Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links
-
Hey Everyone,
Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as
"This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa"
"Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes"
"The organs in the female reproductive system incl"
The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server
3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed.
So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us
<colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 |If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner.
We have 268 of these links from 200 domains.
Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc.
I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool?
Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem.
<colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
| || |
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for that. I figured as I hadn't received any emails from Google that it shouldn't be a problem.
Cheers
-
This has been a much debated topic over the last few weeks.
According to Google Webmaster Tools regarding the disavow tool, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
So as you can see, most sites shouldn't need this tool. If you have thousands of spammy links coming from one source, with keyword heavy anchor text, that could look bad to Google; however, you are more or less averaging 1 link for 200 different domains. As long as that anchor text is unique (even if it doesn't completely make sense) you "should" be fine.
This article from Search Engine Land, 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links, states "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."
You say, "Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process..." Google actually recommends you contact the site owners first and make an attempt at doing everything in your power to request your links get removed prior to using the disavow tool if you choose to do so.
Long story short. With that few links coming from that many unique domains, AND the fact that you haven't received a warning from Google... I would be tempted to just leave things and evaluate the keywords you were previously ranking for. If you see that it has been a straight up nose dive in rankings, there may be some concern, but fluctuation in rankings (at least for me) is relatively normal. In the course of a week, I can be high on page 2 or on page 5 (I have extremely competitive keywords) - I have come to expect this type of fluctuation, because I always rise to the top eventually.
Hope this helps.
Good luck.
Mike
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
-
Can affiliate links affect DA?
Hey guys, over the past two months my DA has gone down from 17 to 12, and I have no dura what could have caused it. I started putting in some Amazon affiliate links in my posts - could that be the reason why? Also, I have about 30 backlinks from a blog with a spam score of 11% - could this also be affecting it in any way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmyAed0 -
Help finding website content scraping
Hi, I need a tool to help me review sites that are plagiarising / directly copying content from my site. But tools that I'm aware, such as Copyscape, appear to work with individual URLs and not a root domain. That's great if you have a particular post or page you want to check. But in this case, some sites are scraping 1000s of product pages. So I need to submit the root domain rather than an individual URL. In some cases, other sites are being listed in SERPs above or even instead of our site for product search terms. But so far I have stumbled across this, rather than proactively researched offending sites. So I want to insert my root domain & then for the tool to review all my internal site pages before providing information on other domains where an individual page has a certain amount of duplicated copy. Working in the same way as Moz crawls the site for internal duplicate pages - I need a list of duplicate content by domain & URL, externally that I can then contact the offending sites to request they remove the content and send to Google as evidence, if they don't. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Terry
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Are online tools considered thin content?
My website has a number of simple converters. For example, this one converts spaces to commas
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ConvertTown
https://convert.town/replace-spaces-with-commas Now, obviously there are loads of different variations I could create of this:
Replace spaces with semicolons
Replace semicolons with tabs
Replace fullstops with commas Similarly with files:
JSON to XML
XML to PDF
JPG to PNG
JPG to TIF
JPG to PDF
(and thousands more) If somoene types one of those into Google, they will be happy because they can immediately use the tool they were hunting for. It is obvious what these pages do so I do not want to clutter the page up with unnecessary content. However, would these be considered doorway pages or thin content or would it be acceptable (from an SEO perspective) to generate 1000s of pages based on all the permutations?1 -
Are links on a press page considered "reciprocal linking"?
Hi, We have a press page with a list of links to the articles that have mentioned us (most of which also have a link to our website). Is there any SEO impact with this approach? Does Google consider these reciprocal links? And if so, would making the links on the press page 'nofollow' solve the issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mikekeeper0 -
What is the best link delete service?
Does anyone know what is the best link delete service? I have heard of removem and linkdelete Which one do you think it best? Is there something better out there? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shopwood0 -
How to know if a link in a directory will be good for my site?
Hi! Some time ago, a friend of my added our site to a directory. I did not notice it until today, when in the search results for my domain name, the directory came in the first page, in the four position. My friend wrote a nice article, describing our bussiness, and the page has a doFollow link. Looking at the metrics of that directory, I found the following: Domain Authority: 70; main page authority: 76; linking domain roots: 1383; total links: 94663 (several anchor texts); facebook shares: 26; facebook likes: 14; tweets: 20; Google +1: 15. The directory accept a free article about a company, does not review it before it is published, but look for duplicated articles representing spam; so one company can only have one listing (in theory). Is there any formula to know if a directory is safe to publish a doFollow link? If they don't review the link I would say is not a good signal, but is there any other factors to take into account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | te_c0 -
Link-Building - Directories
Hello, The SEO world is a bit confuse in the last months with the Google Antartic updates. Its normal since Google is trying to kill SEO to have more Adwords publicity results. My most recent doubt is about directories. I heard Matt Cutts from Google in a recent Google Hangout saying that registering a website in directorys was ok, but not the ideal method to become relevant in the internet world. However it seems that this procedure is not against the Google policies. Now, here in the forums, I already saw someone writing about adding your site to directories and how dangerous that situacion is. So, whats your opinion about adding your site to free and pay directories as first link-building strategy? If directories are out of the question, why SEOmoz as a huge list of paid directorys? Is SEOmoz outdate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PedroM1 -
Do Friends Let Friends Sell Links?
I have a friend with a site that has a lot of content. Some of that content has affiliate links with no follows to affiliate urls. Those pages also have a disclosure on them about the affiliate relationship. Now, he's talking about taking some of the existing under-performing affiliate links and renting them out to another site that wants them for the link juice. He says he'd have an on-page disclosure, a display ad for the advertiser on the page and something in the text like "you might check out our advertiser..." and then some keyword targeted link. He was asking me how risky I thought this is for him and really I don't know.Do you think Google would find this and s**t a chicken over it? I really don't know, given that I see really blatant undisclosed rented links all the time.Of course, my easy answer to him is "don't do it," but it does make me wonder how risky that is. Also, is that a realistic site-wide penalty kind of thing or it just doesn't pass any link juice to the advertiser kind of thing? So, I'm posting here for others to weigh in on. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010