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Do you have the latest version of Askimet installed?  I find it catches 99.9% of my spam.

There has been no official word from Google about an update.  A lot of people have been grumbling in the forums however about something going on.  When Barry from SERoundtable commented on this Google stated that there was no major update but that the algorithm is always changing.

There is also speculation from the team at Branded3 (see this post - http://www.branded3.com/blogs/google-moves-towards-continual-link-devaluation/ that Google may be changing how they detect bad links.  If I understand it right, the idea is that instead of devaluing bad links in bunches every time Penguin refreshes, Google is devaluing bad links as they crawl.

I have another theory. I am wondering if Google is starting to put into use the information they are getting from the disavow tool.  So, let's say that a whole pile of websites have included spammyarticles.com in their disavow.txt file.  Google evaluates the site and decides that it only exists to provide spammy backlinks and as such devalues all links that are coming from this site.  I have no proof for this, but it's a possibility.

I really think the linkbuilding world is crashing down for many SEOs.  It used to be that you could build some directory links, perhaps buy a couple of links and do a few other relatively simple things and in many niches you could do relatively well at ranking a website.

With the recent changes in Google, more and more, content is becoming important.  But, it's not just a matter of creating new content.  You still need to have skill in promoting that content.

I think the successful SEOs of this age are ones that can do some creative thinking to come up with content ideas and then be able to network well to get those ideas in front of other websites and get them linking to their site.

Grrr. I typed a big long reply and Moz ate it.  Let's try again.

The first thing I'd do is reassess the backlink profile. If you got a manual penalty, then there's a good chance that Penguin is/was affecting the site.  You mentioned that bad directory links were the culprit, but have you also assessed other links. For example, this is one I'd disavow:

http://www.montanaoutdoor.com/2014/05/big-hole-river-fishing-report-5-15-15-by-fishtales-outfitting-llc/

Also, sometimes sites that have bad directory links can continue to accumulate bad directory links.  You may need to do more disavowing.

Many sites with issues with one algo can have issues with another. It's worthwhile to spend time mining GA for evidence of drops near Panda dates.

Google will tell you that a previously penalized site has no stigma on it once the penalty is removed.  However, I have seen many sites that could never rank well again after getting a manual unnatural links penalty.  I personally think that there is a problem with the Penguin algorithm that causes this and hope that a future Penguin update will fix this.  But, I can't say that with certainty.  As such, if you are pretty certain that the backlink profile is clear and that another algo is not in play then starting over may be a better idea.

BUT...do not do 301 redirects.  If there is any link related issue (i.e. Penguin) you'll just pass the problems to the new site. I wrote an extensive article here on how to redirect a penalty hit site:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain

Hope that helps!

Woh!  I did not know this.  YAY!  ROGER! We are HUGGING in just a few weeks!

So excited for Mozcon.  

Is it deindexed because of unnatural links?  I've brought a couple of deindexed sites back to ranking well again for brand terms by doing a very thorough link cleanup but you've got to be very thorough.  These sites usually need to start over (or close to over) again for their keyword rankings because in most cases the keyword rankings were only supported by unnatural links that are no longer counting again.

If this were my business I would take the following into account when deciding whether or not to start over:

-Do I have a lot invested in my url?  i.e. Is my url used extensively in advertising, signage, etc.

-Do I have natural links pointing to this url already?

-Do I have the budget to hire someone to thoroughly clean the link profile and get the penalty lifted?

-Do I have the budget to hire someone who can help my website attract links naturally from this point on?

If it's just one page that does this it's not likely to make a HUGE deal.  Google will take the one that they feel should rank best and rank that one.  The others likely won't display in the SERPS.

The fear, I am guessing, is Panda.  Now, if there are multiple pages on your sites that have duplicate content, then having the about page duplicated is one more straw on the camel's back.

With all of that being said, if it is appropriate, this is probably a good place to use a rel canonical tag and point it to the About Us page on the main site.  This will tell Google that only that one page should be in the index.

Yes.

A few years ago there was a massive pool of people who called themselves SEOs who could generally accomplish decent rankings by using techniques that are not in line with the quality guidelines. Now, that pool has gotten a lot smaller. In my opinion the "good SEOs" are those who are extremely knowledgable about on-site SEO and know how to properly create content and promote that content.

Those are skills, however that take years to learn. Gone are the days where someone can take a quick course, buy a few links, slap up some spammy microsites and rank. Yet, some people are still trying because that's all they knew. And sadly, business owners are still buying this crap.

What bothers me the most though is the type of SEO provider who is borderline. They promise that they are "white hat" and don't make spammy links, but they'll happily post links on their private blog network and submit guest posts to hundreds of sites that will publish them. The business owner often hears "white hat" and is easily convinced that this stuff is going to work.

