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Unfortunately, crappy websites don't tend to get crawled often so it could be many months until Google recrawls the website. I'd put the websites in a disavow file as well just to be sure.

what about multiple ways of getting to the same product?

Hi Peter,

As Martijn said, if you can supply us with more info then we can help out. What is the website? When did this happen? what link building activities have been utilised on the website?

Hi Cyto,

Does that include your blog pages? If you have a blog, such as Wordpress, then it may be picking up the different URL's that each post may have. So for example, you might have the blog post in different categories which would mean the post is accessible from 2 different URL's

Hi Ron,

Whilst the pdf would give you minimal SEO benefit, if the magazine is reputable then you could use it as link bait. You could turn your post into a feature on your own website with things you learnt from doing the piece then reach out to blogger/website owners to link to your website.

As has been mentioned, it's not all about SEO and what value a link has. You have to think of the long term effect and what knock on effect guest authoring for the magazine gives you. See if there is anything else you can do with them onsite, that may be something that is worth asking.

Google is very good at devaluing links nowadays so I wouldn't worry too much. If a company wants to conduct negative SEO against your website then they can't be a serious competitor because nobody in their right mind would waste time and money trying to get a competitors' website hit.

As Doug said, concentrate on creating some great content around your business/niche and then look at your outreach.

Just a little note to add to the other comments...

Doing backlink analysis on competitors is very tricky nowadays thanks to the disavow tool. For all you know, your competitor has disavowed these links and Google is no longer counting them which would explain why they are still ranking so well.

The example website you supplied is undoubtedly paid for posts and as they are not no-followed, the website is not going to be passing any benefits to those linking from the website.

Hi Ali, your link building tactics have got you the penalty, I'm surprised you didn't see this drop at the end of May when Penguin 2.0 was released. You need to act quickly and get rid of all those types of links that you have created and start to focus on non-automated techniques. Start to create content that your users and customers will find useful then look at influencers in the industry to share it with, that is your first port of call.

It is vital that you get rid of all those links (article, directory, blog commenting) because they are very spammy techniques.

You need to think about whether your site has been hit with a manual penalty or an algorithm penalty. If you have had no messages in WMT then it is probably an algorithm penalty. Panda is now part of all algorithm changes so you may have been hit by that.

One of our testing sites got hit by Penguin in May and we decided to test out if a 301 to a new website would work...it didnt!! It took just over 5 weeks for Google to catch up and the site lost all its rankings again. I was actually surprised it took that long to be honest, Google's algorithm is too smart for that so I would advise trying to fix any problems before you give up and start a new website.

Penalties will last as long as you have the problem. The issue here is, if it is an algorithm change then it is harder to figure out what is wrong. Whilst a manual penalty is worse, at least you know what to do in order to fix the problem. You need to look at any duplicate content issues you may have and if that is all ok then look deep into your backlink profile because it must be 1 or the other. If you show us your URL then maybe one of us could take a quick look and give you some more info.

I agree with Gary, you should definitely go through all your links and be really ruthless in terms of which are the poor quality links. Anything that is on an article or directory website you can probably get rid of (apart from directories like Yahoo, DMOZ etc) and submit your disavow file to Google.

If it is only your target keywords that have dropped then you have been lucky to escape a site-wide penalty but there is a good chance that this will be on its way so if you can clean up your profile sooner rather than later, it should help.

Whilst over-optimisation is an issue, it is more about the quality of the websites you are getting links from than the anchor text used. You could have a brand link and if it's a poor quality website, you are going to get penalised. If you haven't disavowed any links, I'd make sure that 90% of them were disavowed.

You've also got duplicate content on your website so I'd say you've been hit by a Panda refresh as well as Penguin. Type in "To assist clients in getting value from their businesses, we provide Business Critical Software and IT services within various industry verticals." to Google and you will see 4 different versions of your content.

You need to do a full backlink analysis ASAP and be ruthless in the ones you get rid of, if you wouldn't show the link to Google then it's bad. Use the disavow tool in Webmaster Tools then file a reconsideration request to Google with details of what you have done and why there were so many bad links.

It's a long road to take but if you want the website to come back into the SERP's then you are going to have to do this.

Good luck!

