Local SEO penalty?

[MiriamEllis]

I had noticed this as well, Joy, but somehow, it doesn't satisfy me that this would somehow exclude the client organically ONLY for Austin searchers. If that were the root of the problem, would it not be affecting organic rankings across the board? To me, the link anchor text seemed like a possible explanation until I asked myself that question.

I'll see if I can get one of our organic SEOs to weigh in on whether Google could exclude something only in a specific area.

[GrueBleenAgency]

Thank you both for your awesome thoughts, this has been such an interesting question that we ourselves are so stumped on. Please update as you find out more!

[JoyHawkins]

Tom Waddington (one of the smartest people I know) pointed out, most of the spammy backlinks are pointing to a domain (reliant-plumbing.com) that is redirecting to your site.  Why don't you kill that domain (make it 404) and see if it fixes this?

[MiriamEllis]

GrueBleen,

Just spoke with one of our top organic SEO folks here at Moz (Dr. Pete) and he agreed it would be strange that an organic penalty would only affect users in Austin. So, while I agree that the link anchor text of your links is something you need to be looking at because it's believed that Google devalues (more than penalizes) such links, the mystery continues!

Tom Waddington's idea is also definitely worth looking at. Good idea reaching out to him, Joy!

[MarieHaynes]

Hi. Joy asked me to take a look at this as it's an unusual ranking situation.

While I agree that it is unusual for an organic filter to suppress rankings in just one location, I think that the egregious backlink profile of this site cannot be ignored.

If this is related to backlinks (which I think is quite likely), it's likely not a location issue, but rather, the anchor text of the unnatural links is holding the site back. And...the majority of the anchors use some form of the words "plumbing" and "austin".

I know what you're thinking...Penguin is supposed to just ignore unnatural links, not penalize for them. However, there are two things that I think we should consider here.

First, John Mueller recently said that unnatural links can impair a site's ability to rank somewhat. There are algorithms outside of Penguin that look at link quality. If they see that there are a large number of links that go against Google's guidelines, they can choose to put less trust in all of your links.

When asked whether unnatural links can hurt a site algorithmically, John said, "“That can definitely be the case. So it’s something where our algorithms when we look at it and they see, oh, there are a bunch of really bad links here. Then maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious with regards to the links in general for the website. So if you clean that up, then the algorithms look at it and say, oh, there’s– there’s kind of– it’s OK. It’s not bad.”

But wait...if this is the case, then why would only the Austin rankings be affected?

This is a long read, but a good one. Bill Slawski wrote about a Google patent that looks at link quality. That patent talks about how pages can be devalued for a particular query if there are a large number of links that are never clicked upon. I know it sounds crazy...it's worth taking the time to read it. Also, it's a patent so we don't know whether Google is using it, but if they are, it is built for cases like this.

The only thing that I can't fully explain is why this is only happening for searches from Austin. I think it's conceivably possible that if the patent mentioned above is being used in this case, that the system can detect that there was an attempt to manipulate rankings for Austin searches and therefore, it is suppressing the ability to rank there.

I haven't looked into the website at all...just the backlinks, but this is one of the more manipulative backlink profiles I've seen in a while. We had a similar case about a year ago where we audited the links and disavowed about 70% of a site's link profile. The links were quite similar to yours in the sense that they were low quality links anchored with a keyword plus the city name in which they wanted to rank. Within two months of filing the disavow, we started to see a nice uplift and it has continued to grow (see image).

The first thing I would do is check for the presence of a manual action. Do this in Search Console. You'll see Manual Actions in the left sidebar. If there's no manual action, I'd go straight to disavowing. Be extremely aggressive as the only cases where I have seen improvements after disavowing are ones where we dramatically cut out as much of the unnatural linking as possible. Even if there is something else going on such as a technical issue, these backlinks can't be ignored. While most sites do not need to disavow these days, this one, in my opinion does!

mhc-disavow-links-case.jpg

[JoyHawkins]

Marie,

Since the links are pointed at a different domain that 301s to their site, would removing the 301 (killing the domain) be sufficient or do they still need to file a disavow?

[MarieHaynes]

Most likely, yes.

However, if the content on the pages that were redirected is the same as it was in the past, Google can sometimes apply a hidden canonical. In other words, lets say that the old domain used to be their main site and they built unnatural links to a page called /services. Now let's say that there is a page on the new site called /service_offerings. The content is the same as the old and the old is redirected to the new.

In that case, Google can often recognize that those old links, even if the redirect is removed, should be counting towards the new page.

I'd still want to disavow to make it even more likely that Google stops counting the quality of those links towards this site.

If you do remove the redirects though, it can take a few months to start seeing the benefits, so it will be a hard thing to test. I'd remove the redirects AND disavow. And in a case like this I'd recommend regularly doing link audits to find new unnatural links that the link aggregator tools have missed.

[MiriamEllis]

Marie - how awesome of you to stop by! I am a fan

Did you notice that GrueBleen mentioned in their original post that there are no penalties showing in GSC? Clearly, the links are bad, but like you, I can't explain the SERP behavior for Austin-only users.

GrueBleen, you're getting weigh-ins here from some amazing experts, and as no one has been able to pinpoint the exact cause of the weird SERP behavior, I think you're at the point where hiring a consultant for a full audit is likely necessary. Many ranking problems are easy to solve, but what you've presented here is unusual. In the scope of a forum, we can't fully audit every aspect of a business (history, technical issues, usability, local, etc.). You need someone to do this to see if they can connect the dots between the Austin-only behavior and something the business is doing/failing to do.

[GrueBleenAgency]

Hi Team,

We super appreciate everyone's insights. I agree that at this point it makes the most sense to get individual help. The collective power of the thoughts of your expert team have been super helpful. We will take steps to do some fixes while also continually looking into alternative theories/solutions.

Thank you all for your help and thoughts towards the matter. When we initially posted we didn't know how much people would care to evaluate the issue so this is a nice surprise in terms of the response value/time that was put into this question.

Super appreciative - Josh

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[ClaytonJ]

very interesting thread. Is there an update?

Reviewed same and though the links stand out. Am inclined to believe as google amps up the power of GMB. It is more address proximity on map that is skewing the outcome. Lakeway is simply a little too far out of Austin.