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
-
Huge Drop in External Links
Hello, My total external links dropped from 900 to zero on a site that I've had running for about 10 years. What could possibly cause this? Thanks, Joe
Technical SEO | | Joe20130 -
Unnatural links from your site
Hi, 24 February got this penalty message in Google webmaster tool. Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Already removed all the link on the blog and sent reconsideration request to Google spam team. But request is rejected. Please help me on this or share link with me on same case. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Internal linking disaster
Can someone help me understand what my devs have done? The site has thousands of pages but if there's an internal homepage link on all of the pages (click on the logo) shouldn't that count for internal links? Could it be because they are nonfollow? http://goo.gl/0pK5kn I've attached my competitors opensiteexplorer rankings (I'm the 2nd column) .. so despite the face the site is new you can see where I'm getting my ass kicked. Thanks! psRsQtH.png
Technical SEO | | bradmoz0 -
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 -
Image Link
If I have an image that is well optimiswed for a keyword that the page it is on is ranking for but i put a no follow in the image link - is this going to lose the value of the image on that page. A strange question i know but this image i have on my homepage is optimised around a keyword, the image is also a link but when i changed the link in the image to no follow i seem to have dropped rankings for that keyword. Probably consicidence but i thought i would throw this question out there and get some views?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Inter-link Optimization for Pages
Hi Guys, How much interlinking is okay for between pages? Can i start link my internal pages like Wikipedia does? 20,30 interlink per page? OR is it all depends on Page Authority? Can i go inter-link crazy on 1 year old legitimate site? Big Thanks?
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Metrics to determine the quality of a link?
I found this very useful post on SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/525600-metrics-how-do-you-measure-measure-a-link, but its a bit dated. Also, it doesn't really help in terms of applying exact metrics to measure the quality of a link. Does anyone have any other suggestions to help automate / determine the quality of a link?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0