removed. Matt also mentioned that "we might take action on some of those anchors." Have you seen traffic to any individual pages that have these links pointing to them decrease at all? What if in a future update these links to start to affect traffic.
Even though overall traffic seems to be OK now, I'd say better safe than sorry, go through the effort to get those links removed and do the reconsideration request. That way, they won't become an issue in the future.
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 website is my name. Overnight it went from being the number one google search to not showing up at all when you google my name. Why would this happen?
I built my website via square space. It is my name. If you google my name it was the number one hit. Suddenly 2 weeks ago it doesn't show up AT ALL. I went through square spaces SEO check list, secured my site etc. Still doesn't show up. Why would this happen all of the sudden and What can I do? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbark0 -
Are We Doing Link Building Right? Do Certain Links Actually Matter?
I've been thinking about this as I go through my daily link building activities for clients. Do we really know as much as we hope/think we do about how Google values inbound links, which links actually matter, and how much these link signals play into rankings? For example, does Google REALLY value the fact that a business is paying to sponsor a local sports team, or to join a local chamber? For local businesses, link building is rather difficult because they don't necessarily have the resources or ability to implement ongoing Content Marketing initiatives to earn links naturally. How can we be sure that the things we recommend actually make a difference? I had my family real estate business featured in almost a dozen articles as expert sources, with links from authoritative sites like Realtor.com and others. Does Google distinguish between a profile link on a site like Realtor.com vs. being featured as an expert source on home page news? Just second guessing a lot of this today. Anyone can to share thoughts and insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Google is alternating what link it likes to rank on wordpress site and
Hi there, I'm experiencing a problem where google is pick and choosing different links structures to rank my Wordpress site for my main keywords. The site had pretty good #1 rankings for a long time but recently I noticed Google is choosing to rank the page in one of two ways. Let me just say that the original way where it held good rankings looked like this for example: flowers.com/the-most-beautiful-wedding-bouquets/ this is just an example it' is not my site. And when google decides to switch it up it uses this link structure:flowers.com > weddings (this still points to this link flowers.com/the-most-beautiful-wedding-bouquets when I hover my mouse over it) however this link structure that never appeared before and now does, usually has much lower rankings. Please note it's not both link structures being ranked at the same time for the keywords. It's one or the other that google is currently alternating in ranking and I believe it's hurting the sites position.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F80
I'm not sure if this is a wordpress settings thats gone wrong or what the problem is but I do know when shows the expanded and descriptive link structure flowers.com/the-most-beautiful-wedding-bouquets the rankings are higher and in 2nd place. I'm hoping by rectifying this I can regain back my position. I'm very grateful for any insight you could offer on why this is happening and how I could fix it. Thank you. PS Wordpress site has several SEO plugins0 -
H3 Tags - Should I Link to my content Articles- ? And do I have to many H3 tags/ Links as it is ?
Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should We Link To Our News?
We just started an "In the News" section on our webpage. We are not sure what would be the best for SEO purposes. Should we link to the news websites that have the stories about our company, even if they have no link bank? Or should we just take screenshots of the news article and only link to articles that link back to us (this is what we a currently doing)? Here is our news page, http://www.buyautoparts.com/News/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joebuilder0 -
Do links from twitter count in SEOMoz's Toolbar link count?
I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davhad0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0