14 year-old domain hit by Google unnatural inbound links penalty

[ExpertHelpRequire]

Hello Export Team members,

I need some real solid advise on one very difficult case we are facing currently...

My website - <snip> is running since last 14 years and most of all the time we are on first top 5 position for my industries keywords. Last time we build our website in 2001. Mostly since than we constantly manage consistent ranking. There are so many up and down comes in last 12 years but we are at same place. Little bit up and down.

Now on 29th Aug 2013, I got email from google about Unnatural inbound links. I started doing my research and found few links. We don't do any special activity but just doing regular social media marketing. We don't do any non standard work but do post our product related articles frequently on social media websites.

On 29th Aug 2013 -> I got Unnatural inbound links from Google.

I started work on it and found few issues and correcting those issues. Few corrected and few are not so generate file for disallow tool and submit it before 2 days ago.

Now in between on 3rd Sep, 2013 we live our completely redesign new website... We were working on this new site since last 18 months and during development running it on <another snipped domain>. I am not sure how but some how google index this under development website since last 12 months. I was not aware about it...

Now I transfer that under development site to our main domain on 3rd Sep 2013.... Google did index whole site on same day... On 4/5/6, we don't see any changes... than every day we were going down on major keywords by 1 or 2 positions...

Suddenly on 9th Sep 2013, we completely lost on all keywords. It is 0 traffic.... Google not even displaying us on our company name... If we search our company than also we not able to find our self and through us on 60 - 70 - 80 rank position and many times not display us.

Now my google traffic is almost 0 since last 5-6 days. I have removed that under development site and put disallow on google so it stop taking and comparison duplicate contents.

I am going to submit reconsideration request for Unnatural inbound links but at this time I am not able to understand what exactly wrong happen.

We are one of the top company in our industries and have good happy customer base but this last 5-6 days it was big night mare as we are stop getting new customers and our old customers also not able to find us... I will appreciate if some one can help to identify what we did wrong? is it b'c of new site? b'c of manual action? I am not getting any clue.

We are going to work heavily on new site in next few day for content. All our content are original content, there are many sites who copy our content exactly word by word and so we are going to change our content.

Thank you
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:32 pm (utc) on Sep 15, 2013]
[edit reason] removed links to specific domains, per forum charter [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Hi ExpertHelpRequire, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Note that the Google Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] doesn't allow links or references back to your site... but your post raises several issues that can be discussed without knowing what your domain or market area is.

...Unnatural inbound links. I started doing my research and found few links.

It may be that you've overlooked a few. I suggest doing some reading here on the topic.

We don't do any special activity but just doing regular social media marketing. We don't do any non standard work but do post our product related articles frequently on social media websites.

Google has clarified some of its guidelines, and many of prior approaches to building backlinks to a site... like guest blogging with cookie-cutter blog-posts, or using article sites and placing articles with followed links back to your site... are in fact now considered spam. I've felt for some years that article directories weren't not effective, and more likely to hurt in the long run than to help.

Here's one of our threads that indicated Google's view of how much "social marketing" has crossed over the line into spam, and signaled Google's stricter approach...

Google says link building is not dead, illegal or bad
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4592085.htm [webmasterworld.com]

With regard to disavow, if you've received notices that your links were unnatural, and if you had nothing to do with placing them, then you could safely ignore the notice.

If, however, you were involved in placing them, and my guess that some of your "social marketing" probably falls into that area, then you need to get as many of these links as possible either nofollowed or taken down before using the disavow tool. Keep careful records, and use these when you file a reconsideration request, after the disavow process.

Your new content probably made it even more difficult for Google to adjust to a questionable backlink profile. But at issue, I believe, is that your backlinks are unnatural.

I would in fact work first on cleaning up the backlinks, because, as you're most likely penalized, you are giving scrapers an opportunity to easily outrank you for any new content that you publish.

[aakk9999]

Reading your post, it seems to me that you have three problems running concurently. You should also make sure that domain redesign did not introduce issues that caused ranking drop (or made ranking drop worse than it would be).

