Unwanted spam pharmacy links
-
Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure.
However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts.
Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?
-
Hmmm. Their situation is further complicated by a less than clean link profile (not counting the spam links). They have very few high quality links. Makes me think that a new domain is a possibility to consider.
-
You should also checkout this Whiteboard Friday video, which covers that preemptive reconsideration request I mentioned along with a bunch of other tactics:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday
-
Honestly, think kind of problem exists industry wide and if your regular link profile is good, natural enough, you should be good. However, if a relatively high percentage of links exist compared to the rest of your profile and / or if you received the un-natural link profile notice from Google, I would lay out some of those examples and tell Google exactly what happened. If you think about it, anybody could buy spammy links for their competition and hurt them. The links are essentially supposed to be discounted so that they are not helping you and definitely not hurting you. Just file a re-inclusion request if you received a notice or if you are seeing a considerable drop in rankings.
-
Rand recently talked about this in the latest SEOmoz email newsletter where someone asked a question about negative SEO. Rand had an idea that I liked and hadn't heard before. He suggested submitting a pre-emptive reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, letting them know that someone is building those links and that you all are not responsible for them. Be as detailed as possible.
I guess the caveat there is that everything else you are doing is whitehat, since you are potentially inviting a reviewer to look at all of your backlinks.
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
-
Internal link structure for my loan website
Hi folks. I own a Norwegian consumer loan/financing website, which has been monetized with links. I've created various silos for my content, according to what I believe is most relevant to the user.
Technical SEO | | llevy
However, as a result each article now has a sidebar list, which in turn links to all other articles within the same category (silo). As you can see here, it has about 30 links in the sidebar: forbrukslån.no/beste-lån. With 30 articles in a silo, that corresponds to over 900 internal links, in just one silo alone. I wonder if this could be hurting me SEO wise? I know G cares a lot about relevance and user experience. So I have a feeling it could be interpreted as spammy. Reason I did this in the first place, is that the header links are also being repeated on all pages, without any issue. T4FHxHw0 -
How does link juice flow through hreflang?
We want to use the hreflang tag on our site (direct users searching for the Spanish version of spanishdict.com to spanishdict.com/traductor). Before doing so, we were wondering how link juice flows through hreflang? Any insight or resources on this would be very helpful. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CuriosityMedia0 -
Leveraging "Powered by" and link spam
Hi all, For reference: The SaaS guide to leveraging the "Powered By" tactic. My product is an embeddable widget that customers place on their websites (see example referenced in link above). A lot of my customers have great domain authority (big brands, .gov's etc). I would like to use a "Powered By" link on my widgets to create high quality backlinks. My question is: if I have identical link text (on potentially hundreds) of widgets, will this look like link spam to Google? If so, would setting the link text randomly on each widget to one of a few different phrases (to create some variation) avoid this? Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | NoorHammad0 -
Linking out to authoritive sites from my ecommerce site
Good afternoon SEOmoz community. I was looking for a specific answer or advice or opinion about linking out to other sites. My Site www.tacticalbootstore.com has been undergoing a complete content rewrite. In the process we have been told and read where it can be good to link out to other authoritive sites. One of the pages we have rewritten is here. http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-sizing-chart-a-97.html We have not added the graphics yet as they are being built now. This is just an informational page about sizing of a particular manufacturers boots. Once you get to the bottom of the text we have added a link to the actual manufacturers page. Is this helpful for us in the SERPS or not? Thank you for your time. Chris
Technical SEO | | scamper0 -
Competitors Dodgy Link Profile - How to handle?
Hi All, One of my competitors doesn't seem to mind collecting links with no relevance and over optimisation of anchor text also leaves me scratching my head as to ho wit's possible for them to still get the rankings they do. My question is how do I handle them from a competitive point of view? Do I pay for a batch of poor links to topple this competitor? Or do I bide my time? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mulith0 -
Internal links to low value pages
Hi, We're doing a big content update on our product pages and I'm looking for some advice about our internal linking. In a nutshell, the current design we're using links out from every product page (i.e. plants) to a set of accessory pages (i.e. things to help you plant the plants). The screenshot shows how this works. The accessories we sell are a very small part of our business and don't attract significant or valuable search traffic. It's the plant pages that pull in the visits and make the money.
Technical SEO | | jdeb
The reason for all these links to accessory pages is for usabilty & to reduce the volume of support calls about accessories (we get a lot of those). So my concern is that by linking out to these relatively low value accessory pages from all of our plant product pages, we will be spilling link juice from all our important pages to a small set of unimportant ones. Should I be concerned about this and if so, what should I do differently? I have considered: Making an intermediary page, listing the relevant accessories, so that each product page links to one intermediary page, which then links to all the accessories. Using nofollow on the accessory page links - there is so much info out there about this, much of it conflicting, that I just don't know if that's a good or bad idea. Using some kind of java-based pop-up box to list the accessory links that will hide the links from spiders. Linking back from the accessory pages to the relevant product sub-category pages to loop the flow of link juice. All ideas welcome zoBgC0 -
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>0 -
Is blogger could for building links
Hi i would like to know if blogger through google is a good way to build links and traffic. I have started to use blogger and would like to know if i am wasting my time using it for link building and traffic building for my main site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860