A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off. It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly authoritative domain.
Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's history when it transfers owners, but... that creates an incentive to spam the shit out of a domain and then just "transfer ownership" once it's hit with a penalty. Kind of a hard problem to solve, but an important one. I imagine someone like my dad, not knowing the first thing about the internet, wanting to set up a small site for his business. I picture him trying to buy a domain that matches his business name or something, and then never getting out of the gutter due to past damage to the domain. Not really fair to him (maybe this is a bit of an edge case, I dunno).
I think you'll find a thorough re-inclusion request here will likely help but won't completely bring a recovery (but seriously, make it as thorough as possible, including disavowing every link you didn't build).
Disavowing "dozens" of links is not exactly hard work - I've had people ask for help disavowing THOUSANDS of links their ex-agencies had pointed at their site.
The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/
This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site).
Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?
I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.
Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.
Negative SEO is a very real thing. You can buy links off black hat forums that are specifically advertised to help knock off your competition.
It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.
The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming a little frightening.
> Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"?
There was a cheesy TV show several years back about a group of con artists, I don't remember the name but they had a sort of motto that applies here: "you can't con an honest man."
What exactly is our poor innocent small business owner trying to do by hiring a cheap SEO firm? He's trying to manipulate the google rankings in his favor, and away from what's objectively best for the searchers. Maybe he doesn't know google has rules about or how exactly the SEO firm is going to go about, but he's not an innocent victim.
One thing I don't see anyone mentioning is why Google ignores the 404 and still applies the penalty.
PageRank is fully automated, and probably probes pages very frequently. If you let a 404 remove a penalty, people could probably occasionally 404 Google's crawler and see if it helps their rank to automatically remove poorly performing backlinks.
Google probably sees a 404 penalty remover as technically onerous. It also wouldn't prevent an arms race of spamming ephemeral links, where if the spammer wasn't required to switch domains all the time they'd be able to just stay 4hrs ahead of Google crawler and create a business model oriented around a 4hr link lifetime.
It is Google's fault that their pagerank algorithm isn't sophisticated enough to handle understanding that internet domain ownership isn't static, and for not understanding that spam sites pointing to 404s on another site are a prime indication that a change has happened.
How does an unmaintained phpBB install count as a 'spam history'? By that metric probably half the amateur websites on the internet are 'spam websites' because they have a forum that isn't actively maintained. I run across spambot-afflicted forums on a regular basis.
My friend, I sympathize with you. But surely you can email those webmasters in at most 30-45 minutes with requests to remove those links, give it a week, and then do the disavow tool? Is it not worth it to spend 2 hours to rescue your site that you care so much about?
RapGenius was able to do this in a few hours and they had THOUSANDS of bad backlinks. They even published their source code for automating it.
If those links point to pages that do not exist because they were part of the previous owner's website, why should he have to hunt down each instance of an old link and ask to have it removed? Never mind the fact that we are seeing as much as 80% ignore rate on removal requests these days.
We are seeing more an more of this. I've seen messages from 'Google' with sample links that need to be removed that are from domains that no longer exist. How can you remove a link the Google claims is causing you harm when that domain no longer exists?
The best solution has always been for Google to simply ignore links that it does not approve of and move on. Instead they have chosen the path of penalizing many websites in an effort to 'clean up' a problem that they were instrumental in creating (PR Toolbar anyone?). The collateral damage tends to be irrelevant to many at Google because search tends to be considered a zero sum game. When one site moves down another moves up.
I had a site that was hacked. Over 250k links were built. They were pointing to a new page on the site. We found out about the hack via Google Webmaster Tools. They sent a notice it was a malware issue.
We cleaned up the hack and 404 the page. To this day, there are still over 100k links that Google says is out there.
The nice part is, there is no indication of any negative action taken by Google.
At the same time the real concern for legitimate businesses is the potential for adversaries to use massive spam backlinking to destroy your online presence. Are Google algo's smart enough to not ding you for what you did not do? Probably not. It would almost be trivially easy to destroy a domain this way.
I was sitting in a meeting just the other week where this came up. We were giving our spiel about how there aren't really any shortcuts that work long-term with SEO, and if you pay someone $20 to create 1,000s of spammy backlinks, Google will notice and you'll be severely penalized for it.
So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-links to our competitor's site?"
I'm shocked that this hasn't become a more common or publicized tactic. I can't imagine how you'd trace it, and the way things are right now, all the burden of proof and cleanup is on the site owner.
They could certainly disavow the links, but it seems like you could pretty easily and cheaply become a pain in the ass of just about any small to medium site on the internet.
