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.
50,000 backlinks in webmaster tools from one site???
-
Hi All,
I'm new to evaluating backlinks, but I just saw I got over 50,000 links from a backlink that was added on ONE page at this site here: http://www.netnewspublisherDOTcom.
I presume this is not a good thing, and if I contact them to remove the one link on the one page, it won't solve the other 49,999 links that Google is seeing pointing to us, so what do I do??.
Should I contact them and ask to remove it and see if they don't and then disavow? Or would you just tell Google to disavow the whole site?
Thanks!
-
Hi there, you've received some great responses. What is the current status of this issue?
-
PS - I just realized that OSE says the 50,000 netnewspublisher .com links are NOFOLLOW - If that's the case, should I not bother with these (can no follow links cause you a problem)?
Thanks -
Hi Sha,
Yes - there is one post comment with our URL in it on one page from this site. The pages that are showing in OSE are not identical copies of each other, but unique URL pages with different content - but these pages do not have a link to my site that I can see.
As best I can tell, all the links coming from so many pages is because each page has a "recent comments" section on it. I'm "guessing" when the comment containing the backlink to my site was on each of these pages in the "comment section", it was discovered as a backlink when the page was crawled - could that happen?
I'd be happy to share a URL if I could do so privately with you?
And per what luwhosjack says, my home page that was linked to so I can't really change the URL.
And, I have seen significant drops in my traffic on some pages since May 22 when Penguin hit, but I have no manual penalties. Upon investigating my backlink profile, I have many malicious sites linked to me from Poland (Google says not to open their site) -I'm hoping I can just disavow these since Google agrees they are not good sites.
Plus, I'm seeing at least one competitor and MANY other sites linking to me, but when I go to their page, my url is in their source code, but the webpage is different than all the text that's in the source code (like the source code is a bunch of text on the subject - but the visible webpage is salescopy or optin forms). I don't know what to make of this??? I would presume this is something Google would not approve of and I shouldn't be associated with it - do you agree?
Thank you
-
Hi luwhosjack,
That's about the best you can do if the issue is as I described above - if every 404 on the site generates a new version of that one page then it is generally happening because of poor backend configuration.
Where it gets really messy is in the case where new URLs are being generated by hacking. I've seen several instances where every attempt at injection by a hacker generates a new copy of the page and if the anchor text happens to be exact match, the result is a disaster for the linked site
Sha
-
I had this same issue and it really affected my stats. I tried to contact the website with no luck to get the links removed. Then, when i looked into it more they had linked to the same pages about 30,000 times so I deleted the pages that were linked that I could afford to and slightly altered the addresses that I needed to keep. It made a massive difference
-
Hi mim12,
Afraid I am a lot more risk averse than most when it comes to unnatural links (and I have seen similar situations that emanated from nasty goings on at a couple of sites), so I have a couple of questions to clarify:
First, my read of your description is that there is a single page on that site which contains a link to your site and since you are saying there are now 50,000 links that would mean that there are 50,000 different URLs all originating from that one site and pointing to your site?
So, are you saying that these 50,000 individual URLs are actually identical copies of that one page which contains the link? If so, can you test whether new copies of the page are being generated from 404's by typing a new non-existent path and hitting enter? For example, if the URL of the page in question is http://www.netnewspublisher .com/strangepage.php, what happens if you change the address to http://www.netnewspublisher .com/anotherstrangepage.php and try to access the page? Do you simply get a not found error, or does it generate a new copy of the page with the new URL?
Alternatively, can you give us the actual URL where the original link was placed so we can take a look at it?
Sha
-
Have you seen any signs of algorithmic penalties or SERP fluctuation? If not... forget it. Yes I would ask to have it removed if it's a garbage link from an irrelevant site. But I would avoid the disavow tool and use it as a last result. I don't trust that tool as much as others seem to... You can usually do well without it too. If you start getting manual penalty warnings and your SERPs are dropping without any response from the webmasters... then it might be time to break out the disavow.
Whatever you do, DOCUMENT it! All emails, contacts, discoveries.. keep these documented in a separate folder in case you ever have to submit a re-inclusion request to Google.
That's all I can really say.
-
Actually, with 50,000 OSE might not be the best choice. I would keep an eye on your Google Webmaster Tools # of inbound links and perhaps monitor via http://ahrefs.com. There may be some other suggestions from the good folks here that I haven't thought of. Good luck!
-
Hi Dana,
Thanks for your response. Well, it's not paid. I had 8000 backlinks in WMT before, now I have 58,000. This is the biggest spike I've had before for sure (that I'm aware of) - so it is a big jump for us.
This apparently has been going for for a few weeks to a month - the post that was added to their site has linked (perhaps a blogroll is the best term) through all of their pages, creating all these links.
Still think that's "ok"?
What would I look for in OSE to see if we are "dropping over time"? Not sure what you are referring to?
Thanks! -
I wouldn't panic about this. Getting a sudden spike from a post that gets carried on a news site isn't really that unusual. Did you pay for the backlink? If not, I wouldn't worry about it. If you did pay for it, and now you're feeling a little queezy, then yes, have them take it down if it makes you feel better.
I would NOT use the disavow tool. The site is a PR4, you could do a lot worse than to get 50,000 links from a PR 4 site. I'd also take this in context with your overall link profile. If you only had 10 links and now you have 50,010...yes, this might be a problem, and I stress "might." If you have 100,000 and now have 150,000 it could still be a problem, but far less of one. Also, if you've had spikes in inbound links before, then no worries.
This can happen for a number of natural reasons. For example, we have an industry publication that occasionally posts a ton of info about our products. It can add 20-30K links in one month, and they might all be gone the next month.
Honestly, I'd sit tight for a couple of days and watch OSE and Fresh Web explorer to see if they are dropping off over time. My guess is they will and anything that you may have done while in "panic" mode may end up hurting rather than helping.
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Focusing on Multiple Niches for one site: good or bad?
Is it wise to focus on multiple niches for one site, rather than zoning in one or two different niches? On one hand, you can target many more topics and go after tons of keywords, but on the other hand doesn't google get confused of what your site is really about? Won't google just focus on one of the niches that you provide more than all others? Any input would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Getting a Sitemap for a Subdomain into Webmaster Tools
We have a subdomain that is a Wordpress blog, and it takes days, sometimes weeks for most posts to be indexed. We are using the Yoast plugin for SEO, which creates the sitemap.xml file. The problem is that the sitemap.xml file is located at blog.gallerydirect.com/sitemap.xml, and Webmaster Tools will only allow the insertion of the sitemap as a directory under the gallerydirect.com account. Right now, we have the sitemap listed in the robots.txt file, but I really don't know if Google is finding and parsing the sitemap. As far as I can tell, I have three options, and I'd like to get thoughts on which of the three options is the best choice (that is, unless there's an option I haven't thought of): 1. Create a separate Webmaster Tools account for the blog 2. Copy the blog's sitemap.xml file from blog.gallerydirect.com/sitemap.xml to the main web server and list it as something like gallerydirect.com/blogsitemap.xml, then notify Webmaster Tools of the new sitemap on the galllerydirect.com account 3. Do an .htaccess redirect on the blog server, such as RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml http://gallerydirect.com/blogsitemap_index.xml Then notify Webmaster Tools of the new blog sitemap in the gallerydirect.com account. Suggestions on what would be the best approach to be sure that Google is finding and indexing the blog ASAP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
Should I use both Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools at the same time?
Hi All, Up till now I've been registered only to Google WMT. Do you recommend using at the same time Bing's WMT? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90