I had a client recently contact me to ask me my opinion on the new SEO work they were getting done. I had removed a link penalty for them a couple of years ago and thought I had educated them well on what type of SEO is acceptable. They interviewed several people for an in house SEO job and had me sit in on the interviews so that I could ask them questions to make sure that they were within Google's guidelines. They didn't have one candidate whom I felt understood Google's guidelines. They all wanted to guest post, but just do it on "authoritative sites". A little bit of guest posting is ok...but if that's your main SEO strategy, that's not good. I lost touch with this client until they just recently contacted me. They had hired a great guy who had "white hat" strategies and asked if I could review 150 links he built for them. That's a red flag, isn't it? Any time you can build 150 links you're probably crossing into unnatural territory. Well, these links were all comment spam and forum profile spam. I couldn't believe it.

I think though that the main problem is cost. Anyone who thoroughly understands the technical aspects of SEO and can legitimately build a site's traffic is going to cost $3000+ a month (perhaps less, depending on the niche). So, if I'm a small time small business and can't afford $3000+ a month, I'm going to be looking for the $500 a month type of package...and sadly, this is usually not going to move the needle much.

"...client copies everything to blogspot."

If a large amount of the content on her blogspot site is the same as her main site AND if for some reason Google has chosen the blogspot site as the originator of the content, then there's a good possibility that the Panda algorithm is looking unfavorably on the main site.  The key would be to noindex the duplicate content on the blogspot site and if this is the cause then within 1-2 Panda refreshes you should see improvement.  Panda generally refreshes around once a month.

I'm guessing it's not Panda though as when I search for her name, her blogspot blog doesn't come up prominently.  Still, it's not a good idea to publish to both places unless you can noindex or canonicalize one.  It is ok to put the poems on more than one site provided that there is significant difference and value on each page other than just the poem.

I'm definitely seeing unnatural links too though such as http://demo.classyhost.com/SocialNews5/story.php?id=409614\.  It may be worth disavowing those types of links.

Can you tell if there is a specific date when the traffic decline started?  If you can reconcile it with the date of a Panda (content) or a Penguin (links) refresh that might give you a better idea of what is going on.

When EMD hit on September 28, I asked for people to send me domains that had been affected so that I could see if there were any patterns.  I had over 100 domains sent to me and the vast majority of them actually had Panda issues.  Then, a few days after EMD, Google announced that they had also done a Panda refresh on September 27.

In all of the domains that I analyzed I would say that one of them was likely a true EMD candidate.  This was a one page site with very little content and several affiliate links.  It previously was ranking well for a competitive niche.  The only reason it was ranking well was because of its domain name.  EMD was designed to take the ranking benefit away from sites that ONLY ranked because they had keywords in their domain name.  It doesn't punish a site simply because there are keywords in the domain name.

You've mentioned that your pages are 100% unique.  Do you have thin pages?  If you have a section of your site that has pages with very little content on the page then this can cause Panda to affect you.  But there are other possible reasons as well.

Are you sure it was Panda that affected you? As far as we know, Panda really has very little to do with the quality of your backlinks and rather is about the overall quality of your website.

Were you hit around April 24, 2012? That's when Penguin first came out? But, it can be tricky, because there were Panda updates around the time too - April 19 and April 27.

Ah...but I just reread your question and you said that you started building links in June of 2012. There was also a Penguin update on October 5, 2012.

I've seen a lot of people who have gone on a crazy link pruning spree when really, if the issue truly is Panda, cleaning up your links is not going to help. If you've got spammy links, it's never a bad idea to clean them up. But, it sounds like the more pressing issue here is trying to figure out exactly what hit you. It's also possible that this has nothing to do with Panda or Penguin and actually is something else.

If you can pinpoint the date of your rankings drop, then let us know. That will help.

I've seen this happen where a site buys an EMD and then names their company after it and then subsequently gets links that are branded but in reality they are only branded because they were lucky enough to buy an EMD.  Does that make sense?  For example, if someone wanted to start a house painting company in Anycity and they see that anycityhousepainters.com is available then they name their company "Anycity House Painters".  The branded links that come to them are indeed branded...but they're also an attempt to manipulate the serps.

I think that if you have a brand name that is the same as a keyword Google may not look at it as a brand name.

As far as "balancing this out" goes, it depends on whether or not you've really been penalized.  If there is an unnatural links penalty then that needs to be dealt with.  If there's a drop on a Penguin refresh day, that's a whole 'nother issue.

It's also possible that the drop has nothing to do with the branded links.

But, I think that Scott gave you some good advice on ways to link to your brand.

I have a few thoughts for you.

First, it may take time. In many cases when a penalty is lifted it can take 1-2 weeks to see the benefits of the penalty being lifted.

Second, this is probably obvious, but is the brand name relatively unique? In other words, if your brand is a common word or a keyword, then you may not see a return to good rankings. Google may decide that when people search for that word they're not necessarily looking for your brand.

Next, it's possible that the site is trapped under Penguin and you need to wait till Penguin updates. With that said, Penguin doesn't usually affect brand terms too heavily, unless, again, the brand is a common keyword.

" Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. " - This doesn't sound normal to me. You should not lose rankings after filing a disavow unless you have been extremely aggressive and disavowed really good links. Even then, it takes a good amount of time for the sites in your disavow to be recrawled and the disavow applied. So, if your drop happened shortly after filing the disavow it could be coincidental. There have been a LOT of changes in the SERPS recently and it may be that your site is one of the many that is seeing wild swings.

