Is this organic search sketchiness worth unwinding?
-
Started working on a site and learned that the person before me had done a fairly sketchy maneuver and am wondering if it's a net gain to fix it.
The site has pages that it wanted to get third party links linking to. Thing is, the pages are not easy to naturally link to boost them in search.
So, the woman before me started a new blog site in the same general topic area as the first/main site. The idea was to build up even the smallest bit of authority for the new blog, without tipping Google off to shared ownership. So, the new blog has a different owner/address/registrar/host and no Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools account to share access to.
Then, as one method of adding links to the new blog, she took some links that originally pointed to the main site and re-directed them to the blog site.
And voila! ...Totally controllable blog site with a bit of authority linking to select pages on the main site!
At this point, I could un-redirect those links that give the blog site some of its authority. I could delete the links to the main site on the blog pages.
However, on some level it may have actually helped the pages linked to on the main site.
The whole thing is so sketchy I wonder if I should reverse it.
I could also just leave it alone and not risk hurting the pages that the blog currently links to.
What do you think? Is there a serious risk to the main site in this existing set up? The main site has hundreds of other links pointing to it, a Moz domain authority of 43, thousands of pages of content, 8 years old and Open Site Explorer Spam Score of 1. So, not a trainwreck of sketchiness besides this issue.
To me, the weird connection for Google is that third party sites have links that (on-page-code-wise) still point to the main site, but that resolve via the main site's redirects to the blog site. BTW, the blog site points to other established sites besides the main site. So, it's not the exclusive slave to the main site.
Please let me know what you think. Thanks!
-
I agree with the two methods that both you and Gaston have pointed out.
The downside to reversing those links is that the domain authority could drop a bit—which could impact their rankings on the SERPs. If this happens, the client might think you are doing something wrong and causing their rankings to rank when, in theory, you were trying to help get rid of any sketchy links. In my opinion, I’d keep them. They’ll make your work perform better. Disavowing them could yield worse results than what their former SEO provided. If that happens, you're playing defense and blaming.
Hope this helps!
-
Well, I like Gaston's answers on these boards and at the same time was curious if that seemed like the concensus.... leave it cause no real risk.
-
Hi 94501! Did Gaston answer you question, and if so, would you mind marking his response a "Good Answer?"
Otherwise, how else can we help?
-
Thanks, Gaston!
Any other insights, folks?
Mike
-
Hi there,
There are 2 exits here, and you've pointed them:
- Reverse those links
- Leave all as it is now.
On one hand, if you aren't confortable with those links, just reverse all.
On the other hand, you've said that the main site has a lot of links and it those 'unnatural links' will not make harm and that the satellite blog has really few conections to the latter. I'd say that there isnt, almost nothing, risk. So, i'd leave as it is now.
Hope it helps.
GR.
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
-
How can I stop spam Google Organic traffic?
Hey Moz, I'm a rather experienced SEO who just encountered a problem I have never faced. I am hoping to get some advice or be pointed in the right direction. I just started work for a new client. Really great client and website. Nicer than most design/content. They will need some rel canonical work but that is not the issue here. The traffic looked great at first glance 131k visits in April. Google Analytics Acquisition Overview showed 94% of the traffic as organic. When I dug deeper and looked at the organic source I saw that Google was 99.9% of it. Normal enough. Then I looked at the time on site and my jaw dropped. 118,454 Organic New Users for Google only stayed on the site for 3 seconds. There is no way that the traffic is real. It does not match what Google Webmaster tools, Moz, and Ahrefs are telling me. How do I stop a service that is sending fake organic Google traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | placementLabs0 -
Google Cookies - Organic vs PPC visitors
I am not a developer - I am researching this for our team, so please, be gentle... I am also not quite sure how to ask this question. We want to serve up custom pages for visitors from Google organic. We aren't doing anything underhanded - the pages will have very small differences that will not affect our rankings and won't land us in Google jail. When a Google visitor hits one of our pages, what specific piece of data are we looking for to determine: a. It's a Google visitor b. He/she came from organic results. I need to tell our developers to look for something that triggers the custom page. It's the same data that Google Analytics uses to trigger the appropriate visitor type. Please pardon my naivete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
ECommerce search results to noindex?
Hi, To avoid duplicated content and the possibility of thousands additional pages to an ecommerce website would it be a reasonable solution to have the page as a no-index, would this benefit the site? Thanks **Lantec **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lantec0 -
Does Having A High PPC Bounce Rate Affect Organic SERPs?
Hi Mozzers. My website uses a landing page for Google Adwords traffic targeting keywords like HR Software, HR Systems etc. The design of the landing page is similar to our website but a key difference is that, being a landing page, we've removed the navigation (it is still possible to navigate to the main website by clicking on the logo). We've A/B tested this and found that by removing the navigation we get more people converting/signing up for the free trial of our service. We track conversions using Google Analytics. Depending on the keyword the conversion rate is between 2.5% and 5%. However, because we've removed the navigation the bounce rate is really high, circa 80% for our landing page compared to an average for our website of approx 40%. Would having such a high bounce rate harm our organic rankings for the rest of the website? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OctopusHR0 -
Organic Google Sitelinks - can I edit?
A client just contacted me saying a competitor is threatening legal action threatened against a page description in a Google sitelink (just double checked and its in the serps results too). I checked the site and the content doesn't appear on that page or anywhere else on the site. I also added a Meta description to that page to see if that will have an effect. The page is the home page and I don't really want to demote it. Is there anything else I can/should do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | agua0 -
Are prices shown in search results good for e-commerce sites?
Hello here. I own an e-commerce website (virtualsheetmusic.com) and with the fact we have implemented structured data for our product pages, now our search results on Google appear with pricing information whereas most of our competitors don't have that information displayed (yet). I am wondering: Do you think is that good? What side effects could that cause? Less CTR? Less bounce rate? Less traffic? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How to show country name in google search result
I have a site with tld .com but my target country is United kingdom so i want to show United Kingdom in SERPs.How can i show it ? I have already set target country United Kingdom in Webmaster tools but still it is not showing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
De-indexing search results noindex, follow or noindex, nofollow
If search results were not originally blocked with robots.txt, and need to be de-indexed, is it better to use noindex, nofollow or noindex, follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0