I had a similar thing happen on my personal site, also due to phpBB2. The bad guys used an exploit in phpBB2 to upload a bunch of images of ads for cheap drugs and male enhancement products, and then they spammed links to those images to websites and in email.
I have no idea if Google noticed or cared, because I had nothing on my site that I expected people to find via search. I did have one page, some analysis I wrote on how to beat a particular puzzle, that was #1 on searches for how to beat that puzzle on both Google and Bing, and it stayed #1 [1].
[1] It's pretty funny. The page is just a simple page of mostly text, with some tables. No attempt has been made to optimize for search. There are very few incoming links, and one outgoing link (to a domain that once had an online version of the puzzle in question, but whose registration lapsed and is now owned by a noodle soup chain). I posted maybe one or two links to the page in comments I made on discussions of that puzzle a dozen years ago, and have done no other promotion of it. Yet for over a decade, it has been #1 on Google and Bing for searches on how to beat that puzzle. I have no idea why. (I have not named the puzzle or linked to the page here because I do not want to do anything that might disturb the situation. I'm curious to see how long it stays #1 without any promotion).
This is the way search should work, and it only goes to show how well Google is doing it. People shouldn't have or even want to do SEO, they should just make great content and wait for their rankings.
The real trouble here is that this risk kills investment in developing new and better web sites.
Want to make a better competitor to w3schools? Good luck. It takes just one screw up and all the hard work and money you put into it go down the drain. Practically anybody who makes web sites for profit today has to look at it the way a black hat does because you're going to get treated like a black hat.
It seems like investigating the history of a domain before you buy it, and if it has a negative history either not buying it or ensuring you fix the issues with it would be considered, good practice. It seems like if you do not do that you have yourself largely to blame. Similar to buying a house that was built on the location of previous toxic spill, or that had lead paint, or is haunted.
Me too, "403 Forbidden", which seems like a strange response. I could understand the site deciding to take it down, and showing a "404 Not Found", or getting overloaded and showing something like a "500 Internal Error", but this implies that they want it seen by some people and not others.
(Edited to add: it looks like the whole site is 403'ing, which suggests it's probably just a configuration error)
It looks as though there are a lot links pointing to the homepage from blogrolls which might be causing problems too - especially as he admitted he was selling links from his sidebar?
I just wanted to say thanks for posting this. I'm not into seo at all so I'm exactly the kind of person who could get blindsided by backlinks. It sucks you bought a bad domain but sharing the experience with hn is a good public service. Thanks.
Woa woa woa, let's pump the brakes, you are misdirecting this. Of all the innocent victims Google takes on a daily basis, both algorithmically and manually, you are not one of them.
YOU made a mistake by not thoroughly researching the new domain before buying and moving your site. It's essential to check the history on a domain before purchasing and dumping all our eggs into a new basket, which for you was an unknown basket full of the previous owner's spam.
Archive.org, ahrefs.com, domaintools.com << Not hard to determine a domains past history even for a novice, just using archive.org and the free versions of ahrefs and domaintools.
The only person to blame is you my friend, purchasing that domain and 301ing your old site sealed your own fate. So you're really just wasting everyone's time with a bunch of wining and pulling the big bad evil Google muwhahaha card.
For once, I'm on Google's side here. Party's over everyone, move along.
[+] [-] sharkweek|12 years ago|reply
A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off. It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly authoritative domain.
From the horse's mouth:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-dom...
Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's history when it transfers owners, but... that creates an incentive to spam the shit out of a domain and then just "transfer ownership" once it's hit with a penalty. Kind of a hard problem to solve, but an important one. I imagine someone like my dad, not knowing the first thing about the internet, wanting to set up a small site for his business. I picture him trying to buy a domain that matches his business name or something, and then never getting out of the gutter due to past damage to the domain. Not really fair to him (maybe this is a bit of an edge case, I dunno).
I think you'll find a thorough re-inclusion request here will likely help but won't completely bring a recovery (but seriously, make it as thorough as possible, including disavowing every link you didn't build).
Disavowing "dozens" of links is not exactly hard work - I've had people ask for help disavowing THOUSANDS of links their ex-agencies had pointed at their site.
[+] [-] leephillips|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trevin|12 years ago|reply
Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?
I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.
Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.
1: https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800 2: http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die
[+] [-] puranjay|12 years ago|reply
It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.
The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming a little frightening.
[+] [-] bradleyjg|12 years ago|reply
There was a cheesy TV show several years back about a group of con artists, I don't remember the name but they had a sort of motto that applies here: "you can't con an honest man."
