Site recently hit - should I do anything or wait?

[rlopes]

On Saturday my rankings/traffic dropped about 30%.

I've hired someone to create backlinks on the last month, so I'm suspecting this could be the problem.

On the other hand, I was searching for duplicate content and I just saw that many sites have copied my content.

Should I rewrite my content (5 pages only)?
Should I stop the link building?

[kellyman]

TBH I don't believe, someone will point dodgy links at you in the hope it gets you banned.

I think if you were honest and in a competitive market there was an element, of spam links mixed in with the good,

I can see in my niche even the site that is position one for nearly every keyword has an element of these spammy mass produced links.

Maybe you.. but i wont talk about you Ill talk about my SEO guy as i know nothing about your site, he may have subscribed to something like The ALN network, where they automate backlinking for a set period of time,

Maybe you were on the article submission where the SEO or service you bought added a spun article to SEO Link Vine or these other networks and there still drip feeding totally crap and unrelavant sites because of the automation

I can Honestly tell you i have not backlinked for over a year yet when running a advanced Majestic SEO report on my backlinks im seeing posts from February.

Either Google is going for SEO's and spam with an iron rod and taking no prisoners or they have overcooked the algorithm, if its the later it will be put right in due course.

[rlopes]

@kellyman I think you overestimate Google. Just search the BH forums and you'll see many people trying to get their competitors down with link spamming.

[kellyman]

The word there is trying, and can never be proven,

If there was a way, Black Hat or whatever that person who can manipulate the serpes that way would be a very wealthy person and totally control that Niche or whatever niche they wanted to be in.

I do agree though from this thread alone that Spammy links are causing this issue at present but from what i have seen from what i have seen its only been Very recent, and from the amount of feedback where sites and niches have totally been shaken up, it will be reversed at some point.

External links out of your control should not be able to hurt your site.

I took a look at someones site after they dropped last month and their SEO was totally built on these ALN, Linkvine and blog packages 500 links worth in a small geo targeted site first page for many local keywords, these links get taken away and devalued no links rankings plumet down, people shouting penalty but its nothing of the sort all it is that blue widgets in London value for that site has disappeared, because the link value has too, i bet 80% of these sites would recover with some genuine decent quality links in their place.

[SEOPanda]

Has anyone received this notice, but nothing happened with their site? If so, did you still submit a reconsideration request?

We received one today, and our site still ranks well. We don't buy links, and have a natural profile. We do buy ads though, which some have direct links, but the purpose is for advertising, not for SEO.

Any thoughts?

[SEOPanda]

kellyman - that was a wise post ;)

Tedster, so if you agree with this, then you feel the message is automated, and only because the links from certain blogs are now considered spammy since the last version of Panda ran?

[tedster]

I certainly do think the detection and the messages are automated. The date is VERY roughly coincident with the last Panda iteration (that was March 23), but this bad backlink assault is not part of Panda. The detection is running in other areas of the total algorithm.

[SEOPanda]

I understand this isn't directly related to Panda, but rather what was mentioned about how many blogs were devalued. Since they were devalued, if we have links on these blogs, can they be marked as "unnatural" all of a sudden, and cause this message?

Guess I'm just trying to understand what is happening.

[kellyman]

Well I mentioned in my post i have not done any kind of back-linking for over 12 months, in the past i used a SEO company that got me the results i paid him for, created through spamming forums, Spun articles distributed to these blog networks and so on

So whatever has just happened, is picking up on my past.

My links these days are acquired naturally from my blog posts and articles that only go on my site.

So we could argue that these networks got devalued so did my link juice, or we could say that external links which are out of my control caused the drop ...

[petehall]

@kellyman I have seen almost a full recovery in positions and have reduced titles, eliminated description tags which are repetitive and fixed a few urls.

Over optimisation?... perhpas the links message is not related?

Also referrals are still down but sales are fine, so I am currently exploring other avenues. Mobile traffic is way down, and that is unusual.

[SEOPanda]

@petehall - this message doesn't look like it has anything to do except with external links.

[kellyman]

@ Petehall

That's really good news for you

I just read exactly that on another forum, along with varying the anchor text to show things like click here, and my site name just to weaken the anchor text, and doing this as we speak, im still way down, so going try this now

Just curious how long after you made the changes did you see a recovery and how big is your site and from that site how many titles did you change ?

[SEOPanda]

@kellyman - he's talking about on page changes, not external back links which is what this thread is about.

[kellyman]

Just curious how long after you made the changes did you see a recovery and how big is your site and from that site how many titles did you change ?

Please read again, i know what he wrote and all i said is that i see that on another forum with one added twist is where they varied the anchor and see full recovery

Just curious how long after you made the changes did you see a recovery and how big is your site and from that site how many titles did you change ?

[petehall]

Around 200 pages and shortened almost all titles plus created unique meta descriptions. I havent altered any links, perhaps leave these for the time being.

Recovery in around 48 hours, still on going.

