How long will this Site be punished? (place your bets!)
-
Got hit with a manual penalty in Feb2014. Got it removed in 6 months (before the Penguin refresh). Whole site got deindexed at one point including BRAND searches. (Brand searches has since come back)
Disavowed over 20k domains (yea spam was bad). But still have a good amount of authority links such as huff post, edu, wiki, apple apps, reddit etc. About 97% of our links are on page 2 or beyond. Cant get past that spot 11 'Wall'. The suppression machine is not kind. We even had a very popular article get tons of shares, media pick up, and the original article would not rank on the first page for its title.
Our 'brand + keyword' gets about 2k searches a month. Just 'keyword' gets nothing, which i find amusing.
So whats the prognosis doc? Another year, 3 or never? Anyone else in same boat? Wait for the next penguin refresh and hope for the best?
Cheers
-
Yah it took us 6 reconsideration letters to get out of the 'manual penalty'. I thought you meant there was another way to contact them after the fact.
-
It might be worth it to switch domain names at the end of the day, depending on how important it is to you.
Fortunately, I've never had to do it, but I've read a million times that after you disavow links and try to get rid of bad links the best you can, at some point, after you've literally attempted to get rid of each and every link that has the potential of causing you issues, you have this option to write a "reconsideration request" to Google.
Read this guide, it's great, and the reconsideration request is mentioned in Step 7: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
Best of luck! Let us know if anything changes in the future!
-
Yah i figure most of it would be speculation - just doing due diligence to see if i missed anything.
We've gone through GSC with a comb. No manual penalties remain(in there), received the whole 'congrats you're out of jail 'message. Still add to the disavow list every month. Did a whole onsite audit to fix any on page issues (404s, thin content, meta tags etc) Made the site responsive as well. Planning a site redesign shortly which hopefully does something.
Message to Google? How do i do that lol. Do you mean through the google product forums, or is there an actual email? We have our Adwords reps, but they have done all they can to pass along our message.
Thanks for the response!
-
I don't think anyone can give you a real answer to that question. Any answer would be speculation. There's also not enough info here.
Have you gone through Google Search Console and looked under Manual Actions? How does the rest of GSC look in terms of errors and such?
I would try using the Moz Span Analysis tool and see if you missed any other bad links.
It sounds like it could be possible that Google is manually banning you from the first page. I don't know if that is a real thing or if they actually do that, but I suppose that could be possible! Have you tried sending a message to Google explaining all the steps you have taken to try to remove all spam?
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
-
Will this affect
Hi there! I've got a question that I'm having trouble answering. My client has one site url essentially has two sites within it. The homepage (name-photography.com) content focuses on her fashion photography services with a specific design and look with almost no mention of weddings unless you click the weddings icon. When you click on weddings, it takes you to a "new" site on the same url (name-photography.com/weddings) that has entirely different look and feel. The client would like to improve her visibility for her wedding services and not the fashion photography side. Would it be more beneficial to house the wedding services on an entirely new URL so that homepage content can be wedding focused. Again, with the current homepage, it's all fashion photography focused and not easy to redo. Or could one implement a 301 redirect from the fashion homepage (name-photographer.com) to the wedding homepage (name-photographer.com/weddings)? Thanks for your advice! Jessica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zigzen0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Multiple Keywords for a site
I have a client that is OBSESSED with KWP ranking (don't go there...I know) This client offers multiple services, dog boarding, dog grooming, dog training, dog daycare and dog walking. Essentially these are our focus. She ranks on page one for all of these words (locally of course) BUT she wants to rank in positions 1 and 2 for all of these words. Here's my rub, with her limited budget, we focus on 1 word (and associated long tails like "dog boarding in the south loop) and it takes a couple of months to zoom up to positions 1 or 2 (not counting map pack....she wants ORGANIC) While we're focusing on this 1 word, the others maintain their ranking or slip a few spots (like from 6 to 😎 Conversions average about about 1 a day, organic traffic is roughly 1000 hits a month. In your opinion is it better to split this focus between the 5 target words every month, more slowly building ranking, but maintaining it for longer periods of time. Or do it the way we have been chase dog boarding, then chase training, and so on. It just seems like we are CONSTANTLY chasing something while something else falls. Thanks Tracy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lkilera0 -
Ranking of Travel Sites in SERPs
Hello, I have noticed that some travel sites rank for almost all the keywords but when I click the page, it has no relevant content and often no content at all. I remember Google once updated its algorithm to do away with such sites but I still found some. The question is - if they don't have relevant content or if they don't have content at all, how do they even rank? Secondly, how come they have pages for all keyword combination? How is this achieved? Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Site wide links Concept
Hi All, All type of site wide links are bad for Google or it depends upon other factors as well? For example if you talk about GoDaddy or any other service provider company they put their links on the footer of other websites so in this condition, Google will harm their rankings or not? Also elaborate the best practices for site wide links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Similar Sites on Same Class C
Hi there, I asked a similar question a while ago - please pardon the dupe. I figured being more specific may help. Here's the scenario: I have two customers which sell very similar products. They both host with me so they are both on the same class C of ip addresses. Content on sites is similar due to the nature of the business/industry. There are no links between the two sites - they do not link to one another The HTML is about 50% the same, content near zero other than site structure. They have similar category structures. Question - could being on the same Class C adversely effect rankings of either. One site did particularly well until Panda came around and it's sloooowly coming back. Some advise has been given to the client that the IPs being on the same Class C is killing rankings. I am trying to either validate or refute the claim. All help/feedback appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisInColorado0 -
How long until Sitemap pages index
I recently submitted an XML sitemap on Webmaster tools: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml Once Webmaster tools downloads it, how long do you typically have to wait until the pages index ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0