How should I react to my site being "attacked" by bad links?
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Hello,
We have never bought links or done manipulative linbuilding. Meanwhile, someone has recently (15th of March) pointed at the top 5 websites on my main keyword with lots of bad quality links.
So far it has not affected my rankings at all. Actually, I think it will not affect them because I think it was not a massive enough attack. The particular page that has been attacked had about 100 root domains pointing it and now it went up to something like 400. All those were in one day. All of those links use the same anchor text: the keyword we're ranking for.
With those extra 300 root domains pointing at us, we went from 600 rootdomain to 900 pointing at our domain as a whole. The page that was targetted by the attack is not the homepage.
What I wanted to do was to basically do nothing since I think it won't affect our rankings in any ways but I wanted you guys' opinion.
Thanks.
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This happened to me, too. Google has been finding these links since last October, and I just keep adding the domains to my Disavow list. My rank has slipped a bit (from 2 to 4) but its hard to know if these thinks are the reason. Probably not.
When the links were first pointed at my site, Google moved me from 2nd to 1st place for my top keywords. The bad links seemed to give me about a one week a temporary boost, before we settled back to 2nd .
Google HAS to be aware of this. Their silence on this issue is deafening. Cutts gave it a little bit of lip service; but there must be tens of millions of these junk links being added daily judging from all of the people selling 100k bad links on Fiverr for five bucks.
So far I'm mostly annoyed by these bad links, rather than hurt by them.This has really screwed up all the intense work I did to scrutinize and analyze my link profile.
A nice feature for SEOmoz would be to allow us to UPLOAD our DISAVOW list so we can get some of our reports with the junk scrubbed out. After all, if I tell Google to ignore these 1,000 links and presuming they actually do ignore them, then it would be more useful to get SEOmoz reports with that data removed as well.
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I agree with Russ. If not now, you may eventually see the effect of this surge in links and root domains. 300 in a short spam is bad.
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I would proactively disavow those links and let Google know what is going on. Google needs to know that Penguin has created a market for malicious negative SEO attacks.
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