Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
-
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?
More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.
Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..
"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."
We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.
Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?
What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?
Any other tips/tricks?
-
Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.
As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.
We're getting there
Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.
-
I'd hate for you to throw the baby out with the bath water - there are some good links you'd want to keep, and starting from scratch is a real pain. This is what I'd do:
-
Look at all the pages you did build artificial links to in OSE. Consider dropping (410/404 instead of 301) pages that are mostly sending artificial links.
-
Pages that you didn't build artificial links to should be fine. Continue to 301 them as you are.
-
Evaluate the pages you did build links to, and try decide which option is easier. An example would be the home page.
-
Remove the bad/article links manually. If you can't, just do your best and then disavow and resubmit.
-
Don't 301 the page (just kill it and 410 or similar), and then try to salvage any of the good links by having them changed to the .org.
There are at most 200 linking domains once you combine links from all your tools - it shouldn't be hard to see fairly quickly whether the site is a spam/article domain or a legitimate site. Also, if your friend's site is relevant there shouldn't be a problem if he links with branded (non-commercial) anchor text.
Most people only have a handfull of pages they build links to - review those and hopefully you can start over fresh with the good links you had.
-
-
Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend
-
Looking at the back links for .org, I'd think seriously about just dropping that 301 from the home page of the .com site and any other pages that have bad links going to them.
I'm not sure why OSE shows links that are pointing to the .com site as back links to the .org site. I'd go ahead and delete those accounts, since it seems all those links point to .com anyway.
I'd be working to distance myself from the .com site as much as possible.
-
Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012. Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.
But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems. One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.
-
180 days is the best practice for leaving a 301 in place. You could remove that redirect and that will leave all those links pointing to the .com unaffiliated with the .org site.
How did you do your 301s? page by page or did you 301 the whole domain to the .org site? There are still a few URLs left in the index for that domain
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
-
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
Effect of Publishing Blog Posts Resembling Classified Advertisements
Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) markets commercial real estate for lease in New York City. Any potential negative impact in terms of ranking and traffic by using our blog post in an unconventional manner? I am considering publishing a weekly post describing the latest commercial listings for lease. The post would be formatted and resemble classified advertising appearing in such newspapers as The New York Times. The ads are concise and appealing. Property listings drive a high click thru rate, so I believe blogs posts based on property listings and formatted like old newspaper ads might really improve visitor engagement. Each add could have a link to a corresponding listing page. Would using the blog in this manner every week have a detrimental effect or could prove beneficial? Thoughts??? lr6MIiR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Where/how do you set up 301 redirects when keeping the same domain and not preserving the filename?
Hi there, I'm just reaching to to ask for some help in understanding where 301 redirects should be set up on a website when keeping the same domain but not preserving the original filenames? Essentially what is happening is an old website is being completely overhauled and brought up to date from a technical and usability standpoint. While the SEO isn't great naturally many of the pages have been indexed by google over time. A few pages have decent statistics and I don't want to lose the juice from them, but they do still need a lot of improving. So my question is this, would all the redirection take place in the .htaccess file only in this case? From reading here on Moz I think this is the case, but I need to confirm that. I was reading this article which has thrown me slightly: https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/redirection but this seems more complex as the website was actually moving domains. Open to any insight and if you need further clarification or information let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
A lot of news / Duplicate Content - what to do?
Hi All, I have a blog with a lot of content (news and pr messages), I want to move my blog to new domain. What is your recommendation? 1. Keep it as is. old articles -> 301 -> same article different URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
2. Remove all the duplicate content and create 301 from the old URL to my homepage.
3. Keep it as is, but add in the meta-tags NoIndex in duplicate articles. Thanks !0 -
Keyword Targeting / Cannibalisation
Hi Guys We're about to launch a very large website for a flooring company and would like to find out more about _key word _cannibalisation - to put my mind at rest. I know Rand posted a Whiteboard Friday early last year about this topic and mentioned using part of the same keyword was ok to use. All our keywords are specifically geared for "user intent" meaning each keyword has relevance and the content to back up the keyword. We've ensured the keywords are located within each url, placed at the start of the page title, h1 etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GaryVictory1 -
Directory Listings with anchor text = Should we just Delete them all?
Hi Dr Moz'ers So our ex-contracted SEO "experts" have a enlisted our website to 40 odd directories with the same key word and copy. Is it best to just delete them all to avoid a possible negative SEO/Google outcome? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | supps0 -
Panda/Penguin & Ecommerce Sites in similar niches
Hello, We have a few online stores that are in similar niches. How do we make sure that we don't get penalized for this (Panda/Penguin) We have the sites interlinked, but our newest one is not going to be linked to the others. Also, will rewriting descriptions help if the product is on more than one site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles
Hi, I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000. So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category. My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go? Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically? So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12??? If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to. We are using canonical tags. Thanks, Jarrett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrett.mackay0