Penalty from Google - reason, cure, right way to do this
Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 9:34 pm
My adult site is new, 7 months. My SEO experience is also 7 months long (that's my only site). I built backlinks in three ways: here, by directly sending emails to webmasters with link exchange proposal, and some sites linked on their own to my site. And everything was fine until...
During last 15 days my site's traffic dropped 80% (and it's still going down but slower). Ranking for most important keywords dropped from Google's first search results' page to 3-5th page. After saying WTF and few hours of shock I started researching reasons and cure. There are no definite answers, just general recommendations (we all know them) so mostly useless.
In state of mild panic I checked all backlinks, selected most suspect ones and disavowed them (after contacting other side and deleting from my site). To find suspect links I used SEMRUSH and MOZ tools, and of course visual control of the sites and common sense.
From one site here in exchange for one link on my side I got 20,000 links from that site (they put link to my site in repeating footer of a tube site) - at that time it looked like a good deal but I suppose it was one of the reasons for Google's anger. I also suppose Google doesn't like if my page has a link to some other site's page and that page links directly back to my page, and I have a lot of it.
So after this long introduction I have few questions:
During last 15 days my site's traffic dropped 80% (and it's still going down but slower). Ranking for most important keywords dropped from Google's first search results' page to 3-5th page. After saying WTF and few hours of shock I started researching reasons and cure. There are no definite answers, just general recommendations (we all know them) so mostly useless.
In state of mild panic I checked all backlinks, selected most suspect ones and disavowed them (after contacting other side and deleting from my site). To find suspect links I used SEMRUSH and MOZ tools, and of course visual control of the sites and common sense.
From one site here in exchange for one link on my side I got 20,000 links from that site (they put link to my site in repeating footer of a tube site) - at that time it looked like a good deal but I suppose it was one of the reasons for Google's anger. I also suppose Google doesn't like if my page has a link to some other site's page and that page links directly back to my page, and I have a lot of it.
So after this long introduction I have few questions:
- How to get out of this s*t and make Google love me again?
- Did I guess well reasons for punishment? Is there any other wrong way to use this site? I don't want to learn all those wrong ways from my own mistakes, please share yours
- What is the safe way to use this site, or at least safe enough? I suppose instead of linking A->B + B->A it's better A->B + C->A where B and C are different sites of the same owner, or at least different pages on the same site.
- Would you add anything on this subject or recommend some resource for reading? Except Google's webmaster quality guidelines