Javascript onclick redirects / porn sites...
-
We noticed around 7 websites which with domains that were just recently registered (with privacy protection).
They are using our website keywords/titles and brand name and the sites are mostly porn / junk sites. They don't link to our website directly but use a javascript onclick redirect which is why we think we aren't seeing them in our backlinks report. We've been in business for over 12 years and haven't come across sites like this before. We recently lost our first page rankings for a few of our highest converting key phrases and have been digging in to possible causes.
Just wondering if these sites could be impacting our results, and how to figure out if there are more like this?
Examples:
-
Hi Marcy,
If the sites are using your brand name and/or other brand terms, and your brand is copyrighted, you may be able to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request with Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1. As they note in the description on the tool, be very clear about whether the other site's actions actually constitute a violation of your copyright before filing the request.
I think it's unlikely that these new sites are impacting your site's performance in search - I was a little unclear about the JavaScript redirect, though (I'm at work and don't want to click on the links you posted on my work computer). Is it redirecting from their site to your site, or from their site to another site that is the porn/junk site? If it's the latter, that shouldn't be affecting your site at all. If it's the former, you may want to file disavow requests at the domain level for those sites just in case.
If your drop in rankings was caused by these new sites, I would expect to see a drop in performance across the board, rather than for specific queries, so I recommend that you keep digging on other reasons for the drop. I would take a look at the sites that are ranking now for the terms you've lost rankings for. How are they different from your site? What sites are ranking now that weren't ranking when you were on top? It may be that Google has decided that your site doesn't fulfill the search intent for those keywords, so taking a look at the sites that rank now will give you some insight into the kinds of pages that Google wants to rank for these terms. Since these were highly-converting terms for you, consider investing in PPC ads for these terms while you work to regain your organic presence. Good luck!
-
Hi Marcy
Here is a help section from Google on these sorts of issues - it covers everything from cloaking to content scraping, and doorway pages to other spam types.
I would also try contacting the webmasters and ask them to remove these redirects. If they do not respond or do not cooperate, take the steps in the link above from Google. Hope this helps!
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
HSTS Redirects
Hi Are these 307 redirects bad for SEO? They've just popped up on an audit & I haven't seen them before. I'm guessing as they're temporary they should be updated. Thanks Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Redirecting old mobile site
Hi All, Trying to figure out the best option here. I have a website that used to utilize a separate mobile site (m.xyz.com) but now utilizes responsive design. What is the best way to deal with that old mobile site? De-index? 301 redirect back to the main site in the rare case someone finds the m. site somewhere? THanks! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
.htaccess question/opinion/advice needed
Hello, I am trying to achieve 3 different things on my .htaccess I just want to make sure I am doing it the right or best way because I don't have much experience working on this kind of files. I am trying to: a) Redirect www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com so I don't get a duplicate content/tag error. b) Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com c) Get rid of the file extensions; www.mysite.com/stuff.html to www.mysite.com/stuff This is the code that I'm currently using and it seems to work fine, however I would like someone with experience to take a look so I can avoid internal server errors and other kinds of issues. I grabbed each piece of code from different posts and tutorials. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan
RewriteEngine on Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L] RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
Rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc] Thanks a lot!0 -
Consolidating MANY separate domains into a much better, single URL: Should I point a landing page or redirect to the new site?
I am consolidating a site for a client who previously, and very foolishly, broke up their domains like so: companyparis.com companyflorence.com companyrome.com etc... I am now done with the new site, which will be at: company.eu with pages as appropriate: company.eu/paris company.eu/florence company.eu/rome This domain, although not entirely new, does not have much authority or rank. In terms of SEO and link-building, is it better to redirect the old domain to the specific page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> company.eu/paris or... is it better to put a landing page at the old domain LINKING to the page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> landing page linking to --> company.eu/paris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thongly0