Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
-
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc...
So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
-
This could be an outlier, but easy to check. Use a browser plugin and set the useragent to Googlebot. Browse your site. See if it is displaying anything funky. I have seen sites hacked so that when Googlebot is the agent, they show links to viagra type sites. I would otherwise agree that you need to become friends with the disavow tool asap.
-
I would definitely disavow all of the pharma links, but make sure your code really is clean on your site. I've worked with 3 sites so far that had the same thing happen, and although they were on WP like you mentioned you don't have, it's possible your site was still infiltrated.
Sign up for Sucuri.net or Wordfence premium and have them look at your site - definitely worth the cost of those subscriptions.
-
Hi there WeBuyCars.com!
Are Andy's and Marie's answers helpful? Can you provide any more information?
Thanks!
-
Hi. I remember speaking with you last year some time about link issues. How certain are you that your link profile is clean aside from these pharma links? Usually Google is pretty good at just discounting these, but if you've got your own unnatural links I think that sometimes spam like this can possibly hurt.
Have you seen this?
https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo
Also, what are you trying to rank for? Your title tag is optimized for your url and brand.
-
I have seen this before where it was trackbacks causing issues and injecting spammy keywords in to them. I have also seen RSS feeds carrying spammy backlinks.
It is also worth remembering that lots of the bad links like these will now be dead / removed / changed.
Have you done a disavow of these spam sites yet?
-Andy
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
-
Link Building vs. Straight Earning Links Discussion
Hello, I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content. I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry? Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach. But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome. Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing. Would love to hear your experiences either way. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW3 -
Sudden shift in rankings?
What would make a website move from position 14-17 (for the last year or so) to position 1 for a very competitive keyword when there are no obvious site changes?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OUTsurance1 -
Not ranking for keywords. wehhh
I am not ranking for any of my keywords despite getting a number of Backlinks to my pages and mentioning them in both content and meta tags?!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Should I disavow this Link?
I am trying to clean up my link profile to get rid of a partial penalty and am not sure to do with one of the links to my site http://www.seoco.co.uk The link is 100% organic and has come from a foreign language site that published an infographic that I did: http://www.clasesdeperiodismo.com/2012/12/23/la-evolucion-de-las-redes-sociales-este-ano-en-una-infografia/ The thing is that in the link to my homepage they have used the anchor text SEO as opposed to my company name. I have already sent them an email and asked them to change the anchor text but they haven't responded so I am guessing they probably wouldn't respond to a removal request either. Should I disavow it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy0 -
Is linking out to different websites with the same C-Block IP bad for SEO?
Many SEOs state that getting (too many) links from the same C-Block IP is bad practice and should be avoided. Is this also applicable if one website links out to different websites with the same C-Block IP? Thus, website A, B and C (on the same server) link to website D (different server) could be seen as spam but is this the same when website D links to website A, B and C?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
Can I just delete pages to get rid of bad back-links to those pages?
I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters). We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality. Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question.. b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it? Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033 I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s... Thanks so much!!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zingseo0 -
Are there tools out there to determine when a link linked to your site? I want to know when a link farm was done a site.
In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links. The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done. I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out. Does anyone know how to find this out?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners0 -
Why are these sites so high with poor relevant links...
Hello, Keyword: TV Stands. I have been researching competitors for a client and we seem to be unable to understand why certains pages are ranking on page 1 of Google UK for keyword TV Stands. eg: http://www.furnitureinfashion.net/plasma-TV-stand.html (Google UK 8 - TV Stands) http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999542/Nr.99.aspx (Google UK 9 - TV Stands) The furniture in fashion has links from sites like: http://www.ummah.com/forum/ and http://www.muslimco.com/ which is totaly irrelevant to the site. Any ideas on other things as the tesco.com site does not have direct links to it. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnW-UK0