Attacked with spam links.
-
Our website was hit with the "Pharma hack", "Google Cloaking Hack", or "Blackhat SEO Spam". and Google showed in the results this website may be compromised.
After cleaning out the hack from the website I chacked with the Seomoz tool Open Site Explorer and I found that they hacked 1000 of other websites and created links to my website. They were building a few 1000 links to the website with the clickable text "buy cheap online pharmacy". and more like that.
This website www.washington23.com has been hacked and gives over 200 links to your website for pharmacy items. And Google considers this from your impotent links as i can see in webmasters.
What can I do about it?
-
Would you think I should also use the google disavow links tool?
-
I will start working on it Sunday and I will come back here to report.
-
Don't sweat it, it will give you something to do
or you can probably outsource that real cheap. It's grunt work.
No problem, getting hacked sucks and I want to wring the neck of the person responsible. Feel free to mark as good answer or give us a thumbs up
Visit the site and see if they have a contact us form or email addressmost sites do, only spam sites hide that info because they don't want to be contacted.
you can also go to godaddy.com and check the registrar information and see the email of the person the domain name is registered to if the don't have registration set to private (spam sites usually are domain by proxy private)
-
Thanks both of you!
Dose anyone have some good tips how to do this all quickly, finding there emails etc it can be a big job.
-
I like yours better, i was trying to avoid being technical because sometimes the owner gets the email or whatever and it may go over their head.
The important thing is that they are made aware that they have viagra links on their site, and to let whoever handles their website coding know that they have a serious issue to the health and rankings of their site.
-
Yosepgr,
First it's important to not spell important as "impotent", especially after Irving's reference to viagra.
Write something like this:
I noticed your website at {put web address here} was linking to mine several hundred times. I visited your site to see why you liked my site so much and noticed that it's because your website appears to have been hacked.
You should consider cleaning up all of the links the hackers put in to your website so that you do not get a penalty from Google. You should also consider taking some safety precautions to prevent this from happening in the future. Some things you can do is check your site to see where SQL Injections may occur. You might also put in Captcha validations where your users are able to input information/register for your site.
I hope all goes well with your cleanup.
-
Short and sweet - something like this:
Hi,
I am the SEO at mysite.com and I noticed your site was hacked! If you look in the source code of your homepage you can see hidden links to pharma sites in your source code. This can definitely result in your site being completely banned in Google.
I'm telling you this because our site was already banned, and we lost a lot of traffic as a result of this hack. You might want to take a look at your site as well and remove the code. Maybe you already know about your site being hacked, if so you can disregard this email. Thanks, Irving
-
Thanks. The website is very impotent to us.
Can you give me an approach how to write to them? (My English is bad....)
-
If your rankings returned you're probably OK but I would at very least look at the biggest offenders with the highest number of links pointing to you and contact those guys first. Also make sure you changed all of the passwords and updated and security issues to make sure it doesn't get hacked again the same way.
Also, since it's one letter you have to craft you can just use it for all of the emails.I'd follow up at least once though a week later just to remind them.
a) visit the site
b) get the email address and webmasters email
c) paste the letter and shoot out the email
I bet I could do that in one day. it's probably worth it if they're spamming links to you, but it really depends on how important the site is to you. If your companies livelihood depends on the sites health then I would say do it.
The good news is the links don't have any of your real keyword phrases in them so you're probably OK even if you do nothing.
-
But there are over 100 websites. This would take weeks.
-
How are your rankings after you removed the hack? has your site returned?
I would reach out to the site owners to let them know they were hacked, a lot of them will figure it out eventually and remove the links but it makes sense to be proactive and tell them their site has viagra links embedded in the code and Google will punish them for this, tell them you noticed it because your site was attacked too so they know you're on their side.
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
-
How to Reduce the spam score of the website?
Hello, My Website Spam Score is 60. how can I reduce the spam score of the website. plz give me suggestion
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jyhkgkkkkkhkjgj0 -
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Does this type of link pass juice?
I have a backlink that looks like this: https://theirsite.com/go/?t=https%3A//www.mysite.com Will that pass link juice?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vcj0 -
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Outranked by link farm
Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Footer images links, good or bad?
Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pompero990 -
Ditching of spammy links - will it be of benefit?
Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'. Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions. I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full. Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | themegroup0 -
Buying Links
Hello, I have talked to many SEO companies about their services and rates. I noticed that all of them will buy thousands and thousands of links once you first join. That is why they always want a start-up fee, so they can purchase the links. I know the best method is doing it the ethical hard way of asking sites to link to them, but I dont have time to do that. I mainly want to know where the SEO companies buy their links from. I am figuring that them buying the links are not negatively affecting the sites or they would lose their clients if they got into black hat links. It must be good inorder for them to keep their clients. I was interested in buying links, but do not know who to trust. Does anyone have a recommendation?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neeper670