Determining the Cause of a Penalty

[ProjectLabs]

I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10.

Here are some things I noticed about the site:

1. Over 2,500 linking domains.
2. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable.
3. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site.
4. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain.
5. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links.
6. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text.
7. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer.

Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized?

What do you think?

[toddmumford]

Hi Project Labs,

In order to better understand the scenario, we would want to know if they received a link warning within Google Webmaster Tool, or just "assessed" themselves as having penalty due to steep ranking drops.

The easiest way to answer this is to comment on your points:

1. Over 2,500 linking domains.

   It is very difficult for even medium size businesses to achieve 2500 unique links, so this number might have raised a flag from Google in their niche - especially if it deviated outside of the aggregate "norm" for this niche / keyword set.

2. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable.

   This helps authority, but quickly can be trumped by negative factors....

3. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site.

   I would recommend they contact these webmasters and have these ones removed.

4. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain.

   EMD is a more difficult issue now, since EMDs by default do not rank as well.

   Because people like to link to the site by name, sometimes the exact match can be a serious problem. Is this website owned by a business that has a unique name?

   Example - Cheesepizza.com - owned by Cheesy Pizza Dynasty.

   If this is the case, the owner should switch to using the unique brand name. In some cases there is value in creating a unique name, and building business brand signals if they do not currently have this.

5. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links.

   Excellent, they would want to check for relevancy, co-citation (shared links to other websites and their main topics)

6. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text.

   I would remove those EMD anchor texts and move to url only, or Alloneword.com OR the second brand / business option.

7. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer.

Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized?

Anything engineered will be, or has been penalized, or demoted, and I wouldn't expect this to change.

Internal links and other areas of SEO / trust signals aside, I would recommend studying the top 20 in this niche and thoroughly analyze their backlinks:

1. Rate of build
2. Exact match vs Commercialized anchors vs brand vs branded vs other?
3. Percentage of 'engineered' links vs natural, editorial.
4. Union of links competitors share in top 5 positions in Google.

Hope this helps!