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Most likely, yes.

However, if the content on the pages that were redirected is the same as it was in the past, Google can sometimes apply a hidden canonical. In other words, lets say that the old domain used to be their main site and they built unnatural links to a page called /services. Now let's say that there is a page on the new site called /service_offerings. The content is the same as the old and the old is redirected to the new.

In that case, Google can often recognize that those old links, even if the redirect is removed, should be counting towards the new page.

I'd still want to disavow to make it even more likely that Google stops counting the quality of those links towards this site.

If you do remove the redirects though, it can take a few months to start seeing the benefits, so it will be a hard thing to test. I'd remove the redirects AND disavow. And in a case like this I'd recommend regularly doing link audits to find new unnatural links that the link aggregator tools have missed.

Hi. Joy asked me to take a look at this as it's an unusual ranking situation.

While I agree that it is unusual for an organic filter to suppress rankings in just one location, I think that the egregious backlink profile of this site cannot be ignored.

If this is related to backlinks (which I think is quite likely), it's likely not a location issue, but rather, the anchor text of the unnatural links is holding the site back. And...the majority of the anchors use some form of the words "plumbing" and "austin".

I know what you're thinking...Penguin is supposed to just ignore unnatural links, not penalize for them. However, there are two things that I think we should consider here.

First, John Mueller recently said that unnatural links can impair a site's ability to rank somewhat. There are algorithms outside of Penguin that look at link quality. If they see that there are a large number of links that go against Google's guidelines, they can choose to put less trust in all of your links.

When asked whether unnatural links can hurt a site algorithmically, John said, "“That can definitely be the case. So it’s something where our algorithms when we look at it and they see, oh, there are a bunch of really bad links here. Then maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious with regards to the links in general for the website. So if you clean that up, then the algorithms look at it and say, oh, there’s– there’s kind of– it’s OK. It’s not bad.”

But wait...if this is the case, then why would only the Austin rankings be affected?

This is a long read, but a good one. Bill Slawski wrote about a Google patent that looks at link quality. That patent talks about how pages can be devalued for a particular query if there are a large number of links that are never clicked upon. I know it sounds crazy...it's worth taking the time to read it. Also, it's a patent so we don't know whether Google is using it, but if they are, it is built for cases like this.

The only thing that I can't fully explain is why this is only happening for searches from Austin. I think it's conceivably possible that if the patent mentioned above is being used in this case, that the system can detect that there was an attempt to manipulate rankings for Austin searches and therefore, it is suppressing the ability to rank there.

I haven't looked into the website at all...just the backlinks, but this is one of the more manipulative backlink profiles I've seen in a while. We had a similar case about a year ago where we audited the links and disavowed about 70% of a site's link profile. The links were quite similar to yours in the sense that they were low quality links anchored with a keyword plus the city name in which they wanted to rank. Within two months of filing the disavow, we started to see a nice uplift and it has continued to grow (see image).

The first thing I would do is check for the presence of a manual action. Do this in Search Console. You'll see Manual Actions in the left sidebar. If there's no manual action, I'd go straight to disavowing. Be extremely aggressive as the only cases where I have seen improvements after disavowing are ones where we dramatically cut out as much of the unnatural linking as possible. Even if there is something else going on such as a technical issue, these backlinks can't be ignored. While most sites do not need to disavow these days, this one, in my opinion does!

mhc-disavow-links-case.jpg

Hi Niall,

Are you sure that you need to be auditing your links each month? It's never a bad idea to go through your links regularly, but in my opinion, most sites do NOT need to be disavowing any more.

For a couple of years, a huge portion of my income came from doing link audits. I saw some amazing Penguin recoveries.

But when Penguin 4.0 came out in September of 2016, everything changed. Google made it so that for the most part, they ignore unnatural links. This means that unnatural links should not be able to penalize a site. If you're disavowing a link, you're asking Google to ignore it. So, if you are spending lots of money and time disavowing, then you're essentially asking Google to ignore links that they are already ignoring. In most cases I think it is a waste of money to do this.

Any time I say that, there will be people who swear that they have been able to take a site down via negative SEO by building links, or there will be people who swear that they saw a nice improvement after disavowing. But I've seen very few cases where someone has given good evidence to support their claims.

I wrote a thorough article on Moz about whether or not we still need to be disavowing in the age of Penguin 4.0:

https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin

If you're dealing with a manual unnatural link penalty then yes, you should be disavowing links. But otherwise, in most cases I recommend not disavowing. I think it's possible to do more harm than good. Also, many of the links that are flagged as "toxic" on automated link auditing tools are just cruft that every site gets.

My point in saying all of this is that I am betting that you probably don't need to spend any money on link auditing tools.

