Google Penalty
-
Hi all, I've been having some trouble with Google lately.
Awhile back I came across a quality site that had a "Useful Links" directory. I searched the site and finally found an email. I emailed the webmaster and requested a link. They obliged but wanted a link back, so I wrote a nice blog post that included a link to their site.
This brings me to question number one:
1. Would Google see this as a link exchange?
Problem number two with the link from this site. My site is fairly new with not much of a link profile. What I discovered was that they displayed random links from the "Useful Links" directory in the sidebar and in the footer. So all of a sudden we have a ton of links from one website. This site has hundreds maybe even thousands of pages.
2. Would Google see all of these links and think that they were paid or spam?
We've had a nice steady increase in traffic from Google then all of a sudden it dropped to nothing for two days and has come back a little.
Here is my data from open site explorer:
1/15/2013 PA=27/100 DA=14/100 LRD=5 Total Links=42
2/12/2013 PA=31/100 DA=19/100 LRD=9 Total Links=137
3/19/2013 PA=28/100 DA=18/100 LRD=5 Total Links=212
We experienced the drop in Google traffic on 2/4/2013. So according to open site explorer everything is ok. But is this big jump in links a problem?
Thanks to anybody that reads this long post.
-
Thanks Robert,
I''m actually trying to remedy the situation right now. I've asked the webmaster to please remove our link and I've also adjust the blog post that I wrote and removed the link to their site.
I am pushing the organization that I currently work for to go in the direction of content creation and content marketing. It's just hard to convince the sales dept not to blatantly sell in their posts. It's also hard to convince management to have patience.
Do you have an financial sites in your network that would be interested in an article about merchant fees? I'm writing that right now.
-Brandon
-
Hey Brandon,
Come sell for me! Just kidding. I do like your straight forward approach though. But, with link building I would suggest first changing your point of view just a bit.
First, there are many ways you can assist a webmaster and acquire a link. What you did is called a reciprocal link. "I will give you one Brandon, but I want one in return." So, reciprocity. Those links are frowned upon by Google and are said to be of little value. (Yes, I am saying that is what "they" say.) But, if you put a link in your author info or in your content and someone picks it up, and later down the road for whatever reason you happen to link to that same site from yours as it answers some point you are making, it IMO is still a natural link both ways. (Larry nor Sergey will tell me though.)Then you say this: **What I discovered was that they displayed random links from the "Useful Links" directory in the sidebar and in the footer. So all of a sudden we have a ton of links from one website. This site has hundreds maybe even thousands of pages. **
So, the value of the sidebar and footer links is less by far than in the content portion and that is likely helping you. But, personally, without looking at a business reason for not doing it, I would disavow all those links as preventive medicine. (Those who want to watch the world burn slow down a second and I shall 'splain my point.) My reasoning is twofold, first when I think of a site having natural links and I ignore whatever definition of natural that is in vogue, I look at a site/page that for whatever reason gains some measure of "popular" traffic. If, people are there for some reason (traffic) and they are being driven for any honest reason (not sent because they thought they won $ from an email), some percentage of them will "share" that find or that info, etc. (I sent the video of the guy pushing his girlfriend off the cliff to several people when I first saw it on CNN.) In SEO, a lot of what we do is centered around mathematics and probability, other is around behavior, other is creative, etc. But the probability portion provides that at some level, as something becomes more and more popular, more and more people will want to show it to others (link), NATURALLY.
At the same time, lets take a site that has nothing really drawing traffic to it. It is there and gets X visits a day and occasionally more, but not a lot. If you look at its link growth, it should mirror the traffic to some degree. But, if all of a sudden it appears to start gathering link steam, without gathering traffic, I have to believe that in itself could provide a strong signal as to "natural" or not.I said that to provide a predicate for this: If you build quality content that people want to read, you will gain links. As more people come to the site, find it as a resource, etc. more link to it. Over time more links bring more traffic and more traffic brings more links. What could be more natural.
I can tell you from experience it works and that we still have certain link building initiatives for sites. Occasionally, I will allow someone like you a link just because I want to. I do not ask for a reciprocal link. I can tell you that if you want to write something that fits for one of our sites and the content is good, I will give you the link without blinking. Just make sure it is not you are writing an article for a veterinarian site and linking back to a gambling as that affects my traffic.
I hope this helps and, hell, if they read this I will thumb them up.
Best Brandon, Good luck,
Robert
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
-
Bit.ly Links & Google
Does Google treat bit.ly links differently? If someone linked to my site through bit.ly, would Google see that link as if they had used the normal (exmaple.com/blogpost/) link?
Link Building | | roger2051 -
Disavow data for non-manual penalty
I'm working on cleaning link profile for a client. He has lots of crappy links pointing to his site. I tried to contact site owners so that they remove those links. No go for the most part. Since it's not a manual penalty, there's no need to specify when exactly I tried to contact those site owners, add emails to my disavow file, etc. It's my understanding that it's OK to just add domains to Google's disavow tool to submit because there was no manual action and it won't be checked by a human being. Would that be the right way to go?
Link Building | | vitaliykolos0 -
Google indexing nofollow links
Hi Guys I have yellowpages.com.au appearing in the link profiles for some of my clients, but not in others (even if clients without the link in their profile have had an actual link on yellowpages.com.au longer than some who do have it in their profile). My understanding is that Google MAY eventually index a nofollow link... My question is what would cause Google to actually index it?
Link Building | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
Is there any Penalty for building in bound inks too quickly?
I was speaking with someone today who was spreading out their link building because they were afraid that getting too many too quickly would incur penalties from Google and Bing. Is this a real thing? I have always been under the impression that if they are high quality links and directories that there was no limit to how many you could add other than the limited availability of the high quality links and directories themselves. I would appreciate some input on this.
Link Building | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Google ranking penalty
Do you think that our websites involvement with LinkMonster.com link building program is the cause of our penalty by google in our ranking ?
Link Building | | websitedzyn0 -
Free Classified Backlinks & Google
Is there a risk that Google will de-index your site or lower your ranking if you have too many backlinks from free classifed sites? I would just use 1 free ad per classified website. Thanks.
Link Building | | finalfrontier0 -
Google unranks target keywords
I have read a number of changes in Google (see:http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627)
Link Building | | LeeAnn30
But as of late I am having some problems with my website, and I am curious if anyone of you are also experiencing the same.
The problem is this in SEO it is a SOP that you use your target keyword as your anchor text having the url as the landing page for the page you want to rank for.
But recently the pages I want to rank for specific keywords are going down instead Google is ranking my homepage for keywords I don't want to rank for.
So instead of having my target pages rank it is my homepage that gets shown in Google, now this is what is really interesting the keywords I rank for are not in the meta title, description, keywords of the homepage in fact there are no specific keywords at all in the content!
I checked the backlinks and I have never created any backlinks to my site using those keywords I rank for.
And this is happening at a very fast rate, rankings and pages going down and only the homepage is showing up in Google.
I really want to know your thoughts.0 -
Do http:// links to a http://www. site count the same to Google?
In terms of links to one's site helping your position on Google, if your site defaults to http://www.example.com (automatically adds "www." even if it isn't typed), does Google count links that appear as http://example.com (without the www.) with the same "weight"? Thanks.
Link Building | | celife0