What exactly is our poor innocent small business owner trying to do by hiring a cheap SEO firm? He's trying to manipulate the google rankings in his favor, and away from what's objectively best for the searchers. Maybe he doesn't know google has rules about or how exactly the SEO firm is going to go about, but he's not an innocent victim.
[+] [-] Guvante|12 years ago|reply
PageRank is fully automated, and probably probes pages very frequently. If you let a 404 remove a penalty, people could probably occasionally 404 Google's crawler and see if it helps their rank to automatically remove poorly performing backlinks.
[+] [-] rhizome|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgmmo|12 years ago|reply
Also, a simple backlink analysis from any SEO would have turned up these issues and then you could have promptly disavowed them and be done with it.
It's not Google's fault that you didn't dot you i's and cross your t's as a webmaster.
[+] [-] peapicker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hahahafail|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevingadd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|12 years ago|reply
RapGenius was able to do this in a few hours and they had THOUSANDS of bad backlinks. They even published their source code for automating it.
You gotta try. Good luck!
[+] [-] SteveGerencser|12 years ago|reply
We are seeing more an more of this. I've seen messages from 'Google' with sample links that need to be removed that are from domains that no longer exist. How can you remove a link the Google claims is causing you harm when that domain no longer exists?
The best solution has always been for Google to simply ignore links that it does not approve of and move on. Instead they have chosen the path of penalizing many websites in an effort to 'clean up' a problem that they were instrumental in creating (PR Toolbar anyone?). The collateral damage tends to be irrelevant to many at Google because search tends to be considered a zero sum game. When one site moves down another moves up.
[+] [-] iancarroll|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janesvilleseo|12 years ago|reply
We cleaned up the hack and 404 the page. To this day, there are still over 100k links that Google says is out there.
The nice part is, there is no indication of any negative action taken by Google.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|12 years ago|reply
I think you'd call that a high-risk strategy however.
[+] [-] robomartin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atourgates|12 years ago|reply
So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-links to our competitor's site?"
I'm shocked that this hasn't become a more common or publicized tactic. I can't imagine how you'd trace it, and the way things are right now, all the burden of proof and cleanup is on the site owner.
They could certainly disavow the links, but it seems like you could pretty easily and cheaply become a pain in the ass of just about any small to medium site on the internet.
[+] [-] tzs|12 years ago|reply
I have no idea if Google noticed or cared, because I had nothing on my site that I expected people to find via search. I did have one page, some analysis I wrote on how to beat a particular puzzle, that was #1 on searches for how to beat that puzzle on both Google and Bing, and it stayed #1 [1].
[1] It's pretty funny. The page is just a simple page of mostly text, with some tables. No attempt has been made to optimize for search. There are very few incoming links, and one outgoing link (to a domain that once had an online version of the puzzle in question, but whose registration lapsed and is now owned by a noodle soup chain). I posted maybe one or two links to the page in comments I made on discussions of that puzzle a dozen years ago, and have done no other promotion of it. Yet for over a decade, it has been #1 on Google and Bing for searches on how to beat that puzzle. I have no idea why. (I have not named the puzzle or linked to the page here because I do not want to do anything that might disturb the situation. I'm curious to see how long it stays #1 without any promotion).
[+] [-] npsimons|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
Want to make a better competitor to w3schools? Good luck. It takes just one screw up and all the hard work and money you put into it go down the drain. Practically anybody who makes web sites for profit today has to look at it the way a black hat does because you're going to get treated like a black hat.
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|12 years ago|reply
You don't have permission to access /2014/02/how-google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/ on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
[+] [-] mehulkar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genericuser|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkaziz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bronson|12 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MnfiX2B...
[+] [-] jleader|12 years ago|reply
(Edited to add: it looks like the whole site is 403'ing, which suggests it's probably just a configuration error)
[+] [-] zarpwerk|12 years ago|reply
And you can see the 50% drop in traffic here http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/?url=sp...
[+] [-] spinlock|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IMJacobKing|12 years ago|reply
YOU made a mistake by not thoroughly researching the new domain before buying and moving your site. It's essential to check the history on a domain before purchasing and dumping all our eggs into a new basket, which for you was an unknown basket full of the previous owner's spam.
Archive.org, ahrefs.com, domaintools.com << Not hard to determine a domains past history even for a novice, just using archive.org and the free versions of ahrefs and domaintools.
The only person to blame is you my friend, purchasing that domain and 301ing your old site sealed your own fate. So you're really just wasting everyone's time with a bunch of wining and pulling the big bad evil Google muwhahaha card.
For once, I'm on Google's side here. Party's over everyone, move along.