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If you got hit by a Google Algo update... where do you go?

2 points by johng ↗ HN
One of my websites (a forum) that we do no black-hat stuff on got hit by one of the recent Google algo updates. I can't figure out why. It's a forum full of great information, a thriving community.

Can't think of a reason why Google would penalize it. I've done the resubmission form and Google responds back saying no MANUAL action has been taken on the site... so I can only assume all the traffic was pulled because of some algo issue.

I don't know who to contact, I'm at wits end. Anyone know what I can do?

For the record, the site in question is: nexustablets.net

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] thread
tocomment
Have you used the google webmaster tools? Any clues there?
johng
Yes, and no clues whatsoever. We did turn off the Off-Topic section from being visible to guests, so that triggered a bunch of Soft 404 errors which I've now added to robots.txt -- we did this to try and clean up any perception of the site having low quality content. Though, honestly, I think the off-topic stuff should be fine anyway... we are kind of grasping at straws.
swastik
Well, you have more than 98% of your links with this anchor text: nexus tablets. Out of 118,824, about 118,100 use that anchor text. (I used ahrefs to get this)

That's a massive flag right there. Many of these are sitewide links (which, again, isn't going to help your case). The only saving grace is that many of these sites are pretty relevant to your site. Even then, it looks like it got hit by the Penguin update or the EMD update (since your domain's an exact match, and just about every link has that as the anchor text). There isn't a need for any manual action... there's a massive footprint as far as your backlinks profile are concerned.

Here's the good thing: It seems you have interlinked a number of your forums from their footer. That accounts for a majority of your links... and because it's in the footer, it's sitewide. Because you own those sites, you can perhaps remove the links.

The sites I have seen recover from Penguin have either removed the "bad" backlinks, or diluted their then backlink profile. In your case, it's a bit easier. If it's hit by the EMD update, I haven't seen any site recover from that yet so can't say anything.