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
-
Links Identified in WMT not on Webpages
Hi, We're currently reviewing one of our clients backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic & OSE as we can see many toxic links. However we cannot find the links on the webpages that are listed on Google WMT. We have searched through the website along with checking through the source code. Should we still disavow the domain? Thanks, Edd
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Where Is This Link Coming From?
According to Moz Analytics we have a link coming from here: http://www.grayshadowfinancial.com/ The anchor text is earthquake prone map. I can't find the link, but if I cntrl+f "earthquake prone map" it shows in the find box, even though I can't see it. I'm guessing this is some spam tactic and they are hiding this with their CSS? Is there anyway I could see it? Best, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
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 -
External Followed Links Over Time Nasty Drop HELP!
I had someone help me with SEO and they basically used some stupid form to get back-links I am still learning and have taken over my site to better do things right. I have had a major drop across the board since Panda and Pinguin and rightfully so from what I am seeing. My question is: Google obviously removed the backlinks and SEO MOZ shows this in its report. Do I need to disavow these links still or can I just focus on link building properly? What is the best course of action here? gGuSyJf
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | megapixall0 -
Can i send a disavow if a detect a spam link
I have detected than one web domain is generating 2400 links to my site should a use a disavow tools, as it is imposible to have contact from webmaster and no response to your emails My web as not been warned or penalized, but i dont like this link, and i want to inform google of that,. If google acepts the disavow file, should i still see on my webmaster tools that web links, or will they desapear thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How do you optimize a page with Syndicated Content?
Content is syndicated legally (licensed). My questions are: What is the best way to approach this situation? Is there any a change to compete with the original site/page for the same keywords? Is it okay to do so? Will there be any negative SEO impact on my site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StickyRiceSEO0 -
Anybody have useful advice to fix a very bad link profile?
Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain. This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale. Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get. Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same. So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CustomCreatives0 -
Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?
I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue? Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed? What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin3