The wrath of Google's Hummingbird, a big problem, but no quick solution?
-
One of our websites has been wrongfully tagged for penalty and has literally disappeared from Google. After lot's of research, it seems the reason was due to a ton of spammy backlinks and irrelevant anchor text. I have disavowed the links, but the results are still not rebounding back. Any idea how long the wrath of Google gods will last?
-
Just checking in here. How have things been going? Just wanted to add some info;
- did you actually receive a "manual action" from Google? If not, a reconsideration request is not needed, it's an algo not a manual penalty
- Hummingbird will not do this. The "date" of Hummingbird is not really a specific point in time, and it's definitely not the day Google announced it. The Hummingbird algo didn't act like Panda, Penguin or any other penalty.
- Disavowing links can take up to six months to have an effect. This info is straight from John Muller at Google. Google has to actually crawl the websites that are listed in the disavow file before applying the disavow.
- It's not good enough to only disavow. Google wants to see some effort to remove links as well.
- You may not bounce back unfortunately (tough to say without seeing the site). But if you were artificially ranking too high with bad links, now you might be ranking where you should have all along.
Overall the best thing to do is remove and disavow as much as possible and work on moving forward as best possible to acquire new links and make the site better overall.
-
Yiannis,
Good point. Actually it seems that since the Hummingbird update, the rankings have disappeared. So I am going through all the SEO checkpoints and it seemed that spam backlinks was the viable reason for the site suffering in rankings. There is no notice that the site has been penalized so it appears to be due to the automatic due to the algorithm update. It has been 2 months since clearing the issues, but still no luck in rebounding on the rankings
-
Reconsideration request applies on manual spam penalties and not algorithmic updates. this has been covered extensively by Matt Cutts in numerous videos.
We dont know if he is manually penalised or not. in the case you are follow advises from the two gentlemen above.
IF you arent and removed all spammy links it will take a while for you to get your rankings back. Some people say you have to wait a big update but I would say give it a month and in the meantime try to main traffic from other channels ie. social media, email marketing etc.
-
Everything that Alex said PLUS fill a reconsideration request. Wait a couple of weeks for Google's response. Your request MUST explain all the steps you made to clean up your site and be in compliance with Google's TOS (with proof and all)!
-
Since you lost those backlinks, you probably won't be able to bounce back to exactly where the site left off before those penalties. Did you get a manual action or was it done by the crawlers? Also, did you get a partial or full site penalty?
First double check your Google Webmaster Tools and see what the status of the penalty is and make sure that's removed. There's a Manual Actions area they added in the last few months which lets you see the stats and details of actions taken against your site by Google. If everything is resolved there, start improving your content and get back to link building. Since a good number of your old links are gone, they'll need to be replaced with better quality links.
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
-
Does Google crawler understand & flag a blog post has text asserting sponsorship with dofollow outbound link?
I kind of know the answer, but just wanted to get some feedback from others. For the sake of argument, assume there are no other issues with the linking blog, such as: too many ads, thin content, etc. Question: If you make a payment for a blog post with a dofollow link, and in the blog post there is something to the effect of: "this post has been sponsored by..." Will Google crawlers detect that and flag that as an unnatural link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Script must not be placed outside HTML tag? If not, how Google treats the page?
Hi, We have recently received the "deceptive content" warning from Google about some of our website pages. We couldn't able to find the exact reason behind this. However, we placed some script outside the HTML tag in some pages (Not in the same pages with the above warning). We wonder whether this caused an issue to Google to flag our pages. Please help. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Does Trade Mark in URL matter to Google
Hello community! We are planning to clean up TM and R in the URLs on the website. Google has indexed these pages but some TM pages are have " " " instead displaying in URL from SERP. What's your thoughts on a "spring cleaning" effort to remove all TM and R and other unsafe characters in URLs? Will this impact indexed pages and ranking etc? Thank you! b.dig
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b.digi0 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
How does Google decide what content is "similar" or "duplicate"?
Hello all, I have a massive duplicate content issue at the moment with a load of old employer detail pages on my site. We have 18,000 pages that look like this: http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=26626 http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=36986 and Google is classing all of these pages as similar content which may result in a bunch of these pages being de-indexed. Now although they all look rubbish, some of them are ranking on search engines, and looking at the traffic on a couple of these, it's clear that people who find these pages are wanting to find out more information on the school (because everyone seems to click on the local information tab on the page). So I don't want to just get rid of all these pages, I want to add content to them. But my question is... If I were to make up say 5 templates of generic content with different fields being replaced with the schools name, location, headteachers name so that they vary with other pages, will this be enough for Google to realise that they are not similar pages and will no longer class them as duplicate pages? e.g. [School name] is a busy and dynamic school led by [headteachers name] who achieve excellence every year from ofsted. Located in [location], [school name] offers a wide range of experiences both in the classroom and through extra-curricular activities, we encourage all of our pupils to “Aim Higher". We value all our teachers and support staff and work hard to keep [school name]'s reputation to the highest standards. Something like that... Anyone know if Google would slap me if I did that across 18,000 pages (with 4 other templates to choose from)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Big one or a linkfarm?
Hello Moz and Mozfans,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inizio
I would like to ask you a question. Our friend runs a real-estate server site with aprox. 450 000 visitors a month. There is aprox. 15 000 products to be sold. The problem is, their business strategy lies in visits, not conversions. They also run a huge (you may call it linkfarm) syndicate of exact-match domains, where all those products are feeded. Of course there is supposed to be a duplicate content, but for some reason Google does not care and indexes them. As a result this syndicated exact-match domain agregate has aprox. 350 000 visits a moth, almost as much as their main brand and domain. The thing is they need those numbers. Finally my question: Should we persuade them to: A. forget the linkfarms and focus on their top-product B. milk the linkfarm as much as possible before ban C. something else? Thank you very much. Bestr regards INIZIO0 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750