Backlinks that we didnt place, killing our SERP rank and PR
-
I am in need of advice regarding back links that we did not place, and which are hurting our search engine results. How and why they got there I cannot explain.But they have appeared recently, and are damaging our SERP ranks.
For several years, I have been a member with SEOmoz, and we have done our search engine optimization in house. I am the owner of a personal injury law firm, which is a competitive field in search engine optimization.
Recently, in the spring, we updated our website, added significant content (over 100 additional pages), we set up a better site structure, and we completed a significant back link campaign from white hat sources. As a result, we were the strongest law firm in search engine results in the state of Arizona, and the page rank from our home page went from a 4 to 6, and from our next highest level of pages, they went from a 3 to 6. This happened in 10 week period. Our search engine results were fantastic.
We were getting a significant amount of business from out Places page and our Organic results. That has almost completely dried up.
Approximately 6-8 weeks later, we started having some serious problems. Specifically, our search engine results decreased significantly, our page rank reduced from a six to a four. So we started using SEOmoz tools to see what the problem was, and when we created an open site Explorer report, there are approximately 1000 different links from very shady websites they are now linking to our home page. Some of these linking URLs prompt a download to video and other files. Other of the linking are simple on junk sites.
Obviously, some other person placed these links. First and foremost I am interested in maintaining the integrity of our site, and if there were a way to remove these links, and protect against that in the future, that is what I want. Secondly, if there were a way to find out who did this, I would like to know that also.
What options and/or actions should be taken. I am thinking that I may need to employ a professional/consultant. Will I have to transfer content to another domain?
Your thought and help are appreciated.
Thanks,
-
Just wanted to let you know that the links that are prompting a download are a bug in OSE and not real links. Check out the post by a Linkscape engineer at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains. So sorry for not catching this thread earlier, hope it helps explain some of the problems.
-
I am wondering if your site got penalized because of your backlink campaign.
If you normally don't acquire links during a large span of your business, but suddenly start a large scale backlink campaign, even if it is 'whitehat', Google might get suspicious for the jump of links during the short span.
It would be much better to have a gradual addition of links.
-
Since you did your link building inhouse, let's rule that out as a factor. The next step would be to follow on EGOL's suggestion to investigate your site for any other issues or recent changes.
-
You seem to be focused on those spammy links and I can understand that. They are disturbing. However, before I would blame them for the problem I would want answers to these....
-
is there any problem with the update of your site... were there URL changes, dynamic content assembly, java links in your persistent navigation?
-
the new content that you produced... has it been grabbed by others and posted on their sites... Search for unique sentences in quotes
-
the whitehat links that you obtained... did you have to give any links back to obtain them... are they paid or links that could have been devalued?
For me the spammy links rate my attention only after the potential problems above are ruled out. Lots of sites have these types of links. They are ubiquitous on the web and the sites that hold them usually do not persist for a long time. I believe that duplicate content, linking back to other domains and design problems are more common causes of damage to rankings.
Also, consider that both Ryan and I suggest that the spammy links or the white hat links could have been helping for a short period of time before being devalued.
As for finding an available SEO, I would look for generous and competent contributors here and ask if they are available.
-
-
Ryan, we did not place those links. We went to great lengths to get while hat links.
These 1000+ spammy harmful links (many of which prompt downloads of various files) appeared without our involvement. We did not hand off any link building to anyone. We do it in house based on the techniques we learned on SEOmoz videos and learning materials,
The big issue is as you tracking down and having those links removed. I am looking for either the process of how to do that, or preferably hiring a pro, but dont know where to look for a reputable one
-
We did not acquire the 1000 spammy links, Our backlink campaign was done in house and was painstaking to ensure that they were white hat. Our additional content was 100% original written by us.
The 1000+ links are not only spammy, they prompt downloads of various types of files. we did not place these.
believe me, i am not a conspiracy theorist, but It appears that our site was sabotage with harmful links that we did not place, but obviously someone did with the intent to harm our site
I dont know what part of the county you are in, but I imagine where ever it is, like here, attorney advertising in omnipresent. We were by far the dominant Personal Injury law firm in organic results and also Google places listing results. Probably 50% or our business came from online searches -- which we don't have costs for anything like TV, Radio, outdoor advertising,
I agree that at this point we need a pro to look at it. I want someone who can do forensic type analysis, to find the unwanted and harmful links that we did not place, and have those blocked or removed, and possibly traced,
where should I look to find a reputable pro that can help us
-
Ive seen spammers build links to pages they have placed UGC links on, to boost the value of the links they are getting from your site. Any way they are getting links (even no follow) off your homepage?
