I have been Hit with UNWANTED Links and I need to know how to remove them?
-
I have been looking at Google Webmasters Tools and saw that suddenly I have this huge amount of links form an unknown source “SiteLoki” never heard of it? Didn’t want it! Need to get rid of it!
My Website www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of presence on Google about three weeks ago. I first thought it was something to do with the new Google Algorithm.I also contacted Google to be re-evaluated. They replied:
Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions foundMay 10, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality TeamI have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
There was another post regarding canonical tag issues; resolved, I removed all canonical tags for now.Today I discovered the links and I suspect that having even
1 link for this website will penalize you in Google.Here are some Webmaster Tools pages for reference:
I also noted that the image for the link is from an old site hosted on www.Globat.com. I don't know what that significance might be. I left them in January.
Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer,
Ray
Webmaster-Tools-Query_Your-Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photos-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki_links.jpg
-
Yeah, unfortunately somebody bought paid links, which was probably were you were getting most of your traffic from for awhile, until it stopped working.
To be honest, attracta doesn't seem like the type of company to do that, but you never know.
I'd like to say that by removing those links your rankings will automatically recover, but that may not be the case. At best, it may lead to partial recovery. In cases like these, some webmasters are even walking away from their URLs entirely and starting over with the same site at another address.
Regardless, the only way to really remove the links is to write each of the webmasters in question, and ask for removal. Sometimes this has to be repeated over and over again and even then you only see about a 20% success rate.
Over time, some of these links will disappear by themselves.
Really, the best thing you can do now is start building new links. In many ways you're starting from the beginning, since your previous success was built on something that wouldn't last.
(that said, if you do have major errors in your SEOmoz PRO campaign, I highly advise you to fix them)
-
Thank you for your reply. To my knowledge I have not paid
for any links. I did sign up with www.attracta.com
and even asked the question regarding paid
links and was assured that they only submitted our sitemap and provided our
business information including hours of operation to search engines and other
sites like yelp, yellow pages, attracta’s directory and that sort of thing. They said they do not use paid links. Now I’m
not sure?After several posts on several forums you have given the
most useful and logical reply. Now what I need is some help or guidance on a
recovery. How do I remove these unwanted links. I thought that the first step
was to set up an account with SEOmoz to analyze the problem and then hopefully
get help on resolving the issue. It is hard to see any light at the end of the
tunnel at this point. We are a small business that depends on the website for
30-40% of our sales. This is life or death to us!So any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks again for your reply,
-
Hi Ray,
First of all, I'm sorry to hear about your huge drop in traffic. it totally sucks. There's a lot of that going around these days, but it doesn't make you feel any better when it happens to you.
First things first, I wouldn't be too worried about the links from SiteLoki. It looks like an auto-generated site that probably links to millions of URLs, and Google is pretty good about discounting these types of links. It's not uncommon for most link profiles to contain something similar.
Here's the problem... paid link networks. A few weeks ago Google started deindexing link networks by the dozens, the most high profile being BMR. (http://searchengineland.com/google-eliminates-another-link-network-116513)
I pulled up your site's link profile on OSE and picked a number of URLs at random. Here's what I found:
- Link 1 - Not Paid, Indexed - http://www.examiner.com/article/retirement-means-time-to-think-futuristic-for-local-art-photographer
- Link 2 - Looks Paid - http://coolartdude.com/how-to-get-your-photo-on-canvas/
- Link 3 - Looks Paid - Also hidden text - http://goldcardreview.info/421712603coolche.php
- Link 4 - Looks Paid - http://waterproofcameraworld.com/blog/2011/03/31/photos-printed-on-canvas-a-unique-gift/
- Link 5 - Looks Paid - http://www.giftsandgadgetsnews.com/keep-fresh-and-live-pictures-with-canvas-prints-from-digital-photos/
So out of 5 random links, 4 of them look spammy and paid, and often have very similar or repeating anchor text. My best guess as to what happened to you is that several weeks ago, Google discounted much of your backlink profile that was based on these links.
What can you do? First of all, if you are still paying for links, stop now. It might help to try and clean up/remove as many bad links as you can. Read Dr. Pete's post on Penguin.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
In the end, you probably need to take a different approach with your link building, and begin to build good, white hat links over time.
Regardless, I hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Also and I suspect related are the 406 Permanent 301 redirects that showed up on a crawl analysis on SEOmoz.
See Below:
-
Thanks for the reply ...
The first think that I did was to look at links using SEOmoz and I didn't and still don't see the links from "Siteloki" Then i read this blog from SEOmoz
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-minute-missing-page-audit
Then I look deeper in Webmasters Tools and found the 6,000 plus links from "siteloki"
All of these links refer to the website as it was prior to a rebuild that launched in mid January. This is also what is accounting (I think for all of the 404 errors).
I am beginning to think that this was a Hack Job!
-
Hi Ray,
This doesn't sound good..
I'm not that familiar with sitemap.xml protocols but have you checked in webmaster tools that understands your sitemap correctly? Also there might be some info in crawl dates and crawl errors in your webmaster tools.
I can't imagine you've been banned from google because of just one link.
Greets,
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online
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
-
how to find broken outbound links ?
hey guy, can anyone help me in finding broken outbound link on my website by using moz ? does Moz has this function ?
Technical SEO | | rogerdam0 -
Multilingual Sitewide Links
Multilingual links in the footer section is being counted as backlink and we are getting tons of backlinks from all the 7 lingual websites. Is there a solution where we eliminate these links and still having the option to navigate to other lingual pages? vr24NAv
Technical SEO | | comfortclick0 -
Remove Directory
www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/page-6255 www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/page-6240 www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/page-6253 www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/page-6255 ..... ..... ..... We have so many page like this page and we want to remove all this page from Google search results. How can I remove from Google Webmaster Tools Help!
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
How many links can i do in a day
Hi, I built a niche site yesterday, the domain was 1 week old. What is the safest way to do link building? I.e How many links should i do in order to be in safe? So far, i've concentrated on building my social profile. Like getting as many retweets as possible. Slowly getting facebook likes and added few youtube videos with my link in it. Now i am on to link building. I will only do legit link building methods. Currently i am gonna get 2 press releases. But can you tell me no. of links i must get in a day. PS: The keyword i am competing is highly competitive.
Technical SEO | | Vegit0 -
How to control link flow on a webshop
I am looking for a best practice link structure for a webshop. Say you run a webshop where the front page should rank for 1-2 keywords and then there are 5-10 categories which are more popular and has a higher profit than the remaining 20-50 categories. Will it be wise to let the 20-50 categories link to the 5-10 more profitable categories if possible or should the structure just treat all the categories as equal and hence not let any link juice flow from the less profitable categories up to the more profitable categories. I hope the question is clear enough. Also if you could share any thoughts on how you structure your webshops it would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | loevgaard0 -
Unwanted spam pharmacy links
Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure. However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts. Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Removing inbound Spam Links
Hello, Last February one of my clients websites was delisted. It turns out that some time ago that had attempted to launch a social network along time lines of ning. The project had fallen apart of the was still up. At some point spammers found it and started using it as part of a link farm. Once it was discovered, the subdomain it was posted on was removed and the website returned to search within 2 weeks. Last week, the website disappeared again OSE shows that in the last 2 months the website has got 2000 (There are about 16,000 total spam links) additional spam links now pointing and the root domain. On top of that, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting about 15,000 404 errors. I have blocked Google from crawling the path where the path were the spam pages used to be. If there a way to block the 1000s of inbound spam links?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0