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
-
Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy
Here is my question for SEO. We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band. We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs. Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | masonwong0 -
Links on Brand Banners
Hi, For one of our ecommerce clients, we have brand banners on each brand page that links to their most popular product lines. Some of the banners just have a column of links, and some are paragraphs with copy and anchor text. Example below: Brand Line 1 Brand Line 2 Example 2: For the utmost in quality, performance and comfort, purchase Brand Line 1 . Brand Line 2 offers the perfect ease of use for beginners while not compromising on quality. Obviously these are just examples, and there are several links (more than 2) per brand, but I was wondering if this harms SEO in any way because of keyword stuffing? It makes sense to have the brand name in the link, otherwise the name of the lines might not make much sense (an example of this is one of the lines is called 849.. so without the brand name that doesn't mean much and looks weird) Do you think it would be better to have the links in just columns in the first example, or in paragraph format?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs0 -
Multiple similar links without the penguin?
Hi, I´m working with a site where clients proudly will publish a link to us as sort of a sign/partner symbol for using our services. Potentially we could have thousands or at least hundreds of links pointing to us and we could tailor/provide snippets for the links that clients can use on their site. I´m part of a team that just started working with this site and I realize this is a great opportunity that has not yet been exploited. I´m also a little paranoid that this tactic might be picked up by the penguin or that google sees it as black hat if not done wisely ? But links will only come from respectable business sites although ranging from different genres both really big and small.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Agguk
Today links are mostly leading to our frontpage from our clients but I would like to tailor links so that each client could link to a page that is targeted on the keyword/service they have been using (and awarded diploma for) I think this would serve both the client and our SEO better ? I would really appreciate suggestions and comments on how to approach this best! Here is my plan so far, trying to make good/right use of the opportunity without offending google:
-Most links will be through a logo/sign that shows the award/diploma earned through our service.
I think the "alt" -tag should include both our company brand name and the service/target keyword for the page it´s leading to. -We could also provide a short text describing the earned award and our brand name and this whole text would also lead to the same page on our site.
...I guess using only the targeted keyword as anchor -link within the text would be a bad idea? -Where possible I would also like to customize this short text a little for each client (although that will be hard and only possible to some degree). As we provide "link material" for the client to include on their site, would it be wise to have them use an image that is hosted on our site or send them the image so they can publish that instead? Grateful for any feedback on this! Thanks!0 -
JavaScript encoded links on an AngularJS framework...bad idea for Google?
Hi Guys, I have a site where we're currently deploying code in AngularJS. As part of this, on the page we sometimes have links to 3rd party websites. We do not want to have followed links on the site to the 3rd party sites as we may be perceived as a link farm since we have more than 1 million pages and a lot of these have external 3rd party links. My question is, if we've got javascript to fire off the link to the 3rd party, is that enough to prevent Google from seeing that link? We do not have a NOFOLLOW on that currently. The link anchor text simply says "Visit website" and the link is fired using JavaScript. Here's a snapshot of the code we're using: Visit website Does anyone have any experience with anything like this on their own site or customer site that we can learn from just to ensure that we avoid any chances of being flagged for being a link farm? Thank you 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
It's not link buying, but...
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow. You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links
Hey Everyone, Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as "This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa" "Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes" "The organs in the female reproductive system incl" The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server 3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed. So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us <colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | blagger
| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 | If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner. We have 268 of these links from 200 domains. Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc. I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool? Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem. <colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
| | | |0 -
Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices
I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Marketing.SCG0