Strange Pingback/Blog Comment Links
-
On one of my sites I've noticed some strange links from Google Webmaster Tools recent links feature.
They are pingbacks/blog comments but they are using keyword anchor text and linking to my site. I know we are not doing this. Should I be concerned about this possibly being negative SEO? Here's a sample (be careful, shady site)
-
If that site is representative of the rest of the sites, then I'd say you might have a problem. This is going to involve a judgement call on your part, because as you say, Google has no hard and fast recommendations for these situations.
Looking at that site, the "Name" links are do-follow. Yours is one of 965 comments on the page. My guess is the site recently got itself added to someone's "do-follow comment sections to spam" list (yes there really are such lists) as all the crap links are from the last 4 months.
So to Google, this will absolutely look like the crap it is trying to hammer down with Penguin.
As for "not worrying about it until penalized" - just read through the miserable (and often futile) experiences all over the Q&A section here of site owners who have spent a year trying to dig out from under a Penguin penalty. And as for these links helping you at the moment - not bloody likely. Crappy internal pages with a PA of 1 and 965 links sure aren't passing you any ranking value.
So... how to decide what to do?
- How strong is the rest of your backlink profile and what percentage are these crappy backlinks?
- What's your link velocity for quality links compared these crap ones? (i.e. how frequently do you earn quality links compared to how often these new crap links are showing up?)
- how many of the crap links are actually do-follow?
If your own backlink profile is overwhelmingly strong, there may well be less to worry about, especially if the majority of the crap links are no-follow.The problem of course is that there are also plenty of reports of people running into issues after using the disavow tool too. So that's where the judgement call comes in.
If it were my site and I depended on it for income, the crap links were coming quickly and many were do-follow, I would collect the crap links as they come in, and once every 6 or 8 weeks, or when the links really start to mount up, I'd submit a disavow request. I'd also keep excellent records of the crap links and the quality links I'd been earning so I could respond quickly to a manual penalty should one come up.
Like I say - judgement call. Interested to know what others would do.
Paul
-
Yeah that's what I've been hearing from some people. I usually hear one of two things on this subject.
A. Wait till you know for sure that you have a penalty.
OR
B. Take them out now!
It's a shame that Google isn't more forward with which approach should really be taken.
-
That is possible but the links could be helping them. I would wait to disavow until its actually a problem. you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot.
-
"Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it."
You will be in for a rude awakening when the site triggers an algo penalty. I would be proactive and disavow the links. GWT lists links by date so routinely keep an eye on the recent links you get and disavow them. Also, pingback/comment links are generally nofollow - if that's the case, then it shouldn't trigger penalties.
-
I have had something similar done to my site. One of my competitors "targeted" our business for negative SEO. I noticed a bunch of spammy links pointing to our site with outright X-rated / vile anchor text. The good news is that we haven't seen a drop in traffic or rankings and it's been going on for a while now. Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it.
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
-
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
What is really a bad link in 2017?
Hi, Routine answer is: A link which doesn't provides any value. Tired of listening to this statement where we can see number of back-links been generated with different scenarios. There are still many low DA websites which speaks exactly about a brand and link a brand naturally. So, is this a bad link or good link? Let's be honest here. No one gonna visit such pages and browse through our website; it's all about what it's been doing in-terms of SEO. Do these websites to be in disavow list? Beside the context how a brand been mentioned, what are the other metrics to disavow a domain? Expecting some real answers for this straight question. If it's a low DA site and speaking about exactly our website- Good or bad? Vice-versa...high DA website mentioned website with less matching content. What is the proportion of website authority and content context? Can we keep a medium DA backlinks with some Moz spam score?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Should I disavow links to a dead sub domain?
I'm analyzing a client's website today and I found that they have over 300 spammy sites linking to a subdomain of their main site. So for example, say their site is clientsite.com, well they have hundreds of links pointing to deadsite.clientsite.com. That subdomain was used at one time as a staging site, and is no longer active. Are those hundreds of spammy sites hurting or potentially hurting my client's SEO? Or is it a non-issue because the links point to a dead subdomain? We believe that that staging sub domain site was hacked at one time, and thats where all those spammy links came from. Should I disavow them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rubennunez0 -
I have 4012 links from one blog - will Google penalise?
My website (http://www.gardenbeet.com) has 4012 links from http://cocomale.com/blog/ to my home page -a banner advert links from the blog - I also have 3,776 from another website to 6 pages of my website 1,832 from pinterest to 183 pages etc etc overall there are 627 domains linking to my website I have been advised by a SEO company that I was penalised in about may to july 2012 due to a large number of links coming from one domain or two domains is that true? should I ask the blog owner to remove my link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Should I Disavow Links if there is No Manual Action
Hello, I just recently took on a client that had hired a very black hat seo and used their service for roughly two years. He outsourced link building and the link profile is full of spun articles and blog commenting on chinese websites etc… The anchor texts/pages used for all this spamming no longer rank, but there is no penalty in Webmaster tools manual actions. I was thinking about disavowing some of the obviously spammy backlinks that exist but would that be raising a red flag that could lead to a manual action and even more negative movement? Have you ever heard of anything like the situation i'm dealing with where its obvious the pages have been hit but there is no manual action? What do you all think/suggest? And Should I disavow some terrible links and potentially open a can of worms?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Prime850 -
Unwanted link ?
Hello Working on my 404 pages, I've just found the following http://awesomescreenshot.com/08d22txtc9 This website http://basilurteaindia.com has a link mine as checked into Google. Link is presented with some of my content here http://basilurteaindia.com/images/19022012list.asp?type=2&file=C%3A%5CProgram+Files+(x86)%5ChMailServer%5CData%5Cace-egy.com%5Cm.kilany%5C9A%5C%7B9A532C2F-FB00-4C72-9403-7F26B7DC8E54%7D.eml Does someone know what the hell is that and how to remove it ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AymanH0 -
Lot of new suspicious external links
I am running a small-language site and suddenly saw a lot of incoming English links in Moz Reports and Opensiteexplorer from various domains (the sites are in English, but anchor words are not). When I check the page sources of there is no link to the site (as there shouldn't). Any idea what is happening and what to do about it? Thanks for help in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tjr0 -
No Follows - Sister/manufacturer sites
What is the best practice nowadays for linking to sister sites? Should you do it, shouldn't you, and/or should you list them with no follows? What about the reverse - having them link to us. Is this bad for us in anyway? Should we have them no follow their link to us? We are a distributor so manufacturers link to us as well, should we have them no follow their links? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CHECOM0