Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do you deal with spammy backlinks?
-
One of the web designers I work with asked me to do a preliminary site assessment on a small business website.
The owner of the business had a falling out with his previous web designer and moved over to the one I work with earlier this year.
The site has been redesigned but when analyzing the back links I discovered that the previous designer had created directories to create backlinks to the page. The PR 0 links from the site number about 150 and are from unrelated topic pages.
So, it made me wonder, how much damage can spammy backlinks do?
What is the best practice to deal with spammy backlinks if you find them?
-
hi
i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet
i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites.
will that effect the sites i am about to link to?
i give you an example
i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good
I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them?
thx
-
hi
i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet
i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites.
will that effect the sites i am about to link to?
i give you an example
i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good
I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them?
thx
-
Since there are a few different opinions on this topic, I figured I would weigh in.
A bad backlink profile can effect a sites SERPS, but it depends on the site. If your site has a mostly White Hat, clean on-page strategy, and mostly good backlink history, you should be fine. If your site has a lot of authority, then the bad back links definitely won't hurt you, they might even help you (read this), but be careful, because you still don't want to get to careless.
I would say that you should remove as many links as you can, and then forget about the rest. If you move forward and build a strong link profile that is filled with editorial links, and legitimately acquired reviews, you'll be fine.
Best of luck
-Bryant Jaquez
-
Yes, I've been building back links and it is good to know that it isn't too much to worry about.
-
Thanks Ross, that makes sense. Great to hear.
-
Thanks for your opinion. Actually, there was one porn page that linked over from the designer. It was one of the reasons the concern arose.
-
To add too the comments above specific spammy backlinks can infact hurt your site,
For example if all of a sudden you see a number of links to your website with anchor text to adult terms pointing to your website with your url from adult based websites. I have seen targeted spam in this way affecting websites.
But from what you explain the links that have been built by the prior designer do not seem tat bad at all, I would not worry too much.
-
I second the comment from Ross. I had a similar issue in the recent past. I found it best and easiest to try and forget about the bad back links and move forward with building quality ones....... just my two cents.
-
Hi SEOWriter,
Backlinks cannot hurt your website. Google will devalue the links bu they will not penalise you for having them. If they did penalise you for having spammy backlinks the first thing everyone would do is load up their favourite blog commenting software and blast a bunch of spammy links to the competitor website.
However, if you are really worried about the backlinks because they are paid links or on a site with malware on it. Contact the website owner and ask for them to be removed. Failing this I would just start a quality link building campaign and keep everything ncie and varied.
In my experience crap links from directories dont harm your site, and if your keyword is VERY low competition they will actually help it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Redirect Backlinks from Forbes,CNN.
Hello, I have seen on many places people are selling 301 Redirect Links Via Top Authority websites Like Forbes,CNN etc . How do they do it? and is it safe to have such links? I have researched a lot but not found any useful information to implement it. Any Idea how to do it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ademirates0 -
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarkHodson0 -
Negative SEO - Spammy Backlinks By Competitor
Hi Everyone, Someone has generated more than 22k spam backlinks (on bad keywords) for my domain.Will it hurt on my website (SEO Ranking)? Because it is already in the top ranking. How could I remove all the spammy backlinks? How could I know particular competitior who have done this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Dealing with links to your domain that the previous owner set up
Hey everyone, I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common. Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust. My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
How did I get over 1000 backlinks in less then a month? help?
Hi Guys I'm a newbie and just started my website, im wondering if im reading this correctly, i use a tool called my seo tools and its telling me my website zenory.co.nz has over 1600 backlinks, this is scary since the site is only 5months old and i didn't see this till at least today and i check my sites backlinks on a regular basis. However when I check with moz it says I only have 2? I'm a little confused. Any advice here? Much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Do shady backlinks actually damage ranking?
That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"? That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices? Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices? I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yoni450 -
Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?
I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant0