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Hey Everyone,

This query may be more for a Joomla developer or someone that has had a similar issue. I'm not really looking for answers like, "check Google Search Console" or anything like that.

We have a client who recently had all of their core pages delisted in Google but the blog is still being displayed in search results. For example, if you search "company name" they have a blog post that ranks #13 or so organically. I tested Google Search Console and Google is saying that the site is temporarily unavailable.

We haven't made any changes or updates to Joomla's core structure so I'm unsure as to where this change is coming from. Here are some items we've checked:

1. Site searches within Google, resulted in seeing core pages are not indexed but blog pages are

2. Google Search Console - looked for manual actions (none found), looked at sitemap errors (nothing mentioned), looked at robots.txt (no issues here), attempted to fetch the site as Google (temporarily unavailable).

3. Called the hosting company (Rackspace) to discuss potential issues. They were extremely helpful but we were unable to find anything.

The blog is actually a Module that was added so I'm thinking something has changed to block Google bots from the core Joomla structure but it hasn't blocked them from the blog structure.

Without putting the company name or url on blast, has anyone heard of or experienced anything like this? Any help or insights would be much appreciated!

Hey Monica,

Thanks so much for your response. Couple of things...

Building Quality Links vs. Removing Bad Links

We are definitely aren't moving away from building quality links. I'm just wondering if focusing more efforts on removing is going to be a better use of time as it seems like links are all about percentages. If I remove one bad blog comment link that results into 100+ links then it will build up the percentage of quality link our profile consists of.

EMDs

I mentioned EMDs earlier and in reality it's more of a PMD as they have a branded word + keyword within the domain, and this seems to work extremely well for them. We've considered 301ing to a domain that has the keyword within it, still branded but at least compares to the only thing they really have on us besides a cleaner link profile. When I say cleaner, I mean a lot smaller so the percentage of quality is there even though it is only like 10 links (which we also have).

301 to a new domain

I'm aware of 301 redirects juice etc.., however our "new" domain we've owned and registered just as long as our current domain so it has the age. It's just a little longer to include brand + keyword instead of just brand. Also, in this competitive niche (we're talking, $50+ a click on AdWords) the organic #1 has, literally, 0 links... They redirected their old domain to a new one which makes me believe "masking" old link profiles could be possible?

Food for thought, again thanks for your reply!

Hello Mozzers,

I'd love to receive some advice for a client of mine and insights you may have regarding pros and cons on changing your main domain to mask links. Within a competitive niche there are about 4 different sites that routinely rank 1-4. Our site crushes all three on just about all metrics except we have a high volume of nofollow links and our site remains at #4. Our site is much older so we have significantly more links than these smaller sites, including pre-penguin penalty spammy links (like blog comments that make up 50+ nofollow links from 1 comment per domain).

Obviously we are attempting to remove any toxic links and disavow, however the blog comment nofollow links skew our anchor text ratio pretty intensely and we are worried that we aren't going to make a dent in removing this type of links. Just disavowing them hasn't worked alone, so if we are unable to remove the bulk of these poor quality links (nofollow, off-topic anchor text, etc..) we are considering 301 redirecting the current domain to a new one. We've seen success with this in a couple of scenarios, but wanted to see other insights as to if masking links with a 301 could send fresh signals and positively effect rankings.

Also wanted to mention, 2 of the 3 competitors that outrank us have EMD's for the primary keywords.

Appreciate your time, insights, and advice on this matter.

Hey Mozzers,

I'm noticing that several sites of mine are triggering rich snippets for REVIEWS when I do site:search, however when I remove the site:search their results are stripped of rich snippets.

Any thoughts on this/others seeing similarities?

I recently noticed a large number of backlinks from low authority directories coming in for one of my clients. These links were either purchased from a competitor or from a directory service site that knows we might be willing to pay to have bad links removed. I've contacted the website admin and they require a payment of $.30 per link to have them removed from their directory. Has anyone had a similar experience? I'm also considering using the disavow tool but I've heard the outcome of using this tool is usually bad. I'd appreciate any feedback, thanks!

I agree with y'all, this is definitely a short term win for your competitor. I've seen a lot of our competitors have short gains since penguin 2.0 with spammy tactics. It'll come back to bite them, we just don't know when.

EGOL, is right too, they are pretty dang good at blackhat. If there is a way to spam up the universe they've got it down to a science. I haven't looked at their backlink profiles, but I'd expect to see quite a few chinese domains in there.

Just got this message on one of my sites as well. I thought we had been doing everything by the book but am finding a lot of directory submission websites the farther down I go. Most of our links are from solid sites with solid page ranks, but there are some directories like this: http://www.56resolutions.info/Business/Equipment/?s=H that I think may be giving us some problems.

I guess our next step is talking to everyone here to find out who submitted the site to these directories and then attempt to get them removed.

Hi Clay,

I know Vahe has already answered your question but I also wanted to expand on how I use Woo Rank Reports. Typically these reports are very useful for an initial "where are we" report for a website. They offer a really quick and clean summary on what can be improved upon (very nice to show clients too). Most of the issues or items missing can be resolved fairly easily.

SEOmoz is much better for measurability and long term tracking. The errors and feedback that SEOmoz will provide you with allows you to build upon those initial changes you've made as well as continue to tweak and monitor your site.

I definitely encourage the use of both alongside your Google Analytics and Webmaster tools! Good luck to you.

-Aaron