Black Hat Attack! Seeking Help
-
Hello,
For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack
I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently.
Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself. So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site.
Questions:
1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack?
2. Should I worry about this?
3. If so, what is the best way to go about this?
Would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Thanks in advance!
Howard
-
Thanks so much! I'll have a look at issues with respect to the Panda update and I'll see if I find anything there.
-
Oh, and I wanted to add info on my other traffic drop audit client who had the mystery nofollowed anchor texted links pointing to their site. Their traffic drop ended up being because of abuse of the local listing. At this point I don't think that the mystery links were significant. But, if anyone else knows why these would appear, I'd love to hear it.
-
The blog comment links on the page you mentioned are nofollowed so these really shouldn't harm your site.
I had a client recently that had a pile of mystery nofollowed links that had their keyword as anchor text and I really couldn't figure out where they came from. When I looked at the links to their site sorted by only followed links there were no unusual ones there. I never did figure out where they came from.
The way I understand it, if someone was trying to negative SEO you then any possible penalty would not affect your site until either Penguin refreshes or until Google does a manual review of the site. In your case, Penguin has not refreshed since October so this is not the issue. You would know if you had a manual penalty because you would have a warning in WMT. btw...there's no point filing for reconsideration if you don't have a manual warning in WMT.
If your drop happened at that time in March I would have a very close look for Panda issues on your site as this is more likely in my mind.
I suppose there is probably no harm in disavowing the links as long as you are comfortable with what you are doing with the disavow tool. But I would be surprised if it would make any difference.
-
Thanks for your suggestion. The site owners could probably care less about removing those links but I'll definitely use the disavow tool followed by a reconsideration request.
-
Care to share any of the nasty links? In my experience the vast majority of the time when someone thinks they have been negatively SEO'd they are either seeing just regular normal scraper type sites that link to EVERYONE such as SEO profile sites or domain info sites, or they are seeing links that are the result of previous spammy linkbuilding tactics. An example of this could be if you submitted your site to a spammy directory and then all of a sudden that directory gets scraped by several other directories and boom...you've got a pile of links that you didn't personally create.
I would think that it's unlikely that a drop from top 3 to top 20 at this point would be because of a negative SEO campaign because in order for you to be penalized for bad links there would have had to have been a Penguin refresh (which there wasn't) or you would have received a manual spam warning in WMT.
If the drop happened around Mar 13-15 then there was a Panda refresh around that time, so that could be it.
-
Hi Howard, I think the best thing is to prioritize and contact all the sites in bulk to have those comments removed. If they don't answer disavow those urls, Then write arecon request to google to ask them to remove any penalty they put upon you because you were victim of some kind of negative seo attack. After having your rankings fixed try to understand from where that attack may be arrived although I don't think you'll find anything since the attack wasn't on your site
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
-
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 -
Does building backlinks help improve Google rankings? If so which links work nowadays?
Hi Guys, Please only reply of you have real experience.... So as the title implies does building backlinks work in improving the rankings in Google? I know they are not on the same level as some are spammy, in blog networks etc but how about other backlinks that are of higher quality? If yes, what sorts of backlinks work nowadays in boosting rankings but not risking getting penalized? So should you build backlinks ongoing? If so how many per month? I have a real struggle trying to get backlinks on really high quality sites. Any advice? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz1 -
Is there proof that disavowing backlinks in GSC help to boost rankings in Google?
Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz0 -
Seeking Site Feedback
Hello everyone! Hope you are all doing well. Long story short, I'm currently in the 30-day trial period for Moz Pro and I'm taking advantage of running a campaign for my (currently) one-man SEO/Digital Marketing company. Recently built my site using Divi. Filled out all the SEO information through the Yoast SEO plugin, tied Google Analytics, etc... Seeking feedback on the visuals of the website and whether you have any feedback on link-building in order to bring in more traffic to the site. http://fourpeaksseo.com Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Four-Peaks-SEO0 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Redesign Troubleshooting Help
We launched a redesign at the end of May and soon after, our website was de-indexed from Google. Here are the changes that I implemented so far to try to fix this issue: 301 redirect chain - We changed all our URLs and implemented 301 redirects. However, these are multiple redirects meaning 1 URL redirects to a second and then a 3rd. I was told that this could confuse Google. For example: http://cncahealth.com 301s to http://www.cncahealth.com 301s to https://www.cncahealth.com We wrote a rule for each variation of the URL and not there is only a one to one 301 redirect and this was validated with urivalet.com. Canonical tags did not match URL - We created the new website in a CMS where the CMS generated non-SEO friendly URLs. We applied 301 redirects to those CMS URLs, but when we enable canonical tags within the CMS, it uses the original CMS URL and not the URL of the page, so the canonical URL doesn't match the page. For now, I disabled canonical tags until I can figure out a way to manually insert canonical tag code in the pages without using the CMS canonical tag feature. After doing these two fixes our website still doesn't seem like it is able to get re-indexed by Google even when I submit the sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools...the sitemap doesn't get indexed? Questions...there are two more concerns that I am hoping can be answered in this community: Cache-Control = private : I saw from URIvalet.com that our cache-control is set to private. Is this affecting us being indexed and should this be set to public? Load Balancer - Our old website was not on a load balancer, but our new website is. When I look in our analytics at servers, I notice that the site is being picked up on one server and then another server at different times. Is Google seeing the same thing and is the load balancer confusing Google? I'm not sure what else could be an issue with us not being indexed. Maybe its just a waiting game where after I implemented the 1 & 2 change I just have to wait or does 3 & 4 or other issues also need to be addressed in order to get re-indexed? I hope someone can help me. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rexjoec0 -
Help with E-Commerce Product Pages
Hi, I need to find the best way to put my products on our e-commerce website. I have researched and researched but I thought I'd gather a range of ideas in here. Basically I have the following fields: Product Title
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YNWA
Product Description
Product Short Description SEO Title
Focus Keyword(s) (this is a feature of our CMS)
Meta Description The problem we have is we have a lot of duplicate content eg. 10 Armani Polos but then each one will be a different colour (but the model number is the same). I don't want to miss out on rankings because of this. What would you say is the best way to do this? My idea is this: Product Title: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt Blue
Product Description: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt in Blue Made from 100% cotton Armani Jeans Polo with Short Sleeves, Pique Collar and Button Up Collar. Designer Boutique Menswear are official stockists of Armani Jeans Polos.
Short Description: Blue Armani Jeans Polo SEO Title: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt Blue MA001 | Designer Boutique Menswear
Focus Keywords: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt
Meta Description: Blue Armani Jeans Polo Shirt. Made from 100% cotton. Designer Boutique Menswear are official stockists of Armani Polos. What are peoples thoughts on this? I would then run the same format across each of the different colours. Another question is on the product title and seo title, should these be exactly the same? And does it matter if I put the colour at the beginning or end of the title? Any help would be great.0 -
I need de-spam help/advice
For one of my sites I am working on I outsourced SEO about 3 years ago. One of the "tricks" the SEO used at the time was to pay for several Blog posts to be "sponsored" by this web site using exact match keywords for the domain. 1 Where do I look to determine the spammy links pointing to this site? 2 Have you had success getting rid of these bad links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kadesmith0