Links via scraped / cloned content
-
Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names).
To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed.
Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.
-
Thanks Donnie and Oleg - good advice there! Couldn't believe how many dodgy sites were hitting this particular site. Around 15% of links (out of not many links - around 300) from dodgy outfits all doing more or less the same kind of stuff.
-
Yup, you can't control the bad links coming in so your best bet is to develop your brand (buy building high quality links w/ brand anchor text) to reduce the impact of spammy links.
-
IMO focus on building good links for your own site. It is completely up to you, however the time you invest trying to get them removed is probably better off spent branding your own site. If they are doing wrong things they will end up getting it. Everyone who f's with the big G eventually gets 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
-
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.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Is this negative SEO? Should I disavow these links?
We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks. As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy. We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name. There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed. My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites? If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links? Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong. Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today. http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DemiGR
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping. All of them look pretty much identical to this. Thoughts?1 -
Links and how they count?
We managed to get ourselves out of a penalty 6 months ago and 100 days later after the message of penalty removable we finally felt that we were moving back on track (not a lot of movement before and 50% down due to links being taken away), we have around 120 really high quality links but 95% of them are urls or the business name. Anyway we still have a couple of pages that I feel are fairly down on rankings and most of the links as mentioned above are high quality but they are either anchor text of the website name or url my main question is that when looking at my competitors I see that they have the same or less links and from much less powerful places (most I would not touch) but they seem to have a ratio of 5 - 10 % of the links are the keywords they are trying to rank for. My question is if you have 50 links from better places but they are unrelated terms such as the web site name or just urls and you have 50 links from average places but 5 - 10% are on related terms to what you are trying to rank for which ones would win out.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
Footer links VS Page links - Which one is best?
Hello all 🙂 I was wondering if someone could advise me on a link building question. If you wish to create a couple of landing pages for different locations with anchor text link building etc is it better to have a page like this web site here: http://www.acorncommercial.co.uk/commercial-property/development-sites/ or quick footer links like this web site here?: http://www.robertholmes.co.uk/ (click on quick links at the bottom). I would like to know if there is a difference from an SEO perspective or if they are considered black hat. Your advise would be much appreciated! Yiannis
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | artdivision0 -
Same content, different target area SEO
So ok, I have a gambling site that i want to target for Australia, Canada, USA and England separately and still have .com for world wide (or not, read further).The websites content will basically stays the same for all of them, perhaps just small changes of layout and information order (different order for top 10 gambling rooms) My question 1 would be: How should I mark the content for Google and other search engines that it would not be considered "duplicate content"? As I have mentioned the content will actually BE duplicate, but i want to target the users in different areas, so I believe search engines should have a proper way not to penalize my websites for trying to reach the users on their own country TLDs. What i thought of so far is: 1. Separate webmasterstools account for every domain -> we will need to setup the user targeting to specific country in it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO_MediaInno
2. Use the hreflang tags to indicate, that this content is for GB users "en-GB" the same for other domains more info about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
3. Get the country specific IP address (physical location of the server is not hugely important, just the IP)
4. It would be great if the IP address for co.uk is from different C-class than the one for the .com Is there anything I am missing here? Question 2: Should i target .com for USA market or is there some other options? (not based in USA so i believe .us is out of question) Thank you for your answers. T0 -
Link directories question
Looking over a clients site and they have a bunch of link directory links that seem very skeptical to me, but the mozrank and authority seem to be ok on the home page. One directory is addlinkzfree and they have the same template and layout as a few other directories this client has. Link page has no juice whatsover, but home page has PA 54, MR 5.04 and root domain is DA 45. At first glance this would appear to be respectable numbers right? But the title of the directory and multitude of links lead me to think its nothing but a link farm. Should I advise the client to run and try to remove links from these type sites even though home page has decent scores? Im of the mindset that anything diredctory with links, free, partners etc in title need be avoided. Would appreciate any backup on this or am I just being paranoid?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anthonytjm0 -
Partner Site Hit with Penguin - Links hurt me
I work for a network of international websites, the site I work on is for Canada. Our partners in Australia were hit by penguin hard because they hired a black hat SEO guy and didn't know. He was creating profiles on highly authoritative sites and keyword stuffing them. Now, they've completely dropped off the SERP. This is where the issue occurs, because we are all international partners we are all linked together on the header of every page so visitors can choose their country. Now, because they were hit hard and we have reciprocal links (not for rankings but for usability) will we be affected? It seems like we have, but I just want some opinions out there. Also, should we go ahead and stop linking our sites between countries to avoid this mess?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0