With that said, it's never a bad idea to regularly review your links...not for finding links to disavow, but rather, to see what is working for you. I personally like Ahrefs for monitoring links. I have alerts set up to tell me when I get a new link and I check those regularly. My goal though is to find what kinds of good links I am getting. For example, if a particular type of content has gained a few natural links then I know that that is good content to do outreach on and try to get more links.

If you're a Moz member, open site explorer is good at surfacing good links as well.

You're very welcome Amy.

Here's Moz's guide on title tags:

https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/learn/seo/title-tag

It's recommended to put some keywords first, but you want to be sure not to keyword stuff. So, in your case, an example of a decent title tag might be "Recording Studio in San Diego - Studio West".

Google likes to see content above the fold. What I mean by "above the fold" is the area of the screen that is visible without scrolling down. I do find that when I go to your site, I can easily tell what your site is about by reading the above the fold content. The phrase, "San Diego's Premier Studio and Music Production School" is good and makes sense. (A lot of sites have almost no good above the fold content.)

I'm betting though, that you might see more traction if you put a paragraph of text below your slider that explains more about what your business offers. That text will give Google more to index and searchers something to read.

Hi. To check if you have a manual action, go to Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual actions.

With that said, I see studiowest.com at #3 local and on page 2 for "recording studio san diego". There has been a lot of turbulence in the SERPS and I've seen a number of clients that have disappeared for a day or two and then suddenly reappeared (often higher than they first were.)

I had a quick look though and I think there are a number of changes you could make to help if things don't work themselves out. Your titletag is your brand name - you should have a few keywords in there, preferably at the start of the title tag. You also have very little text above the fold for readers and search engines to read.

Those are good things to change regardless, but I wouldn't make too many big changes without waiting for a few days to see what Google does.

Best of luck!

It's not that Google will penalize you for using the disavow tool, but rather, that if you disavow a good link you'll potentially end up doing harm.

I don't think Matt's statements were confusing. He said that if you reavow a link it may not be given the weight that it once had. This is a measure Google takes to make it harder for people to experiment with the disavow tool. I wrote a lot more about this here:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2409081/can-you-reavow-links-you-have-peviously-disavowed

Losing a link from a wikipedia page should not cause a drop IMO. Links from wikipedia are nofollowed and do not pass PageRank. Now, in some cases you can get followed links from sites that scrape wikipedia, but I would be surprised if losing these links hurt you.

In regards to Google ignoring bad backlinks, that's what they say they do now. Still, if I see a site that has a lot of self made SEO links then I'll disavow just to be sure. Also, there are other algorithms that use links and there is the potential for manual actions, so it's not like we can completely ignore unnatural links.

There are many different kinds and qualities of site audits. I've seen some expensive site audits that were useless. It frustrates me that some SEO companies are producing these expensive audits that are not helpful at all.

There are good tools out there to cover the basics, but a good SEO audit has to go well beyond what a tool can give you.

When I do a site audit it will take me several weeks to complete it. Seriously...weeks. I'll often discover something that seems off and then go down a rabbit trail for a few days investigating that. I'll agree that tools like Moz and SEMRush are awesome. But a good site audit needs an experienced eye in order to be helpful.

I also think that many SEOs overlook overall site quality when doing an audit. I'm not talking about technical quality, but rather, answering the question, "Is my site truly better than the ones that are ranking above me?" I really think that as Google gets better and better at answering a user's query, the only sites that are going to be ranked well are the ones that truly are better sites...not just the ones with the proper h tags, title tags and url structure.

For example, I recently reviewed a site that ranked #1 for years and then dropped to page 3. He was sure that he was being penalized. When I looked at his site I couldn't figure out how to purchase the product he was selling. There was almost no helpful information on product pages. There was only one stock image of the product. As a user, I would be much more likely to purchase from any of the sites on page 1 than from his site. Those sites had beautiful design, buying guides, easy to understand shopping carts, etc.

A tool won't give you that info.

The problem though is that to have an experienced person who has successfully helped sites recover look at your site, it's going to be expensive.

The potential harm in using the disavow tool is that you could be disavowing links that are actually helping you. If a link is truly an unnatural link, then yes, it should be disavowed, but if you are disavowing and then re-avowing, and then trying different links to disavow this could be dangerous.

Matt Cutts a few years ago said that Google had built in some features to the disavow tool to prevent people from trying to experiment with it. He hinted that a reavowed link may not carry the same power that it once did. Also, Cyrus Shepard from Moz did an experiment where he disavowed every link to his site and rankings plummeted. He later removed his entire disavow file and his rankings did not recover at all.

Regarding discounting links vs penalizing for links, Gary Illyes from Google made statements saying that the new Penguin algorithm no longer penalizes sites. With that said, if you have a lot of unnatural links I still recommend disavowing as you could get a manual penalty.

