How to block/notify google that your domain has been added to sites with very low trustworthiness?
-
Hey Guys,
I am writing to SEOmoz community because a problem occurred which I do not know how to solve:
My domain (xyz.com) occured on very strange sites with very low trustworthiness (even blocked by google). Checking the site, I found out that all of the pictures were ALT=xyz.com.
Could this hurt my position of my site on google rankings? How to prevent such actions, what should I do?
Thanks for you help in advance!
-
Thanks a lot!
-
Hey, that is really unlikely but if you want more comprehensive feedback can you provide some details:
1. Your site + pages in question
2. example of the scraper sites
If it was that easy to kill your competition, SEO would be all about nuking the opposition rather than building up your own relevance.
here is some feedback from Matt Cutts:~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CosWAVLCZg&feature=player_embeddedMost of the time though, this content is not malicious, these sites are not indexed and they are not even linking, they are just using your domain (the scraped site as the alt text for the image).
Matt suggests DMCA & Spam reports which you can do if you are worried but I promise you, you are wasting time worrying about something when you could be working on your site.
Marcus
-
Thanks Marcus!
But I am still a litlle worried, because it seems to me that these sites where set up with ALT=nameofmyurl in order to somehow harm the my site's google rank (especially looking at the fact that all of the sites are blocked by google due to potential harmful software they have).
-
Yeah, this is just scraping by the sounds of it. At least they are referencing you. Don't worry about this at all. If you are still concerned you could always submit a DMCA request to google for the offending pages: http://www.google.co.uk/dmca.html
Cheers
Marcus -
Hey Marcus,
thanks gor your help. We do all of our link building in-house, so we exactly know where we put our links.
COming back to the problem: There are several sites with the same trustworthiness level (very low) and all of them have the same pattern: Several pictures (ours by the way) are placed on the given pages with ALT "nameofmyurl" (most of the pictures are taken from our server with the help of hotlinks). The pictures are not linked.
As I understand, this will not harm my site's google rank?
-
Hey Dominik
There is not a great deal you can do here but if the sites have been nuked then the links wont count for much. If you employed a link builder and this is on the back of that then you could contact the link builder and ask them to remove the links. Equally, you could contact the sites in question and do the same if you are worried.
One other point - if these clearly dodgy links are pointing to your site, I would double check to see if you have been hacked and become part of a link network that they are promoting with links into your site.
If it is just the alt tags that have your URL and they are not actual links then... god knows what this is all about but the best advice here is to stop worrying about it and just concentrate on your site.
Hope it helps
Marcus
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
-
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Google having trouble accessing my site
Hi google is having problem accessing my site. each day it is bringing up access denied errors and when i have checked what this means i have the following Access denied errors In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons: Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.) Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories. Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.) The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results. Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site. Now i have contacted my hosting company who said there is not a problem but said to read the following page http://www.tmdhosting.com/kb/technical-questions/other/robots-txt-file-to-improve-the-way-search-bots-crawl/ i have read it and as far as i can see i have my file set up right which is listed below. they said if i still have problems then i need to contact google. can anyone please give me advice on what to do. the errors are responce code 403 User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/0 -
Site-Wide Header image w/ Link hurting me?
I have a banner in the header that is constant across all pages except the one it links to. It goes in before the content div and this search term is #1 across google in almost every variation, but it appears to link in a lot of the non relevant pages for #2 spots in some cases. While this is a relatively new domain (started 03/12), but this has been a constant rank for about 2 months. I'm wondering if this may be hurting the keyword targeting of my internal pages and if i should no follow that header image on all pages except the homepage?
Technical SEO | | choiceenergy0 -
I am trying to block robots from indexing parts of my site..
I have a few websites that I mocked up for clients to check out my work and get a feel for the style I produce but I don't want them indexed as they have lore ipsum place holder text and not really optimized... I am in the process of optimizing them but for the time being I would like to block them. Most of my warnings and errors on my seomoz dashboard are from these sites and I was going to upload the folioing to the robot.txt file but I want to make sure this is correct: User-agent: * Disallow: /salondemo/ Disallow: /salondemo3/ Disallow: /cafedemo/ Disallow: /portfolio1/ Disallow: /portfolio2/ Disallow: /portfolio3/ Disallow: /salondemo2/ is this all i need to do? Thanks Donny
Technical SEO | | Smurkcreative0 -
Buying a SERPs competitor domain / site
For a specific term, we have the potential opportunity to purchase the domain (complete with site) that sits just above us in the Google search results... The domain has reasonable page authority of 49, domain authority of 38 with 168 linking root domains - 311 total links... Would the most beneficial use of the domain be to retain the site content as is and incorporate a few relevant links back to our site or... 301 the entire domain?
Technical SEO | | digitalarts1 -
I changed the domain and structure of my site,is there anything I can do to help speed the recovery in SERPs?
I change the domain of my site in March (pretty much exactly when Panda hit, by coincidence). Our search traffic has dropped by 90% in that time with little recovery. In webmaster tools it shows about 400,000 pages on the new domain and about 85,000 still indexed on the old domain. I set up custom 301 redirects to all of the new pages on the new domain so everything that was moved has a good one hop redirect. I've been told that the only thing I can do is sit back and wait for everything to finish transitioning. The problem is that it has been 5 months of poor traffic, which means 5 months of slow sales. Is there anything I can do the speed up the transition?
Technical SEO | | iJeep0 -
Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.
Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop! (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!
Technical SEO | | MarcLevy0