BTW I and a mates sites have had exactly the same TBPR increase and then big decrease over about the last month. Nothing seems to have changed in traffic tho
-
we completed a significant back link campaign from white hat sources.
when we created an open site Explorer report, there are approximately 1000 different links from very shady websites they are now linking to our home page.
I hate to state the obvious but it seems most likely the links you gained where not from white hat sources.
Without being able to view your site and the links involved, a likely guess is that your site received paid links which have been devalued.
The first step I would recommend is signing in to Google WMT and submitting a request to determine whether your site is under a penalty. If your site is under a penalty, perform whatever cleanup is necessary to remove the penalty.
If your site is not under a penalty, it is likely those 1000 links from questionable sites gave you a boost, and those links have been devalued which has negatively impacted your overall stats and rankings.
I recognize your site is for a law firm so feel to correct me if you feel I am in error. My understanding is anyone can legally create a link to your site. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. You can track down each site and request them to remove the link. Keep in mind OSE only shows approximately the top 25% of links on the internet. There may be many other links which you are not seeing. Another helpful tool is Google WMT which may display more links.
These "bad" links should not hurt you in any way unless they are paid links and you receive a penalty for buying links. Otherwise they are outside of your control.
I would recommend contacting whomever you used for your link building campaign. Another tool is to take a look at who else these sites have built links for. Can you determine if all of Agency X's clients (or whomever built your backlinks) receives similar links?
-
Most websites that become highly ranked in their niche accumulate a lot of links from spammy domains. My sites have lots of them too. I didn't place them, I can't control them and I don't worry about them.
There are many factors in your question that could relate to your rankings drop.... 1) site was updated, 2) big backlink campaign, 3) added lots of content, 4) one thousand spammy links. Any one of them could be the cause of this drop.
The updated site might have a crawl, indexing or some other problem.... the backlinks you acquired might not be as good as you think.... the content that you uploaded might be duplicated elsewhere or have been spun for other sites... and those spammy links could be the problem.
If you are confident about your updated site, the quality of the backlinks and the uniqueness of your content then my bet would be placed here..... that the 1000 spammy links that were quickly acquired actually helped your rankings temporarily and then were devalued.
If you have any doubts that you can't answer yourself about the first three factors you might get a pro to look at them carefully for you.
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
-
Bad ranking and drops on main keyword
Hi Guy's, I have a question about a website that ranks between SERP 10 - 20 and often drops out of the search results. Looking at authority it should score in atleast in top 10. Netherlands + Belgium - Dutch language
International SEO | | Happy-SEO
https://www.vaneyckshutters.com
Keyword: Shutters (in all languages) Netherlands: SERP 10 - 20 and drops
Belgium Dutch language: Top 3 position
Belgium French language: Top 3 position History:
In the past, the website was live on domain extensions: .nl (Dutch) .be (Belgium) Later they switched to .com/nl/ (Netherlands + Belgium - Dutch language) .com/fr/ (Belgium - French language) And finally they swtiched to .com (Netherlands + Belgium - Dutch language) .com/fr/ (Belgium - French language) *All switched where provided with redirects In 2016 Q3 a new website was launched provided with https://, there where some issues with redirects but that's mainly fixed now. After launching the new website the positions where terrible. The website didn't score on the keyword: Shutters, and some times not even on there own brandname. After a while it stabilised but still sometimes the website dropped out of the search results. A few weeks ago we made some technical changes and now we see drops again. Strange things Still we see strange things happening. Mainly the fact that Belgium NL and FR score good, but that could also be because of lower competition. What about the search result: site:vaneyckshutters.nl (indexed) site:vaneyckshutters.be (indexed) i came across this article, and looked at: vaneyckshutters.nl/robots.txt (present) vaneyckshutters.nl/robots.txt (present) Strange that the meta titel is ignored bij Google:
".com" meta title is the same as the indexed ".nl" and ".be" At some point a saw a redirect from the old website to the new:
302 permanent redirect (made me think there was some tweaking going on) I asked a friend if he could provide some SEO advise and gave suggestions: - In the robots.txt is see "disallow:[empy]", is that smart? Canonical on home is set to: "/" but redirect without "/" x-default in alternate is missing Advise Does anyone see the issue or has an advise for us? Maybe we are missing the clues and is something going wrong on: Server/domain level (redirects) Authority level (still some 404's) Technical issues (hreflang) etc. etc. Hope someone can help us out! Thanks a million!0 -
Backlinks to URLs with Language Parameters (for Chinese version of website) and SEO?