Also, there are other algorithms that use links, so yes, I still do disavow. My reasoning for advising that you don't disavow is because it sounds like you are experimenting with the tool and disavowing and reavowing. Again, if a link needs to be disvaowed, then disavow it and leave it at that.

OK, so if your homepage is completely deindexed, then there has to be a technical issue or a manual penalty. I'd say that a technical issue is much more likely.

To look for a manual penalty, go to Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.

If there is nothing there, then I'm happy to take a quick look if you want to PM me the url or better yet, send me an email at marie at marie haynes dot com.

It's tough to comment without seeing the actual page, but here are my thoughts.

You should not try to experiment with the disavow tool. If you've got links that you yourself made for SEO purposes and they serve no other purpose then yes, disavow them. But, if you're not sure, it's best to just leave the disavow tool alone as it's possible to do more harm than good. Google's new version of Penguin just ignores unnatural links and doesn't penalize sites for having them. If you have lots of spammy links I still advise disavowing, but disavowing just a few links is not a good idea.

Regarding page titles, it's generally best practice to have your most important keywords at the beginning of the title tag, so with that in mind the old title tags look better to me.

Is it dangerous to have your H1 tag and your title the exact same thing?  My thought was that it's not be the best use of space, but that it couldn't cause harm.

What do you think?

Here are my thoughts.  My first strategy is to build great content.  But, it's true that no one will link to your content if they don't know about it, so sometimes you need to do other things to get your site noticed.

My second plan of attack is to create linkbait.  I've had good success with designing a couple of calculators.  The trick is to find something that is REALLY helpful in your niche but that is hard to find elsewhere on the web and to make it easy for people to share on FB and other social sites.  These are not always easy to think up!  And you need to have the skill to program the calculator (or the cash to hire a programmer).  Another type of linkbait I use is to blog about current events, but give people a solution.  For example, when the earthquake in Japan happened, a lot of people in my niche were searching for a particular thing  in regards to radiation.  I wrote an article that answered these questions.  I made sure that I researched my keywords and crafted my title so that it ended up attracting a lot of SERP attention even without having backlinks.  Because that was a highly searched term for a couple of months it brought traffic and links to my site.

For my informational site the above is all that I do.  I will occasionally email a site owner to let them know about some great content that I have produced, but not often.  I let my readers promote my content.  I make it easy for people to share it in social networks.

I also run a real estate site.  It's new and I am currently in the stage of creating a great site so that when I start a link building campaign people will have quality stuff to link to.  My first plan of action for my real estate site is to publish a very comprehensive article rating the top ten neighborhoods in my city.  I have crunched census data and have my top ten.  Then I'm going to write a great article about each of the neighborhoods.  Once I have incredible content I will do some press releases, I will personally email local and national newspapers, and I will email people in my niche who will be interested in this type of content.  I may eventually add reviews of restaurants, hotels and other businesses within these areas in the hopes of gaining links from those businesses.  The possibilities for this one bit of linkbait are endless - I could offer badges (with an embedded link back) for the top businesses, I could have a contest for the schools in each area to come up with reasons why their school is best (which would encourage more linking), etc. etc.  My brain is so full of ideas that I don't have time to build all of these things!

I may do some manual linkbuilding for the real estate site such as a few quality directories.  I will analyze my competitors' backlinks to see if there are any good opportunities for me.  But, so far what I have seen in the competitive link tool are low quality directories that likely won't help.

I considered buying some links, but it's looking less and less attractive to me.  For a previous site of mine I bought some links from "sponsor pages".  The sponsor part was complete bull because you basically paid some money to sponsor a product you've never heard of and you got a link from a high PR page.  These links definitely did help my site.  And, I can see how it's tempting to go after them.  But here's my thought on link buying:  I think that Google is getting better and better at detecting paid links.  There are some that they will never get such as if I pay my neighbor to write a blog post about my business and include a link.  But, for things like sponsor pages and link farms and "buy an article on this page and we'll link back with three keywords", Google's got Phd's working on anti-spam algorithms.

So, I would hate to go through years of building up my business via linkbait and hard work and hours and hours of content production only to find that I get penalized a few years down the road because I bought some paid links.  I can't imagine losing first place rankings, and all of the income that goes along with that (especially for our real estate site) because I got penalized.

That's my strategy for you.

It looks to me like this isn't her website at all.  Instead, she has purchased space on the funktional designs website.  "www.designsbymaida.com" isn't a website - it's just a domain name that redirects to the designer's site.

So if there was any linkbuilding effort geared towards designsbymaida, then yes, funktional designs would benefit.

But, I don't this this is an ethical question.  I don't think they're trying to do anything shady.  They're just giving space on their website.  Now, if she wants to SEO her site she's got to talk to Funktional Designs about taking her content and putting it on a self hosted site.