The first thing to consider is what type of penalty the website got hit by, if it was Penguin and 99.9% links built were spam then you can leave all your links and just take the content. If it was Panda then you can't even take your content and place it on the new/old website because you'd still get found. If it was both then don't even bother redirecting anything!

I'd question the importance of the website to any business if it wasn't worth spending time on finding ALL the spam links and fixing the penalty. The reconsideration request can take a while, you may have to submit 3 or 4 requests before it gets lifted. I know this can take a considerable amount of time, effort and money but it's got to be worth it to get the business back on the right footing. Put yourself in Google's shoes, they deal with these requests every day and have got a back log so if they see ONE link that looks spammy, then they aren't going to lift the penalty. Someone is going to have to sit down and look at your link profile manually!

If the www.websitename.com has bad links and poor content, then why 301 it? I know you are doing it for the customers but you could just put a banner on the homepage saying you've moved to www.website-name.com.

I would stick to the local SEO strategy but think about contacting influential bloggers from around the area, maybe look at Yorkshire and even Lancashire because people will be willing to drive a couple of hours to a nice hotel. I know you won't be able to target those location keywords onsite but in terms of your outreach, it may be better for you as people in Derbyshire won't necessarily be looking for a hotel there.

Whatever you do, don't go down the black hat road, Google is far too smart for that now and you WILL get penalised. I'm assuming you have done a backlink analysis on the competitors to see what links they have, well don't forget they could have disavowed these links and they would still show up in OSE etc so don't believe everything you see when it comes to backlink analysis.

I'm not a huge advocate of PPC, even with the (not provided) problems we are having, but you it would be interesting to test a PPC campaign out to see the response and you can use these results to help you in your SEO campaign.

I thought that'd be the case! trying to get the developers to create unique pages and try and keep a similar/same design, not sure if it'll be too difficult though. Thanks for the advice though, fingers crossed we'll find a solution.

Hi Schwaab,

Thanks for the reply. Google hasn't cached the new pages.

For example, the old page is http://www.teapigs.co.uk/customer/pages/matcha/what-is-matcha and the new content sits on http://www.teapigs.co.uk/tea/matcha_shop with the different tabs. Are we going to have to make them actual pages with static URL's for them to be crawled and indexed? Got a feeling we will!

All the points made are great and I'd just add one more thing...look at the average length of the blog/website that the post is going on. Like EGOL said, on Moz, most posts are around 1000 words so that's what you should aim for but for another blog, they may want something longer or shorter. Match the content and length to the blog it is going on, that way you are adding value to the blog and not just blogging for links.

Hi Andy,

I'd be totally ruthless with your link audit, even if 1% of you thinks it is spammy, disavow it. In fact, if it isn't driving traffic then disavow it, what are you going to lose. The question to ask yourself is would you be happy to show the link to Matt Cutts? If not, then get rid.

We heard from Google recently that they are not allowed to open any files that are sent to them for security reasons so, for me, going through the effort of contacting webmasters and sending Google files with emails etc is pointless. I know they say you should be we have stopped asking because it gets you nowhere and you haven't got the time to wait for replies. I'd just get some numbers and info together about what you have disavowed, why there was these links in the first place and what you have done to remedy it. Obviously, if you can get them taken down easily then do so.

Stop building links until you have the penalty lifted! Don't look at the anchor text used to justify whether it is a good or bad link, look at the relevance to your website. I even disavow 404 and no-followed links if I think they are spammy.

Good luck in the recovery!

Totally agree with Devanur here...there is no need for any site-wide link. If there is a link between the two websites then I wouldn't take them off but i would no-follow the link.

Hi Mozzers,

Happy Friday! I have a client that has created some really nice pages from their old content and we want to redirect the old ones to the new pages. The way the web developers have built these new pages is to use hashbang url's for example www.website.co.uk/product#newpage

My question is can I redirect urls to these kind of pages? Would it be using the .htaccess file to do it?

Thanks in advance,

Karl

The thing with the disavow tool is that Google doesn't necessarily count all the links you submit as bad. If they think you have submitted a link by mistake then they will ignore it. That is why people are encouraged to get them taken down rather than just use the disavow tool. There is no point submitting a reconsideration request if you haven't had an unnatural links warning, if anything you are just drawing attention to yourself!