Five years ago, I purchased a domain name from a competitor who was taking their site down. We simply created a 301 redirect from their site to our home page. Unbeknownst to me, the previous webmaster had built some very questionable links. I never added their domain to Google’s Webmaster Tools because there was no reason to. The consequence was that I never received any warning messages.
As you might have expected, we were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. At the time, I couldn’t put it together because the link building activity we engaged in was more akin to public relations and partner outreach than submitting to directories or other low return-on-effort tactics. Certainly, we were doing nothing that warranted the Penguin penalty.
No less than six consultants who conducted their own analysis gave us a clean bill of health. Even exhaustive site audits came up empty handed, showing that we, and I say our “good” domain wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. In fact, many of the SEO consultants said that we had one of the best backlink profiles they had ever seen including links from CNN (YouMoz post explaining the process), NYTimes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TechCrunch, Harvard and many more.
Clearly, it was time to tackle the project myself. I started by exporting a sampling of backlinks from SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. I sorted the list from lowest trust to highest allowing me to look at our worst links thinking that those were likely the culprits. That’s when I noticed some spammy sites linking to us. How could that be? Following the bunny trail, I ended up on pages with lists of links to random, and yes, very questionable websites. But where was the link to our main corporate site? There wasn’t one. But, there was one to the domain that we bought half a decade ago.
I found literally dozens of such links, perhaps hundreds if you count all the pages they were on. In effect what we had done is channel a bunch of garbage spammy links to our main corporate home page via the 301 redirect. It’s my hypothesis that this was pulling our website down and the root cause for the Penguin penalty.
In all my research, there was only three things I could do. Rather, these are actions I needed to take immediately to test my theory.
- We immediately killed the 301 redirect from the bad domain to our good domain. Further, we had the hosting company completely remove that domain from our servers. Now, it just doesn’t resolve anywhere. One thing for sure, I want no association with that domain.
- My second action item was to reach out to the dozens of webmasters and ask them to remove the links. I did this by doing whois lookups and sometimes outright guessing the email address such as [email protected] in hopes that it would get through to a human being. Many bounced back. A small percentage replied.
- I used the new disavow tool. For all those webmasters that I reached out to and their email bounced back, I added their domain to my disavow master list. The people who took down the link, I had no reason to disavow the link because it no longer existed.
So what happened next? I waited. And waited.
Then today I get a Google Analytics intelligence alert that my organic traffic from Google exceed the threshold I set-up last year. I set-up this alert to inform me when we may have recovered from Penguin. The analytics alerts save me from logging into Google Analytics everyday and allows me to focus on higher priority items in our business.
Clicking through the alert, I find out it’s true.
That whole process took about 100 hours in total over the course of a few months. This isn’t a quick fix. Technical SEO things rarely are. But if it’s fixed now, it was well worth the effort.
Now, the question is will it last? Were all our troubles for the last year due to a bad domain pointing to our good domain? If it’s fixed now, great!
But I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t dig deep into the backlink analysis, would the issue have ever been resolved?
