Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?

[Whebb]

Hey Everyone,

We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there.

Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites.

Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Whebb]

Appreciate the different responses. Sounds like not much to do but keep an eye on it and see where it goes. May have to disavow a bunch of links, but if that is the worst of it, then not too bad. Thanks!

[Carson-Ward]

This often happens when a site has been compromised. Spammers will use a legitimate site to post links to their even spammier site, then build anchor text links to the legitimate site in order to build up that links' authority. In other less-common cases users will be redirected, or different content will be served to international users.

Check out the URL that links are pointing to and analyze the source closely, and make sure it looks the same from far-away IP addresses.

If you're not being hacked and your client hasn't commissioned any link-building of this nature, you probably don't need to worry. Google's really good at sorting out spam attacks from link-building campaigns, but in the unlikely event you do get an unnatural link warning you can usually get the penalty removed. You could, for example, show them this Q&A

[MoosaHemani]

Now there is lots of Maybe here but I will potentially discuss few of them

1. May be client had no idea that commenting on other blogs comes under the bad link building and he or someone from his company is doing that. I mean may be there idea was to promote the product they are selling but somehow they are getting in to it. My idea is to explain what kind of links they are getting and ask them to recheck if someone from the company is doing this.
2. There is a possibility of a negative SEO especially if they are powerful in the offline market. Yes the website is new; they have a poor domain authority but because of their authority in the offline market make some competitor do that!
3. Unintentional involvement in the paid links can also result in this. Make sure someone from their company is involved in to it.

In any case, all you have to do is to grab the links and remove if possible or simply disavow the links so that you can tell Google that these links are not by you and you are not in ned of a link juice flowing from these websites.

Hope this helps!

[FedeEinhorn]

Seems like your client's fault. Even though you said they swear they did not create the links, no negative SEO will waste the time or efforts on giving links to a site that was just launched and it's not even ranking well.

Perhaps your client did buy the links but without even knowing, there are places where links are sold like a "Be in the first page on Google", so common people do not associate that with spam links...