Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?
-
Dear Friends
I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png
-
Hey - it's just so hard to say without a link / some research. Just focus on quality and try to understand where the problems are so you are not SEOing in the dark. You could get an experienced consultant to take a look for a few hours or get a full on SEO audit which again will give you some more intel and a prioritised approach. Certainly though you can likely learn lots from analytics by understanding where there has been a drop in traffic, engagement etc.
Always try to base the work you do on data and analysis where possible so you are not just spinning your wheels!
-
Thank you so much. I am doing the same right now. Please let me know whether the thinking is right
-
I had 3 ads on site and i am dividing it all so that the top is not heavy. it wasnt previously heavy too, but i have modified it nonetheless.
-
I am rewriting at least 150 articles out of the 950 articles on site. I think those articles are poor in quality. And they need a boost. I am also tackling duplicate content issues and have removed multiple tags from a single post and kept 1 tag on 1 post limit.
-
If after all this, the site does not come up, then it is a backlinks problem and then i need to dig into ahrefs and check out what to do. But i am hoping to god it recovers after the content modification.
These things might take 2 months but i think they will make a slow but sure difference. My livelihood depends on this blog so the return of traffic is very essential for me.
-
-
Hey
The main issue here is that things rarely happen in isolation. Sure, you may have had a penalty for outbound links but if you are selling links or generally looking to manipulating results with the links on the site what else is going on?
You have to step back and look at the site with a quality reviewers perspective:
- Why does the site exist?
- Does it provide value to the intended audience?
- Is it the best answer for a range of targeted queries?
- Is the site an expert resource?
- Is the site an authority on the targeted topic(s)?
- Is the site trustworthy?
- Is the site technically well optimised?
- Does the site have technical or traditional SEO issues?
There are a lot of moving parts here but you need to go back to basics. It's always hard to advise without any direct context (not having seen the site) but the the two elements I would consider would be a qualitative review and a more traditional SEO audit.
This is a great overview of the leaked Google quality guidelines:
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines
That is probably a good starting place and you can start to ask the big questions rather than look for some single algorithmic answer to why your traffic seems to be going in the wrong direction.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Should I worry that thousands of spam sites are linking to me?
I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and discovered there are 117,301 links to my site— mostly from very low-quality, spammy websites. I definitely did not solicit these links. I'm worried they are from a competitor trying to get me penalized by Google. Should I be worried about this? spam-websites.png?1505218483
Technical SEO | | steve_benjamins0 -
Webmaster tools not showing links but Moz OSE is showing links. Why can't I see them in the Google Search Console
Hi, Please see attached photos. I have a website that shows external follow links when performing a search on open site explorer. However, they are not recognised or visible in search console. This is the case for both internal and external links. The internal links are 'no follow' which I am getting developer to rectify. Any ideas why I cant see the 'follow' external links? Thanks in advance to those who help me out. Jesse T7dkL5s T7dkL5s OkQmPL4 3qILHqS
Technical SEO | | jessew0 -
Will links be counted?
We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers. The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
Are bad links the reason for not ranking?
Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea. We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet. However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred. This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us? I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution? If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EduardoRuiz1 -
How to find all the links to my site
hi i have been trying to find all the links that i have to my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk but i am not having any luck. I have used the open explorer but it is not showing all the links but when i go to my google webmaster page it shows me more pages than it does on the semoz tool. can anyone help me sort this out and find out exactly what links are going into my site many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is link cloaking bad?
I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites. In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links. Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
Bad back links
Hi Folks I seem to have approx 587 back links to my homepage from this site kitchendetailsanddesign.com since my entire site has under a 1000 back links; I wonder if I should be worried? I've tried contacting the webmaster to remove them but no luck any tips 🙂
Technical SEO | | PHDAustralia680