Why Did Our Site Disappear for 6 Months?

[Kelley_I]

Hello!  The company that I work for recently hired a company to do their SEO.  After they took over we fell out of the search engines for our keywords for 6 months! (I had previously done the SEO using Moz, but had to step down due to my husband getting cancer. He's all better and I'm back. )

We contacted the SEO company recently to find out why the only way we could be found in the search engines was if we searched on our name. The reason they gave was Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird. I personally don't believe that would cause our site to disappear for 6 months then miraculously reappear for our keywords a few days after us complaining.

One of my main concerns is they have submitted us to 140 directories and 20 social bookmarking sites. How do I tell if these are good or bad sites? A few of them I've clicked are suspended and one Google warns about malicious content and to leave immediately -  so those are obvious.

Thanks for your help!

Kelley Insana

[crackingmedia]

Hi Kelley,

Welcome back to Moz and glad to hear your husband is better.

It sounds that the SEO company are spinning a yarn or two! Penguin and Panda are reasons for losing ground, but Hummingbird - at this stage! No, I don't believe that.

It's difficult to explain why your site has disappeared for so long and then to come back so quickly. Could it be that for some reason the SEO company put a robots.txt on the site that disallowed any indexing of the site other than the home page? I have seen that happen once before where the result was only a home page was indexed. It might be worth checking the date/timestamp of the robots.txt on the server to see when it was last updated.

How do you tell if the 140 + 20 sites are good or bad? Only really by going through each one checking their content and also perhaps checking them in Open Site Explorer. Target the ones you have identified already first and then begin to go through the others.

I hope that helps. All the best to you.

Peter

[Kelley_I]

Thanks Peter,

I will see if we can get the robot.txt file and see if that has anything to do with what happened.

As far as the directories go, so far none of the ones I've checked have any content. They are just straight directories with links such as this one http://www.rightwingeye.com/  In my opinion linking to directories like that are not good, but I could be wrong.   I will check them with Open Site Explorer. If I discover bad ones do I need to remove our website from them? Or doesn't it matter?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

The recovery days after you complaining is probably a coincidence.  They would have to get really lucky that your site just happened to get indexed right after they fixed something.

What dates did you see your traffic decrease?  From when to when?  That's the best way to figure out what kind of penalty you may have received.  If it doesn't match up on dates, then we can help you diagnose what happened from the work logs that the SEO might provide.

Cody

[donford]

Hi Kelley

This response would alarm me "The reason they gave was Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird". If they are siting this as a reason that means they were 99.89% likely doing something wrong to begin with.

Having crappy directory links isn't necessarily bad unless they make up the majority of links you have. Although you should never spend time trying to get listed in crappy directories, its a waste of time. Just look at the link and say would I "ever" visit this site for anything ever? If the answer is no, you likely have no reason to be listed there.

Peter pointed out one possible reason, another could be canonical tags point or looping on themselves. In general it sounds like the company used was horrible, and it is a boon that you're back.

Hope all is well with your husband, and welcome back.

Don

[crackingmedia]

Hi Kelley

I agree with your view of rightwingeye.com. It's just farming links.

If you have lots of incoming links to your site from sites like this one then yes, it is a risk. They will be serving very little link equity individually, but collectively they will deliver more, However, having links from sites like these is not worth having compared to the fall out if your site is seen as harvesting links from a lot of low quality sites.

Peter

[Kelley_I]

Is there a way to find out if a company is a legitimate SEO company? They also did the web design for our site and did a fantastic job on that end of things. It's the SEO that's questionable.

[balloon.co.uk]

Hi All

If Kelly did want to remove a link from a directory - how would she do this?

Assuming she doesn't have passwords to the site and the spammy webmaster won't reply to any removal request?

[crackingmedia]

I think it is true that many web developers think that because they build websites they also need to do SEO. But they are different disciplines and unless they have people with both disciplines in-house they may not be any good at SEO.

Yes, they need an understanding, but sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Without checking out what the web development company has to say about SEO - and I don't suggest you post their name here - it's difficult to say, but what you have described does make it sound that something with the SEO was not good!

Peter

[crackingmedia]

Hi David

First step would be to remove the link herself from those sites if she could get access. If that didn't work then at least try to contact the sites and ask them to remove the links

But if she is unsuccessful with those routes she would be to go through Google Webmaster Tools and start a process of disavowing those links one by one. This video by Google's Matt Cutts may help explain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA

Peter

[balloon.co.uk]

Thanks Peter

I've reached out to 100 webmasters and had 2 reply…… so I'll try the disavow option.

Thanks for the link.

[McTaggart]

If a client is employing me to remove poorest backlinks identified at audit stage, I usually make 3/4 approaches to webmasters first, and see how that goes - and usually manage to take down the majority of spammy backlinks that way.