Being Link Attacked - Should I worry?
-
Hey,
Hope everyone is well.
Just a quick question. I hope to get an answer from Google officially (I've asked in their webmaster forums area) but any experience or opinions from the community here would be great.
I noticed recently that our site started to get thousands of links from comments in random blogs from all across the web. This is nothing to do with us as we don't "build links".
I can only assume it is a competitor trying to get our site hit by the algorithm for a particular search term, as all the anchor text (I estimate about 1,800 links with this anchor text) point to one page on our site that is ranking for that term.
I recently removed the website from webmaster tools and re added, due to an unrelated issue about the a video rich snippet not updating, and all the links have just popped up today on there.
Is this something I need to worry about? and should I start collecting all these domains and using the disavow tool to block the whole domain of these sites with the comments (some of them seem like genuine sites).
There seem to be new ones everyday and it looks to be an ongoing attack as well.
Thanks in advance!
-
This is so crazy. Let's keep working on it. I hope that together we can come up with a way to handle this for people in the future.
Thanks for reaching out to me. Very interesting stuff.
-
Just sent you that email, hope you like what you read
-
My tips for the letters involve politeness and humanity. Be human and explain what has happened in a professional and concise manner. I wouldn't start with threats. Nobody responds well to that.
But if need be you can weave in something about reporting the situation to Google and referencing the site where it was built.
The problem is those comments are damn-near impossible to remove... But at least it will stop the bleeding and shut down the campaign. If you can find the source, of course...
I'm more and more interested in this and want to research more to see if writing an article about it is an option. Would you mind sharing your domain with me and a few examples of the poison links? If you'd like to do so privately you can email me at seojesseo at gmail dot com
or tweet me @seojesseo
or respond here.
And of course if I find anything I'll let you know. (no promises!) And I won't use any of your domain info for any sort of public presentations. Thanks
-
Thanks for the response Jesse!
Ok damn, there goes my Friday morning
I didn't see any article submissions, just comments, and a lot of them were not even followed. I haven't looked into it too much though.
This is a real shame, I hope I don't keep asking loads of companies to do it, could start getting quite boring.
Thanks again for the information, I'll start digging around tomorrow.
P.S. Any tips on getting these guys to respond to me? Legal letters perhaps?
-
Yes I would worry about this.
Geez this is like the third thread this week about this. I can't believe it's happening so much.
I have a few ideas on how to track down who is doing this and put a stop to it.. I think maybe I'll write a YouMoz blog on it. But really it is all about figuring out how they are doing this.. the answer will most likely by that they are buying links from a mass link purchasing site. When you do this, these link builders usually own about 20% of the domains you're seeing links coming from. (especially if there are article submissions included.. are there?) If so, you can usually find out who the owner is through some sleuth work and some who.is searching, then once you figure out the link-submission company you can contact them to report the fraud...
Getting them to respond becomes the tricky part.
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 if a website has paid or spammy back-links? Latest ways to investigate.
Hi all, I would like to investigate about our website back-links if something is wrong. If there are any paid or spammy back-links. How to proceed on this exercise? We have been using ahrefs and seems like it's quite enough. Is there any way we can pull out the fishy back-links? Do we have any helpful data from webmasters about this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Tiered back links
Playing catch up with latest SEO techniques and wanted to ask the community what opinion is with generated tiered back links. For example, in one month having - 50 tier one links, 250 tier two links and 1000 tier three links generated within articles forums, social networks, guestbooks etc. In my view this is blackhat, my question is - is this still acceptable? or will it be damaging my domain? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | w4rdy0 -
Outranked by link farm
Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Does linking older posts help?
Asking a blogger to add an anchor text into their old post that relates to my niche. does that help with backlinks? does the quality of backlinks determine by how new the post is or the page rank determines all? for example a new post with lesser page rank vs a old post with higher page rank which one is better to put your link on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
How to Handle Sketchy Inbound Links to Forum Profile Pages
Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles. Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool? Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things. This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
Internal Link Structure
Hello Everyone, I'd be grateful for a little feedback please; This is my site, the home page
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TwoPints
of which is targeting the phrase jobs in **** (I'm sure you can fill i the gap
:)) I've made a few changes recently which has included having the
Contract jobs in **** | Permanent Jobs in **** | Temporary Jobs in **** & Today’s
jobs in **** links added to the homepage... Perhaps foolishly and impatiently, I did all of these at the
same time, whilst also changing the sites internal link structure, specifically
for all links to the homepage, which previously were like <a<br>href="/">Home and have now been changed to <a<br>href="/">jobs in ****</a<br></a<br> Meaning that I have 4500 internal links with the anchor text
'jobs in ****' But rather than seeing an improvement n my SERPs ranking, I have
gone from page 2 of Google to page 6, and falling...... Apart from being inpatient, what have I done wrong? Many thanks0