Can high SERPS and/or social signals minimize Google penalties and a back linking removal question

[cbielich]

As I am continually sizing up my competition in the SERPS I have scanned their sites with a fine tooth and comb. I have found that these sites practice in the very things that I have practiced in the past and have removed thinking that may be some of the reasons I was hit with Penguin.

Some of these factors are:

• Link Scheme with sites they own (C Blocks)
• Content for Search Engines (Keyword rich text)
• Exact anchor text in back linking profile

Yet even though my competition practices in these methods (One site even places exact anchor text in the footer and header of every page for one of their other forum site) they seem to have not even been touched with any of the recent updates. In fact it seems their ranking have increased.

In scanning these sites the only major difference that I have been able to see between them and I is that their SERPS are higher than mine and they have way more social signals than me. One site has about 73k facebook likes where I only have about 300.

My question is Can Google ignore penalties for sites that have higher SERPS and /or social signals that would effect another site that had lower ones?

My other question is related to back links

My main site has links from another site I built a long time ago (Pre SEO and not knowing what I was doing) somewhere in the 73k range. Obviously a HUGE signal to Google that this might be spam and I am aware. I have removed the links from that site but unfortunately the average crawl rate per day is very low so it is taking a very long time for Google to find those pages and re-crawl them to find the links gone. Since that site I have than has those links pointing to my main site has very low traffic I am totally willing to kill that entire site with a 404. Can this help speed up the removal of those links from that site? I figure since the site no longer exists all links from that site will be removed almost immediately from my main site.

Any thoughts?

[BlueprintMarketing]

I would 1st off definitely tell you without a doubt the difference your ranking is because of the 73 thousand Facebook likes they have over your 300. To Google Facebook represents something that is real data that can be quantified by Real people so that is the difference. You probably were both penalized equally however they are beating you because of the social media presence.

73,000 links sounds extremely high obviously if you're willing to 404 them you should before you in the domains name and every site that you're linking to I would keep the links in place take the domain off-line just killed the DNS for short Time.

Also inside your own website look for redundant interior links I know it sounds crazy however  it affects your link flow in a amazing way.

Sincerely

Thomas

[cbielich]

What about header links to all my main pages, Im sure those are not considered redundant. Did you find redundant interior links on my site?

[MarkHodson]

On the first question I don't quite agree with Thomas. I think that social signals are an important part of the mix but I don't think that having 73k Facebook Likes will undo the damage caused by a manipulated link profile.

If you've been hit by Penguin - and if you're sure that's what's hit your site - then you simply have to sort out your unnatural link profile. That means getting links removed, or at least making every best effort to do this, and making detailed notes of your attempts, which you can submit to Google on a Googledoc if required.

High rankings would NOT have protected your competitors from a Penguin update. They are separate things. Google does not "think" along the lines of "Oh well, this site may have a crap link profile but at least lots of people seem to like it on Facebook, so let's give it a free ride". Penguin is algorithmic. There is not a committee of Googlers deciding which site to hit on an individual basis.

Social signals are important and they will likely come into play once you've fixed your link profile. But, in my opinion, not until then.

[irvingw]

There are so many factors that come into play with rankings positions, it;s almost impossible to pin it down and definitely not one factor like FB. If Google ranked sites that strongly based on FB engagement then FB would be nothing but spam. FB should be thought of as a marketing tool and a traffic driver not something the help with rankings, although I do believe Google does consider if you have social media presence in their algorithm.

If you have the power to kill off 73k links from one site to your do it, if it's not a site u care about 404 the site, or remove the links on that site, or if you can change the configuration to nofollow those links that works too. The links can still be there as long as they are nofollowed and no longer pass PR.

Speed up the crawl rate in WMT if you want to get respidered more after cleaning up bad links on your site. Explain in detail to Google what you did specifically to clean up your site and humbly request reconsideration.

[cbielich]

Halarious that the disavow links was just released from google webmaster tools today

[MarkHodson]

yes, great timing! I think Matt said in his webmaster video that disavowing will also take a few weeks. Please let us know how you get on. Good luck!

[cbielich]

Just uploaded my list, hope to see results from it

[BlueprintMarketing]

gentleman you are both correct and I apologize for my incorrect answer. I had been under the assumption that you did understand or have something to do with this other site. My apologies for not reading thoroughly enough you made the right choice by listening to these gentlemen.

Respectfully,

Thomas Von Zickell

[BeytzNet]

I believe that social signals are important however I doubt if Google has a way of knowing how many "likes" you got (Bing may know due to their somewhat partnership).

What I do believe is that Google does recognize people coming from social media like FB and gives you credit for it (as a site that has social appearance)and that it does recognize other types of shares such as twitter, tumblr, stumblupon and obviously Google +.

There was an article here at MOZ once and they tried to analyze social signals. I thinkk that the result was that there is a correlation but not necessarily causation.

Good luck