From what I can see, your timeline is:

1) You got unnatural links notice on 29th August
2) You found out that your development domain got indexed in Google
3) You have put the test site live on 3rd September, removed the test domain and blocked it from Google

I will leave unnatural link notice aside in my comment as Robert has already posted a very detailed reply in this respect.

With regards to the other two points - how has your domain redevelopment been executed? Here are few things to check:

a) You say you are not ranking for your company name since few days ago. Is your company name part of <title> (at least on your home page?). If not, I would suggest that you add " - CompanyName" or similar to your title - this is also good for domain branding purpose.

b) When you redesigned your site, have URL changed? If so, have you done 301 Redirect for old URLs to their new version?

c) Has your site structure changed (main navigation, secondary navigation). The change may also affect how pages rank.

d) You said you removed your test domain and blocked it from Google. If you have removed the test domain (presumably these duplicate pages now return 404), you should not have blocked it from Google as well. You must let Google crawl it so that Google can get 404 and see that pages are gone. If you want a quick removal of development domain, you can use WMT URL Removal tool to remove the whole domain from the index (or part of domain where your test site was, as you can remove the whole folder from Google index using WMT).

[Mentat]

On 4th of september Google rolled an "secred update", when a lot of OLD sites got hit!

[seroundtable.com...]

[ExpertHelpRequire]

Thank you for your reply. I will take care about posting rules and follow it. I am sorry about it as I was not fully aware about it.

We explicitly not doing any SPAM from our side but as I mention we do post our articles regularly on social media and I think that get hit. This is what I am thinking. I do remove those in last few days.

But I am getting confuse on following questions.

1. On many posts I found Unnatural inbound links is not doing any damage on website. I am not sure how much true it is but many forum I found that.

2. Am I get penalize due to Unnatural inbound links or new design changes what I did or my under development website.

I am going to remove all unnatural links and most of them I already did it. Few I am not able to do it as those sites are not responding. So I put it under disallow text file.

Can you please let me know - Let's say if I delete those links and google lift manual action than also will my site under google algo penalty? Or once google manually action get remove than I can assume I am good in eye of goolgebot?

I did completely new site design and look but I keep all web page URL exactly same what I have before but this is totally new design, look & feel but web page names are same. In new design no of web page get reduce as compare to old website.

Some one told me, even If I get out of google manual penalty than also I will never recover and I will keep face this problem permanently and they suggest me to drop this domain and start everything from fresh. Personally I feel, I have not done anything wrong than also why I need to go to that router? I will appreciate if you can put some eye on this.

As per your suggestion I am not going to change content for now but just on removing unnatural links. Many links I didn't put it but not sure how it generate as few sites automatically take my content without my knowledge.

My sitemap and site structure got change but links and navigation is mostly 90% same as old site.

Please suggest.

Thank you

[Mentat]

Take it easy!
You have too many variables to play with:
- unnatural links.
After you submit your reconsideration, it can take one month to see results.
- new design
- google algo update on 4th of September (you changed the design on 3th)

1. The new design is unlikely to affect you so fast.

2. Wait, wait at least a month after reconsideration.

3. It's not that easy to "restart" with a new domain after 14 years...

I understand your pain, but use your Google Analytics with advanced segments

See the traffic patterns in this year. Do you see a small decrease of traffic each month?
This, + a downfall in September => your problem is Panda and there are few happy recoveries...

[superclown2]

I have had a few sites which have disappeared from the SERPs after changes. They have all come back again after a few weeks.

It's a bit early to panic.

[ExpertHelpRequire]

I just got reply from Google with following message,

===============
Reconsideration request for mywebsite : Site violates Google's quality guidelines

We received a reconsideration request from a site owner for mywebsite

We've reviewed your site and we believe that mywebsite still violates our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from mywebsite may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.

For more specific information about the status of your site, visit the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools. From there, you may request reconsideration of your site again when you believe your site no longer violates the quality guidelines.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum.
================

Can you please let me know what is the meaning of this?

This means still I have Manual Action for Unnatural inbound links or this is some other new issue?

Thank you

[aakk9999]

Yes, it appears that Google still believes there are unnatural links pointing to your website.

You should log into Google Webmaster Tools and check the "Manual Actions" page. Google may have provided some sample links in there for you.