Micro Site Penalty?

[Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland]

I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz.

After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper.

Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH!

Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns.  Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites!

As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO.

Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this!

• server-side 301 redirect for the micro site?
• Delete the micro site (drastic measure)
• Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7
• other options?

The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.

[TomRayner]

Hi Eric

To me, it looks like you've identified the problem. In the technical sense, it looks like your website is suffering from a over-optimisation/Penguin penalty.

If you look at the links pointing to your product pages, there are a number of unnatural signals.  Virtually all of the links come from shademakers.com (unnatural), they all have commercial or targeted anchor text (unnatural) and they are all dofollow, thus passing SEO equity.

The fastest way to remedy this in my eyes would be to remove the links.  You could 301 redirect, but I believe removing the links on shademakers.com looks more like a conscious effort to stop this manipulative linking (as it stops any link equity being passed altogether, which is more what the Google algorithm will want to see).

It's worth noting here that, since this is likely an algorithmic penalty, it may take a while for the removal of these links to be seen and reconsidered by that part of the algorithm (and there's nothing unfortunately you can do to accelerate this).  Similarly, those links were likely to be the cause of the big jump in rankings (in tandem with your on-site SEO), so in order to see top 3 rankings again you may need to earn high quality and relevant links to those pages with healthier anchor texts.  The third scenario is a sort of combination of the two - the bad links have been devalued but no negative action on your site has been taken by the algorithm - in which case you just need to earn high quality links in order to recover the rankings.

I would remove the links completely and try to earn better links.  Once rankings start to pick up, you may want to link from the shademakers.com site again (if it's getting any relevant traffic), but if you do so I would almost certainly use branded or non-keyword rich anchor texts and also use no-follow links - to show that you're not trying to pass PageRank or any SEO link equity, but just want to link to a relevant site.

Hope this helps.

[Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland]

Cheers Tim I suspected this was a result of this "Unnatural links to your site" and appreciate the reinforcement.

Ranking improvements were solid before unnatural links were put in place but I agree it is a combination of the two.

This just popped up in "Manual Actions" in Webmaster Tools

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.

I will get all the links removed to show best intent then click "Request A Review" hopefully this will speed up the process?

This was out of my control but certainly reinforces my view "Links are earned not bought!"

[TomRayner]

Hi Eric

The manual action appearing in the site is not a bad sign to have at all - it shows that it was not algorithmic action and so now that you've identified the problem you should be able to get it removed ASAP.

Yes, I would remove all the links and then in your reconsideration request mention exactly what you have here.  The manipulative links were unbeknownst to you, you've identified them all, removed them all (and cite the URLs where they have been removed) and you should be good to go.

To me it looks like these were made in genuine error and not meant to manipulate rankings; you should mention that. It's not everyday where they get reconsiderations where 100% of the bad links will be removed, as in your case, so it should be pretty positive.

These requests typically take 5-7 days, but I have seen them take up to 2 weeks, just an FYI.

[Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland]

Cheers, yea certainly unintentional from my client.

I will include a Google docs spread sheet showing the actions taken to remove these links and probably a link to this discussion!

With a rather humble and embarrassed apology!

oh well my first penalty in a 100 sites or so.

Thanks for your help!

have a great day!