Massive amounts of incoming links caused by parked domains

[soundofsongs]

This post is deleted!

[randfish]

Hi SoundofSongs - first off, welcome to Moz

As far as the penalty goes, the challenge is that it may not be an automated penalty, but rather a manual one. If that's the case (which is impossible to know for sure), fixing the problem alone won't be enough. You'll need to wait for someone from Google to review the site, and they'll only do that if you submit a re-consideration request.

Here's how I'd think about this. You didn't do anything wrong other than letting the domains accidentally become duplicates. If you set up the 301 redirects again and have all those sites pointing to your main site, you shouldn't have trouble. Just send in a reconsideration request to Google through Webmaster Tools and let them know what happened and that you've fixed it. It may take a few weeks or even a couple months for them to review the request, but if that's the only issue, you should be cleared.

If, however, there are other problems - bad links to the site from sources you don't control that Google thinks you've built or content/on-page/UX issues that Google doesn't like, fixing the parked domains won't be enough, and you'll likely get a response from Google in Webmaster Tools saying that your request has been denied. At least you'll know at that point.

As far as the landingpage.com solution - I don't think it's particularly necessary, but if you think some of the parked domains are or have been spammy and don't want them pointing to your main site, then go for it.

Best of luck!

[soundofsongs]

Hi Rand,

Thanks for your reply hope you've enjoyed the holidays. A hidden manual penalty could be it may be applied to main.com as it doesn't even rank for a direct name search as far as I'm aware there is no 'bad' seo on this main.com domain except for the dupes which were an accident.

There are only ~50 incoming links to main.com but that was enough to rank for some target keywords. The sister site may have had some bought backlinks though that was before my time but that still ranks for a direct name search. That brings another question is it worth cleaning these up? I've been slowly compiling a list of the links that are bought but at the moment am not disavowing them as I don't think they are currently causing a problem.

Looking through the numbers our rankings have been on a decline since May and we will have to continue the SEO battle. Though in the mean time we are looking at solutions to bring in some cash flow such as adwords and letter drops to local businesses.

The suggested CPC is quite high would you suggest bidding at a higher or lower price? They are quite low volume keyword searches but are directly targeting our profitable market. The high volume keywords while relevant to our site do not directly target our profitable market so we are avoiding wasting money on these keywords as the CPC is the same.

We are also working on new content for the adword campaign to increase the conversion rate of these viewers.

Your blogs and tools have been very helpful for us,
Thank you

[randfish]

Happy Holidays to you, too!

1. It's possible that the penalty is related only to the duplicates, but the process I described above should help uncover whether that's the case.

2. It's definitely worth cleaning up the domains you owned that are duplicates rather than 301s. As for the other older links - it depends on how bad they are, how many there are, and whether you think there's risk that Google may penalize you for them. Unfortunately no easy answers there.

3. SEO isn't the only inbound channel! Social media, blogs, building an email list, content marketing, etc. are all options, too.

4. I like targeting hihgly relevant, rarely searched phrases. The CPCs tend to be lower and the quality of leads higher. And working on conversion rate is a great idea since that helps all kinds of traffic.

Wish you all the best!