What do I do with these back links?
-
In the last two weeks, I've got 10 pingbacks from this http://caraccidentlawyer.cc/coroner-ids-berkeley-bodies-who-were-killed-in-recent-car-accident/ and sites like it. The featured attorney is a competitor of ours and, since the links aren't sex/drugs/rock&roll related, (and he's linked too) I doubt this is a negative SEO campaign, but I want it to stop. These blogs are basically pure spam. Any suggestions?
-
Any time! It's definitely wise to err on the side of caution. If you ever want to chew the fat on SEO/digital stuff I'd be happy to help.
-
Thank you very much. I'm still new, so I get nervous. I really appreciate you taking the effort to explain this in such detail.
-
Great answer, Tom.
-
Hi Ruben
This looks to me to be an auto-scraper and trackback tool. It's pretty primitive and useless, by all accounts.
The bad news is that there's very little you can do to prevent it, other than contacting the person themselves and asking them to look into the issue.
The good news is that I'm very confident that this will be having no negative effect on your site. As is the case in the web, blogs and tools exist like this and work away on literally millions of sites. I have no doubt that the algorithm takes this into account and simply devalues/ignores any of these kind of links. With the pingbacks being so little, it certainly won't be having an affect.
If it was nearing the hundreds of thousands, it may become an issue - and so my advice to you would be to make a weekly note of these kind of links and if/when they appear. Save the URLs away in a spreadsheet and should they become very large in numbers, add them to a disavow file and submit that to Google. Just this week we've had Matt Cutts encourage the use of pre-empting bad links and negative SEO attacks by submitting a disavow file, even if you haven't received a warning/penalty or any ill-effects.
I don't think this is anywhere near the stage where you need to concern yourself with that, but in order to be future-proof, make a note now and weekly as you go along. Only if the links started being really big in numbers (10,000+) would I look at submitting a disavow file. But I'd be pretty confident that you won't have the need to do this.
Hope this helps ease your concerns a bit.
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
-
Hreflang tags with link to redirect loop
Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue on a client site that I'm hoping someone can help me with. Basically, the client has two domains, one serving users in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com), showing Euro prices, and the other serving users in Northern Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/) showing £ prices. The issue I'm having is that the URL for the Northern Ireland page has a 302 on it and goes through another 2/3 301 redirects until it resolves as http://www.americanholidays.com, however it does then show the £ prices. You can see the redirect chain here: http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11 The homepage is using the Hreflang tag, and pointing search engines to serve the http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ page to users using EN-GB as their language. The page is also using a self-referencing canonical, which I believe may negate the whole Hreflang tag anyway? My main question is - is the fact that the Hreflang for the gb_en page is pointing to a chain of redirects negatively affecting it? (I understand too many redirects are never good). Also, is the canonical negating the Hreflang? Any help/info would be great as I just can't get my head around it! Thanks guys Daniel
Technical SEO | | DanielKiely60 -
Link building with AddThis URL
We've begun using AddThis for tracking our social sharing. AddThis has been adding the snippet to the end of the URLs on our pages and we've been finding that people linking to us are linking to the URL with the snippet. AddThis says this isn't a problem for SEO. Is this correct? Here is an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/how-to-start-a-non-profit-organization-in-colorado.php#.UunCfPldVig I want to make sure this is not affecting our SEO in any way, particularly that Google would see this as an affiliate or paid link since it has the "#". I may be crazy but I just want to make sure!
Technical SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
1000+ links from domain to subdomain - impacting?
Hi there! I'm wondering if anyone could kindly help me with this question. I have a domain let's say: thisdomain.com - and I also have a subdomain called widgets.thisdomain.com thisdomain.com has approx 2000 pages on it. There are site wide links in the top nav, side nav and footer pointing to widgets.thisdomain.com (all with the same anchor text - not branded - it's a money term). My question is, do you think this would be causing some kind of algorithmic penalty (over optimisation / penguin)? Or, do you think Google realises these links are pointing to a subdomain and says, "hey, OK we understand these two domains could be related" or given subdomains are seen as essentially standalone websites, the algo is saying "hang on a minute, pal, this looks fishy, why are you linking to this subdomain 1000+ times with sitewide links on the same anchor text"? Should I nofollow these sitewide links? Do you think that will help? I would really appreciate any help on this one. Cheers!