Never change too much at once... links will take much longer to evaluate than the obvious on page factors.

[kellyman]

@ petehall

Thank you Im really pleased it worked out for you

hopefully i can come back too in 48 hours and give some good news fingers crossed

[petehall]

@SEOPanda we all took the same % hit at the same time, hence the relation. Sorry if I have diverted the topic slightly.

[tedster]

We do buy ads though, which some have direct links, but the purpose is for advertising, not for SEO.

If those links do not include a nofollow attribute, then they might be part of the problem. In the past, I know that Google just ignored commonly used advertising links when the source site did not include the nofollow attribute, but that was in the past. Maybe things are changing (but maybe not... it's hard to tell.)

but rather what was mentioned about how many blogs were devalued

It was blog NETWORKS that were devalued. And if you saw what was in those networks, I'd say there was no gray area at all. It was a clear manipulation, using automatically generated text, badly spun articles that didn't make sense... all kinds of spammy techniques.

If you used the services of a blog network, you would know it.

[kellyman]

@kellyman I have seen almost a full recovery in positions and have reduced titles, eliminated description tags which are repetitive and fixed a few urls.

Over optimisation?... perhpas the links message is not related?

Also referrals are still down but sales are fine, so I am currently exploring other avenues. Mobile traffic is way down, and that is unusual.

I took petehalls advice today on my second site which is local and only 15 pages, changed the title and descriptions, i also removed the google analytics from my site (as advised on another forum) and i too see this site kind of make a recovery today, not everything has returned but the main keywords that dropped 3 out of 5 have returned to page 1 position 3 where they were prior to the drop. that's up nearly 11 places from where they sat for the last 2 months

Now this got me thinking and i believe like i stated from the start is that this new algo is a glitch, i dont believe its intended to drop sites has it has been doing, that would only muck up the quality of searches .

I am just awaiting the reconsideration request from my main site, then i will add the same fix to that site and see if that too recovers

[petehall]

@kellyman I am still seeing very bouncy results, but when they look bad it's the old style title in the results. Also making each page of your site significantly distinguishable from the next is the key I feel

[CainIV]

Sometimes the simplest of links and work yield big rewards. Building up the inbound link profile with local Chamber of Commerce, accreditation, membership links and local links matching your business address can help offset poor quality links (if this is the case for you)

[SEOPanda]

Instead of reaching out to everyone to change links which I am not sure if G even thinks is a problem, what if we simple 404 the page? Would that in effect be "removing the backlinks" ?

Thanks

[zippyonenut]

I received one of the Google letters March 2, soon after we started dropping for HUGE (Over 120,000 uniques monthly) competitive keywords that we were positioned at the top for. I wasn't sure what it was that caused this letter from Google. After I studied our site I could not find anything suspicious. I was really guessing after reading Google was getting serious about Title tags and Pop-ups so I removed the pop-up made adjustments to a few Title tags making them less spammy and I received this letter after submitting a re-inclusion 2 1/2 weeks earlier:

Reconsideration request for http://www.example.com/: Manual spam action revoked
March 21, 2012

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.example.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

[edited by: tedster at 3:50 am (utc) on Apr 6, 2012]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[Prasawet]

After to much time in struggle with G. webmaster rules about this and that (and with no results for a long time) I finaly give up and erased all my WMT accounts for all of my websites.
After month or two SE traffic have significant increased, I don't know why and I don't care...more important to me is that I stopped playing by G. rules (and waste a large ammount of time).
I just follow common sense and stick with a basic webmaster rules regardless of G. have to say.

[martinacastro]

Prasawet your site is still penalized?

[Prasawet]

A few of them stay out of index but the rest (those that suffer of traffic drop) have gone up.

[crobb305]

zippyonenut,

Your experience is interesting. Thank you for sharing with us. I also received a notice on March 2, but I have no way of knowing if it was an algorithmic notice or manual action. I have only seen a ranking reduction on one phrase (fell 300 positions, two weeks after the notice), but traffic was largely unaffected. I'm trying decide what to do, but I am inclined to wait it out.

[np2003]

I had a site that was hit, page #1, now on page #5-6. Hit around same date as well, Early/mid march. Authority site that had been on page #1 for awhile. I think Google F*&#$ up on this one, lets see how it pans out.

[fathom]

After to much time in struggle with G. webmaster rules about this and that (and with no results for a long time) I finaly give up and erased all my WMT accounts for all of my websites.
After month or two SE traffic have significant increased, I don't know why and I don't care...more important to me is that I stopped playing by G. rules (and waste a large ammount of time).
I just follow common sense and stick with a basic webmaster rules regardless of G. have to say.

I believe if it is free it is not worth very much... course all of Googles accounts are invaluable and yet free... so what is in it for Google?

Free data in return? The ability to automatically snoop on you would solve alot of spamming problems.

Admittedly that is just a hunch... but it explains a lot and with Googles changes on privacy on all accounts under a single roof... big brother? ...or now the Godfather of the Web?