With all of that said, there are cases where Google makes mistakes. I've had a few cases where I just couldn't figure out why a site couldn't rank for their brand name. Here's an example: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/VFnodOiYXqc;context-place=topicsearchin/webmasters/pedorthic. In that case we were able to get a Google employee's ear and magically, after not ranking for months, the brand terms were back within 24 hours. But, this type of situation is likely quite rare.

I am guessing that in your case, you need to give it a bit more time.

Best of luck!

I personally do everything manually.  I think that the link removal tools can work great for some sites, but your best chance at identifying the bad links and keeping the good ones is to look at them manually.  2500 domains is a lot, but not impossible.  I'm currently working on an account of about that size and it will take me about 10-14 days to go through as many.  Once you get going you will recognize patterns and it will go faster.

I used to get emails on my own but I have just hired someone to do this for me.  I find that the automated tools miss a lot of them.  I was considering hiring from o-desk or mechanical turk, but in my situation, because my business is expanding and most of what I do is penalty removal, it's worth my while to hire and train someone to do this for me.

btw...if you've got 2500 domains, you won't have 2500 emails.  Many will be offline or nofollowed or perhaps even natural.

Ezine Articles links definitely need to be removed if they are followed links.  Often times those links are nofollowed, but if you have a high enough account level there then they are followed and need to go.

A few other points:

-Yes you're right.  It's not enough to just disavow.  Google's going to want to see evidence that you've tried hard to remove links.

-Lately I have only be using links from WMT and not other sources like Majestic and ahrefs.  That may cut down on the number of domains you have to deal with.  So far it is working for me.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

When I see links like this, the first thing I worry about is whether your site has been hacked. But yes, attempts at negative SEO are possible as well.

Whenever, Google is asked about negative SEO like this they say that they are generally really good at determining that these are not links that you made yourself and that you are safe to ignore them. But, they do always recommend disavowing just to be sure.

Here are my thoughts on your questions:

1. Do these links hurt your SEO, even if nofollowed? If nofollowed they are no harm to you. However, in some hackings what the hackers will do is point thousands of nofollowed links from domains they control and then, somewhere down the road they can change them to followed. As such, in this case I'd still disavow the nofollowed links.

2. What else can you do other than disavow? Not much unfortunately. If you find that a lot of these links point to a particular page you can 404 or 410 that page and that will get rid of the links. But otherwise, sadly, there's not much else you can do.

3. Most likely Google will ignore these links but no one can say for sure.

Hi Candice,

Your problem may lie in overoptimized backlinks.  Your top anchors are "drupal developer" and "drupal development".  This type of link building worked well in the past, but these days can get you penalized.  Without having a deep look it's hard to say whether you've been penalized or whether Google is just no longer giving you credit for those links.

Links are important for ranking and these days the links that count are ones that are naturally earned which are unfortunately hard to get.

Whether or not you should start over is a decision that probably can't be made in a forum post as there are many factors to consider.  But, I would say that failing a reconsideration request is not on its own enough to make me want to start over.

Did Google give you example links that were already in your disavow?  If so, did you disavow on the domain or url level?  Often if you've disavowed on the url level you'll be missing links.  If the link truly was disavowed then you've probably got other similar ones in your profile that need to be removed/disavowed.

Did you make extensive effort to get links removed?  That's vital when you have a manual action.

"Can I create a brand new domain/website and transfer the PA juice WITHOUT the bad links?"

No.  What makes up the PA is the equity from the links.  If you start a new domain and 301 the old to the new you'll pass ALL of the link signals good and bad.  There are ways to start over and redirect users from your old site to the new without passing the penalty, but it will be like totally starting afresh.

Another factor to consider is that if you start new you'll need new content as well.  If you just put the old content on a new url Google will usually recognize that this is the same site and apply canonical tags which essentially still point the unnatural links at the new site.

I've yet to see a site that could not get its unnatural links penalty lifted....and I've seen some REALLY badly spammed sites.  But, it's not uncommon for it to take several attempts in order to succeed.

While it could be Penguin, I don't think we can make that call on the data given to us in the question.

What you are doing is what Google calls "doorway pages": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311.

This can land you with a manual thin content penalty or, more likely, can cause your site to be looked at as low quality by the Panda algorithm.

If you can produce unique pages for each city that actually add significant value (i.e. not just unique words) then this might be alright.  Otherwise, the best practice is to have one really good page of content that is indexed rather than trying to capture search terms for each city.

I definitely agree that Penguin is a huge possibility.  But, I think it could be dangerous advice to send a site owner on a link removal/disavow mission when we don't know for sure.  There are many other possibilities.  It could be a Panda issue.  It could be that it was a new site and the previous high rankings were a honeymoon effect.  It could be that the /home.html page is blocked by robots.txt or has a canonical tag that is confusing Google.  It could be that they changed the title tag on the page so that it is no longer appropriate.  It could be that the site was hit with malware and users are clicking away because of virus warnings.

(btw...the thumb down was not from me.  I respect that you are trying to help but just wanted to comment to make sure that the site owner (or someone else reading this post) doesn't go off disavowing links without getting to the cause of the problem first.)