Technical SEO | | WCR0 -
Link from Blogspot.com subdomain...
I have found an author that has an article about a particular product we sell online. I was thinking of speaking to them about getting a link to our site. But then I looked at the stats: <label>Page:</label><label id="Page Authority" class="key lsdata">PA:1</label><label id="mozrank" class="key lsdata" title="MozRank">mR:0.00</label>mT:0.00<label id="SEOmoz-data-uid">0</label> links from
Technical SEO | | bjs2010
<label id="SEOmoz-data-uipl">0</label> Root Domains<label>Root Domain:</label>**<label id="dom-pageauthority" class="key lsdata" title="Domain Authority">DA: 59</label>**24,797,212 links from
<label id="SEOmoz-data-pid">110,858</label> Domains<label>Subdomain:</label>Its on a subdomain of blogspot.com - and the page is relevant to a particular category and our e-commerce site.Is it worth pursuing the link?Thanks!0 -
Deeper Anchor Link Finding Tool?
Hi! We are still working on removing some paid backlinks from an old SEO company. Used Removeem.com which uses OpenSiteExplorer. Thought we had them all cleaned up. Removed many and disavowed the rest. Submitted a reconsideration request, but our amigos at Google said, "No, no no...." So, the example offending remaining link they gave us was xyzs.blogspot.com. However, the anchor text link that Open Site Explorer was just xyzs.com. Interestingly enough, Google told us to look at their list of links and this sample links was not even there. (neither version.) So, we signed up for majesticseo as it integrates wtih removem via api if you have an account, but that didn't really add any links. Is there a deeper tool we can use? Any ideas on how to locate some of these hard to find anchor links that Google is talking about? Any other tools out there? Thanks!! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Link to overall brand pages
On our website we have two ways to get in a brand environment. We have general brand pages and brand pages divided by category. At this moment the category brand pages get the most SEO value, because we have a link on our homepage to these pages (via the mega dropdown). The problem is that we would like to assign the SEO value to the general brand pages (with all the articles) instead of the category brand pages (with only articles within a category). We prefer to optimize the general brand page without a link to this page on the homepage for now. for example; Those two pages have the most SEO value
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO
www.debijenkorf.nl/herenmode/diesel
www.debijenkorf.nl/damesmode/diesel but we would like to assign value to;
www.debijenkorf.nl/diesel Do you have a solution for this problem? Thank you in advance! Kind regards,0 -
Syndication: Link back vs. Rel Canonical
For content syndication, let's say I have the choice of (1) a link back or (2) a cross domain rel canonical to the original page, which one would you choose and why? (I'm trying to pick the best option to save dev time!) I'm also curious to know what would be the difference in SERPs between the link back & the canonical solution for the original publisher and for sydication partners? (I would prefer not having the syndication partners disappeared entirely from SERPs, I just want to make sure I'm first!) A side question: What's the difference in real life between the Google source attribution tag & the cross domain rel canonical tag? Thanks! PS: Don't know if it helps but note that we can syndicate 1 article to multiple syndication partners (It would't be impossible to see 1 article syndicated to 50 partners)
Technical SEO | | raywatson0 -
Optimum Number of Links on Any Given Page
One of the guidelines you provide stipulates: "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page. This means that each of the pages being linked to from a given page are also affected by the number of links on the linking page. For these reasons, we recommend you include less than 100 links per page to ensure that they are all crawled, though if your pages have a high page authority, search engines will usually follow more links." As far as these 100 links are concerned, is this in reference to ALL links including outbound, internal, etc? Or is this referring to only outbound links to other sites?
Technical SEO | | johncmmc0