Hey all, We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be: **www.example.com/australia?la=zh ** This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version. My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)? Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.
International SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
What is the best way to rank well on both Google.co.uk & Google.com?
I am working on a website that is primarily a UK based software company but is now expanding into the US. The website is a .com site and is not geo-targeted to any specific location. Currently the site ranks well on Google.co.uk for a number of the focus keywords. We are now targeting Google.com as well to increase visibility in the USA. The site is ranking number 1 for one of the focus terms on Google.co.uk but no where to be seen on Google.com but on another term the site ranks 3rd in both Google.co.uk and .com. There are a number of other terms that rank on the first page in Google.co.uk and on the 3rd or 4th page in Google.com. The server is located in Germany and I do not want to geotarget the site to the US as I am concerned this would have a negative impact on the .co.uk ranking. The site currently has a mix of .com and .co.uk links pointing back to the site, in actual fact possibly more links actually come from US sites already. My original plan was to just focus on building links back to the target pages from US sites rather than creating a US folder on the site and geotargeting that section of the site in WMT and having to build page authority for a completely new page with no existing backlinks. But now that I have a number 1 ranking on .co.uk and the same term not ranking at all in .com as well as a postion 3 ranking for a term in both .co.uk and .com I am slightly confused as to the best options. Any help, advice, opinions would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | PaulSimms0 -
Single keyword not ranking in US only
I recently took on a client who had a 6 month old site, and had not done any seo or link building. All links so far have been natural, I can't see anything dodgy that would cause a problem. It's fairly niche so just sorting out the page titles and a bit of on site stuff got them ranking on page 1 & 2 in the UK and US for most of their keywords. However their main keyword which is just the name of the product (lets say xxx and xxxs ) does not appear anywhere in the US search, despite ranking #10 in the UK and all related terms ('what is xxx', 'how to use xxx', 'benfits of xxx' etc) having similar rank on both. They didn't have any analytics installed before I took over so I can't see any historical changes in traffic from different keywords. Any ideas why one single keyword would not show up at all just on Google US when everything else is ok?
International SEO | | ricalebro0 -
Getting ranked in French on Google UK ?
Hellooooo the Moz community ! (#superexcited, # firstpost) Here's my problem. I'm working for a client specialised in Corporate Relocation to London for French families. (I'm reworking the entire site from the ground up, so I can manoeuvre pretty easily) The thing is, these families will either be : Searching on Google FR but mostly in English (French as well) Searching on Google UK but mostly in French ! (and of course, English as well) To be honest, I'm really not sure what strategy I should go with. Should I just target each local market in its native language and google will pick up the right language if people are searching in the "opposite" language ? I'd love some tips to help get me started. Sadly, I don't have a lot of data yet. (Client didn't even have tracking up on their site before I came in). So far here's what I got (on very small number of visitors): Location: 50+% from UK / 20+% from France.
International SEO | | detailedvision
Language : 60+% En / 35+% Fr Thank you. Tristan0 -
How can I replicate India SERPs from US
I was recently checking out our analytics keywords stats and I am seeing traffic noted as google organic traffic coming from India. When I do a search on http://www.google.co.in/ for those terms using a "incognito" browser with no cookies, and not logged in I don't see our site in the first 100 results. The same thing happens on google.com if I try to set the account in india. I am trying to see if this might be an issue with an adwords campaign not getting auto-tagged (auto-tagging is turned on in adwords), or if there is something else going on. The keyword campaign gets many more clicks than analytics shows for this organic option so perhaps it is an odd rare occurrence. I am glad to have the traffic, but I want to be sure it is actually tracking correctly as organic, or if PPC is not tagging for some reason 😉 Any suggestions or thoughts?
International SEO | | SL_SEM0 -
Ranking local content against English content
Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve
International SEO | | sjcbayona-412180