5 replies to this topic

[Sarah]

Hi All,

I've inherited a site in the past month, and it has taken a real pummelling from Panda then Penguin. I began working for the company in April and have been assessing some of the backlinks by hand (using Majestic SEO as my link check tool) and trying to understand the previous SEOs linkbuild strategy and undo some damage - then of course Penguin hit.

Since then, we've gone form ~200 impressions a day to <10 for one of our key products, and I have a great deal of work to do. One of the URLs linking to us is "utahhiphop.com/stainless-steel-cable" which when checked redirects to the homepage of Ebay.com. The link was found by Majestic in April 2012, so it's been a live site until recently - has anyone else come across something like this before?

Sarah

Edited by Sarah, 15 May 2012 - 05:52 AM.

[tedives]

That URL is not redirecting (tried from here in the States, at least not for me right now) - did you check it with a header checker tool like Rex Swain's?

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

- Ted

[Michael Martinez]

If it redirects to another site it's NOT pointing at your site. Ignore it.

If you are dealing with a huge mess of links you cannot get rid of and are not sure about, here are two possible solutions provided by Matt Cutts.

1) (Given in an article on Search Engine Land): Get a new domain and start fresh.

2) (Given to me in an email which I passed on to people in another forum): If you feel uncomfortable about links pointing to your site, then redirecting the URL(s) to example.com is okay.

In either case you will NOT see an immediate recovery from Penguin.

In the first case if you keep the same page design and navigation you most likely will NOT see a recovery from Panda. You have to fix the site design/content (it could be anything and may not be obvious -- but think in terms of keyword stuffing, duplication of boilerplate, heavy on-page navigation, etc.).

In the second case people were only concerned about the "Unnatural Links" notifications Google was sending out before Penguin struck. I suggested to another forum that if they really did not like certain links THEY had not placed that they could probably move the content to new URLs and redirect the old URLs to example.com. Obviously you cannot do this with the root URL of a domain or sub-domain. I asked Matt afterward if that was bad advice and he said it would be okay for people to do that.

This is band-aid SEO but a lot of companies have really sunk their own boats by investing too heavily in link-based strategies. In my opinion starting over would be the fastest and most cost-effective solution for a lot of these sites. My guess is that most people will NOT start over.

[piskie]

The redirect is in the head of the target page and I just checked that the redirect doesn't kick in if I disable Javascript.

[Michael Martinez]

I looked at the page with the YellowPipe Lynx Viewer. I seriously doubt any link on that page is hurting your site but you could always report it to Google for spam.

[Sarah]

Thanks for the great advice there - definitely worth another look from another angle. It's not so much that the link would be harmful, it's just the ebay.com that's displayed when I try to access the page to take a look at it that made me question what on earth was going on there.

I have abandoned the link-checking now - there really is nothing that I can do about that, so I'm just heading back to getting the site to operate on a better level. I'd prefer that we get the site working in a better fashion for the people who are looking for what we sell than go full on into a link building strategy now.

Sarah