Detected a bad site linking to you? what to do?
-
I have detected on linkdetox site that had stolen a face photo of a smile from a star my website and is linking to the page.
I uploade a disavow with that site very bad domain. But my question is if should a take that picture of my site or rename so the link goes to 404.
It is not an important or relevant page for my website
-
There's no harm in disavowing the link but it's probably not necessary. The point of the disavow tool is to allow webmasters to ask Google to not count links that were made for SEO purposes. If you had placed this here so that you could increase your rankings then sure, I'd disavow it. It's unlikely that it's a negative SEO tactic...not with just one link. But, if you had a pile of these and you felt it was negative SEO then I'd disavow.
Every site, even the ones with the cleanest backlink profiles have bizarre links that appear like this. I would just ignore it.
If, however, you are trying to get it removed because you don't like the idea of your face residing on a page filled with porn, then if you can't contact the webmaster, you can try reporting the site to its host. Sometimes the host will remove spam pages/sites.
-
That's really helpful. Thanks Jeff.
-
You can always email -
postmaster@
and/or
webmaster@
Those two should go through to some one who looks after the site. Disavow will be enough to stop the link causing you any problems.
-
This bad site has no contact information. Impossible to reach the webmaster to ask for removal.
I am wounder if the disavow will be ok. But in this case i will rename the page and delete the photos.
-
Agree with Peter & Jeff,
If you're really upset with a link you can disavow it if you want to do it correctly you should email them prior, but if you jsut want it done, add the domain to the disavow list and job done.
-
FYI, Google's Matt Cutts has broken from the previously stated mantra on the disavow tool, and now is encouraging Webmasters to use it if they are worried if a link is from a bad domain, due to poor SEO (or someone else trying to hurt your site by creating bad links):
-
I would ask the site owner to remove the photo and link. If that fails then if the page is not important to you then it will be simpler to remove it than wait for the disavow to take effect.
Peter
-
I have more than 3000 original pictures on my website with the water and they are constantly stolen. I dont mind about that.
In this case is a porn site. On other cases among with good sites there are sites that i dont want the link of the credit and i delete the linked picture the link remains but goes to a 404.
I mean deleting the photo because i community advice deleting or rename the page i wild do that also with the disavow.
What would you do?
-
So a site is using a photo from your site but giving you credit for the photo by giving you a link?
How are you sure it's a "very bad domain" ?
The disavow will be fine it tells Google you don't want that site linked to your in anyway. If you don't want people stealing your images you could look into water marks.
-
Hi Dario
The first thing you should really do it contact the site who created the bad link and ask them to remove it and the photo if you are not happy about that also. If they are unresponsive then sending in a Disavow should really be done after speaking to the offending site's owner.
If though, as you say, the page is not important to you, then if the above doesn't work then yes, just remove the page.
Peter
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
-
Internal Link Building and Link Juice Quality
Hi There! I manage the website for a law office that covers many geographical locations. For very specific niche content, we would prefer to create one piece of content and link to the various geographic locations where we would handle that topic instead of posting multiple variations of the same content for each specific geographical area. If we put a button on these pages that has links to each location, will that have the same "link juice" effect to the pages we're linking that linking directly in the text would? (example: the Where can we help you? button on this page : http://www.zdfirm.com/volkswagen-recall/) Thank you!
Link Building | | ZDAdmin0 -
Bad Links to New Domain - Do I Disavow?
About 2 months ago a new client of mine bought a domain and we built him a nice new site; however, it appears the previous owner of the domain used some spammy SEO tactics. I've had to redirect about 30 pages and now I've found some spammy links. I've only discovered a few of them, but he doesn't have that many links yet so I'm wondering what kind of impact this will have. Is it worth disavowing a half dozen links? The sites are in Chinese and appear to be unmanaged link farms so getting the webmaster to remove them is unlikely. Also wondering what else is lurking out there that I haven't discovered yet... I suggested to the client we consider a different domain since the site is new, but he's become pretty attached to it. Any ideas?
Link Building | | Dino640 -
Links from sites with iffy link profiles?
So the site http://www.cadenas.de/ appears to have good decent scores from the various Moz ranks, but when I check out the site in OSE there are a lot of really sketchy links that jump out, online pharmacy/drug type links. I should also add that the negative links are seemingly going to a weird blog deep in the site and only appear when I select all links to the root domain in OSE. Everything about the site appears very legitimate except for the link profile which has me nervous. Would you guys pursue a link from this site?
Link Building | | CJ50 -
Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me?
Hi All, I hope you can help. Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me? but I know for a fact there are. Why is this? I have submitted my site to a few local directories and can see my site is on their site but when I run a Link Analysis it shows that I have no links. Does anyone know why this is? Many thanks, Aidan My site is http://www.theethicalsilkco.com/
Link Building | | aidanlawlor0 -
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links ...
Hi, We recently got "the message" from Google about unnatural links for two of our 50 sites. Ranking has dropped significantly since, we did not take any action to remove the links. All our 50 sites were managed by the same SEO company but only two got this message. We are in the process of understanding the best ways to deal with this situation, but currently there are two main approaches we can detect: Remove the links, resubmit for reconsideration Ignore the message and do not do anything, if you do something it is actually like admitting you did something wrong, and Google can not prove that you did... Any insights on what approach we should adopt? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | jid1 -
Removal of "bad" incoming links
I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors. Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us. The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions: How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site? What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us? If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric> Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites? Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site). In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it. Thanks. Mark
Link Building | | MarkWill0 -
What is the best way to transfer a sites link juice.
We have been building a new website for one of our clients which he wants it to replace an existing website which will be taken down shortly. The existing site has a reasonable amount of inbound links and we would like to redirect that link juice to the new website, can anyone tell me what the best way to do this would be. Thanks Fraser
Link Building | | fraserhannah0 -
Linking to root domain or specific sub-site
Hello, When optimizing for multiple keywords, should I try to get links back to the root domain of the company I work with, or would it be better to link back to sub-sites specific to the keyword I am optimizing for? Does 'getting the root up' help all keywords I work with? Cheers, Mike
Link Building | | Malarowski0