Help!!! Am I being Attacked???
-
Hello,
I do not believe so much in spammy links attacks and I definitely do not believe my site is worth attacking.
However, I'm seeing new links pointing to my site that I have no idea where they come from.
I just spotted three articles on a poor crappy article site with exact match keywords point to me. The articles are completely unique (copyscaped them) and they were posted according to the site time stamp during Oct and Nov 2012. (And they Appear in the WMT recently discovered links from more or less the same time).
What to do (besides for disavowing this domain)?
Thanks
-
I actually agree with what Mark Ginsberg said that it might be an SEO firm we hired way in the past (we don't have anyone for over 6 months) and might have pipe lined articles on our behalf.
But yes, main keywords to the exact landing pages
-
are they your main keyword phrase? not sure why someone would go thru the trouble to make them unique if they wanted to sabotage you. have u tried contacting the author?
-
Thanks, what you are saying makes sense.
(even though we haven't been using any SEO firm for many months now). -
Have you outsourced link building / SEO services to anyone? It could be they used a tool or outsourced this work to someone else, and these articles only went live in Oct. and Nov, even though they had technically gone through the pipeline a few months prioer?
It doesn't seem like someone would attack your site in that manner with a few articles on a crappy site - they would use sitewides, thousands of directory submissions, social bookmarks, etc., for much cheaper than having 3 unique articles written and posted with anchor text.
I'm more of the opinion these are remnants of an old link building strategy than of a malicious attack to hurt your site.
Mark
-
Yes these links are the only ones. It is really strange...
-
In those articles the backlinks to your website are the only ones?
If there are also other backlinks maybe the one posting the article put those links to your site without any intention to cause you harm, maybe he just wanted to add other backlinks too, to make the article look more natural.
I'm not a big fan of the Disavow Links Tool. In the official release Google said this tool should be used just in case you receive the Unnatural links warning. My advice is to always think twice before using this tool.
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Please Help (Newbie)
Hello, guys and gals, I am new to SEO and I am vigorously trying to rank my site here in Michigan for my company and respective niche. I have had some luck as I took many days to learn the basic foundation and apply what i have learned, but even after so I have had zero luck with establishing domain authority, page authority or even seeing the slightest SEO rank improvements. could someone please help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlesp31 -
All of my blog titles have disappeared. In need of Wordpress help.
Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question but here it goes. All of the titles on my real estate website have disappeared. I have spent hours looking through different forums trying to figure out how to make them show up. Also whenever I hover the cursor over links they turn to white and disappear as well. This is the website: http://www.acolerealty.com/blog/ If this helps here is the custom CSS in worpress is the following: /* GREEN */ body {background: #eff3ec !important;} .header-membership {
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscube.biz
background: #fff !important;
box-shadow: none !important;
border-bottom: 2px solid #e5e9e3 !important;
} .header-membership a {
color: #909090 !important;
text-shadow: none !important
} h1#site-title a {
color: #397249 !important;
} header nav#main-nav {
background: #7aad79 !important; /* Old browsers /
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%, #397249 100%) !important; / FF3.6+ /
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#7aad79), color-stop(100%,#397249)) !important; / Chrome,Safari4+ /
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%); / Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ /
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / Opera 11.10+ /
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / IE10+ /
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / W3C /
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7aad79', endColorstr='#397249',GradientType=0 ) !important; / IE6-9 */
} #t-header-container .home-search-container #header-top-search::before {
background: #7aad79 !important; /* Old browsers /
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%, #397249 100%) !important; / FF3.6+ /
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#7aad79), color-stop(100%,#397249)) !important; / Chrome,Safari4+ /
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%); / Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ /
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / Opera 11.10+ /
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / IE10+ /
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / W3C /
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7aad79', endColorstr='#397249',GradientType=0 ) !important; / IE6-9 */
} input.button-primary {
background: #7aad79 !important; /* Old browsers /
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%, #397249 100%) !important; / FF3.6+ /
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#7aad79), color-stop(100%,#397249)) !important; / Chrome,Safari4+ /
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%); / Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ /
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / Opera 11.10+ /
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / IE10+ /
background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #7aad79 0%,#397249 100%) !important; / W3C /
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7aad79', endColorstr='#397249',GradientType=0 ) !important; / IE6-9 */ border:1px solid #23472d !important;
} input.button-primary:hover {
background: #628b61 !important;
} footer {
background: #e4e8e1 !important;
}0 -
Branding and Page Titles - Please Help
Hello, I have a question about page titles. How important is branding here? I'm not referring to the company name, but rather the terminology that's used as "branding language" for a company. For example, let's say that the it would be a good idea to target the keyword "Restaurant Coupons" based on search volume and competition. However, our branding adheres to the language "Dining Offers". Is it considered a bad idea to use "Restaurant Coupons" in the page title? Or is that considered inconsistent branding? Basically, I'm just trying to figure out the correct balance between the SEO value of words and adhering to a company's branding. Any help is appreciated! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atmosol
Nick1 -
Site Search Results in Index -- Help
Hi, I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.) Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed. I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links. But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be: Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?) Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good? Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability. Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC1 -
Backlink from my YouTube Channel, helpful for SEO?
A website will include a link to a youtube video associated with my channel. Does my website also get SEO credit, even though that website isn't linking directly to my site, but rather to a video on my youtube channel. The youtube video is also uploaded to my website, but this website wants to link to the video directly on youtube. Website is "www.hawaiijobengine.com" and youtube channel is "hawaiijobegnine.com" - how does Google know these 2 are same owner? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Adding Meta Languange tag to xhtml site - coding help needed
I've had my site dinged by Google and feel it's likely several quality issues and I'm hunting down these issues. One of Bing's Webmaster SEO tools said my xhtml pages (which were built in 2007) are missing Meta Language and suggested adding tag in the or on the html tag. Wanting to "not mess anything up" and validate correctly, I read in **W3C's site and it said: ** "Always add a lang attribute to the html tag to set the default language of your page. If this is XHTML 1.x you should also use the xml:lang attribute (with the same value). Do not use the meta element with http-equiv set to Content-Language." My current html leads like: QUESTION:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlm12
I'm confused on how to add the Meta Language to my website given my current coding as I"m not a coder. Can you suggest if I should add this content-language info, and if so, what is the best way to do so, considering valid w3c markup for my document type? Thank you!!!
Michelle0 -
Emergency Help...
Hello All, I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher" i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position. Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog. He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file. He also installed the following plugins: Link Juice Keeper NoFollow Free The SEO Rich Snippets Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Robots Txt WP-PageNavi Add Meta Tags These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help. My blog link is : http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/ I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located. Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | symbolphoto0