**"Some people will argue that Google penalizes keyword domains, but I know that isn't true. " **

I think that a lot of people in the SEO world are confused about this. When the EMD algo first came out I studied a large number of sites that had taken drops. Google confused everyone because they made a big deal of announcing the EMD update and then sneakily pushed out a Panda refresh a couple of days later. A LOT of sites were affected by this Panda refresh.

At that time I had asked anyone who thought that they were hit by EMD to share their domain with me. A large number of these ended up being sites that, IMO were hit by Panda.

The sites that were affected by the EMD update were ones that truly did not deserve to rank, and only previously ranked well because they were EMDs.

There is no penalty for having an EMD.

Now, back to the original question. I'm unclear as to whether OP is saying that there is a single EMD that is ranking well, or perhaps you are saying that this company has a whole bunch of service+location EMD's that are ranking well. If this is the case, then whether or not they deserve to rank depend on what kind of unique value they are offering. For example, if this was a plumbing site and every single location had almost the same content on it describing their overall plumbing business then Google wouldn't like that. But, let's say it's a real estate brokerage and the brand has worked really hard to provide helpful, unique content for each city they service. I could see this working. Google still would prefer that a realtor ran just one site, but if these individual sites were helpful enough to users then they still could do well.

I was on the phone tonight with a site owner who may have been affected by Penguin.  I was explaining how overuse of keywords with anchor text can adversely affect a site and he asked me an interesting question:  "If that is the case, then why does the SEOMoz guide say differently?"

Here are some quotes from the SEOMoz beginner's guide:

"Anchor Text - One of the strongest signals the engines use in rankings is anchor text. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrase in that anchor text."

That pretty much implies that you should try to get as many keyword anchor texted links to your site as possible.  There should probably be some type of Penguin warning in here.

"Self-Created, Non-Editorial - Hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links through guest book signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These links offer the lowest value, but can, in aggregate, still have an impact for some sites. "

Granted, the text goes on to say this:

"In general, search engines continue to devalue most of these types of links, and have been known to penalize sites that pursue these links aggressively. Today, these types of links are often considered spammy and should be pursued with caution."

That's a good warning, but I think it could be perhaps made a little more clear that self made links like this are not wise to use as an SEO tool.  I think that to a beginner, it kind of sounds like the guide is saying, "There are lots of opportunities out there where you can get a link by making one yourself.  Go ahead and use them but don't overdo it."

The majority of people in the SEO world believe that if Penguin hits you, it hits you HARD.  But, I don't agree with this.  John Mueller from Google has said that it can affect a site incrementally.  I've seen sites that took a dip with a Penguin update of only a few positions, or perhaps from page 1 to page 2.  With this update so far I'm seeing some sites that improved from page 2 to page 1.

However, it's also possible that your drop is because you've got competitors who are recovering after doing a thorough link cleanup and now appearing above you.

"I'm inclined to simply focus on building better links rather than disavow given the lack of severity. "

Are you building links or earning links?  If you're building links what kind are you building?  These could be the problem.  A lot of what people used to call "natural" is no longer considered natural.  If you've been making your own links then it's possible a disavow is in order.

For crying out loud.  I have a day job.  And I'm supposed to be working.  How am I supposed to get any work done when there is so much great information that keeps appearing on SEOMoz Q&A?

Yes!

In almost every site for which I have removed a penalty, we keep seeing unnatural links that appear over time.  Some of them may be the result of old automated link building tactics that are still replicating.  Some may be negative SEO.  And I think many of them are old links that just couldn't be found by the link checking tools until now.

You will likely want to do monthly disavows for some time until you start seeing that no new unnatural links are appearing.

Keep in mind that when you update your disavow you are overwriting your current file, so you need to download your file, convert it to .txt, add on to it, and then reupload it.

Let's say I have a page on my site with the url www.mydomain.com/page1.php?id=234.

Let's say it can be accessed by the url www.mydomain.com/page-this-is-a-keyword-rich-url

And let's say that the second example is what I have set as my rel-canonical.

I wondered what would happen when people submitted the non-canonical url to twitter.  We know that Twitter shares count for something in SEO.  I didn't want things to go to waste if people were landing on my short urls and sharing them on Twitter.

Well, tonight, I shared one of my own urls on Twitter.  I was accidentally on the short one (not the canonical), but when I shared it via addthis the long one was shared.  So, Addthis must read the canonical and use this to share.

Very cool.  At least to me.  I may possibly be the only person on the planet that understands what I just wrote, but this is a neat discovery for me.

Hi. I remember speaking with you last year some time about link issues. How certain are you that your link profile is clean aside from these pharma links? Usually Google is pretty good at just discounting these, but if you've got your own unnatural links I think that sometimes spam like this can possibly hurt.

Have you seen this?

https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo

Also, what are you trying to rank for? Your title tag is optimized for your url and brand.