Website Spam Backlinks Solution
-
I have been doing some back-link checking and found that 25% of the total back-links to my PR5 site are Spam and generated over the past 8 weeks.
There are 189 links in total from 38 different domains and the anchor text is a combination of 'ugg boots for women' from TLDs in China, Russia and North Korea. The PR of these sites is 15 are n/a, 12 are 0 and the other 11 range between 1 - 6.
More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing?
Clearly with such a high % of my total links now being Spam, I want to be proactive so this does not hurt my rankings in search. If a Spambot is behind it then the issue is going to get worse moving forward. Any advice is welcome...
-
Text on the page doesn't necessarily mean it'll get indexed...but it might.
You can always just 404 the page, wait a week or so, and see if the page shows up in Google's index (just copy and paste the URL into Google).
If it shows up you can simple block SE spiders from indexing it using your htaccess and/or GWT.
-
A pragmatic solution which is great.
I was worried about how Google would interpret my doing this. Panda, penguin... it all seems so up in the air and I don't want to fall foul. Essentially these links are pointing at gibberish now, so no foul I reckon!!
Thx.
-
Ah right, my 404 page does have text on it like you say.
If I remove the original page URL from Google's Index by using WMT, would that resolve the issue moving forward?
-
Just one thing about that you need to be careful about: having your 404 page indexed.
Some 404 pages have content (ie. "Sorry, but this page has moved...").
And if it's the only page on your site with that content, Google may still index the page.
-
You said: "More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing?"
You're in luck!
404 the page and your job is done. Just change the URL by one character and you're good.Make sure the page is actually retuning a 404 status code.
Google only cares about links to pages that resolve on your site. By 404'ing them you are essentially removing all of the links in one shot.
Don't make a disavow, or anything you're done.
-
You definitely want to be proactive...but not overreactive.
The disavow tool should only be used for a penalized site.
If you have a clean link profile you probably don't have to worry.
I once had a competitor hit me with 250,000 spammy blog comments...and nothing happened.
If you're really concerned you can always 404 the page and repost the content on another URL.
-
Have the links actually harmed your site in any way? If the sites are extremely spammy, full of spun content, and/or feature only scraped content then you may not want them pointing to you... but if they haven't hurt your traffic, rankings, etc. then why remove your page or disavow the link? Google will likely just discount the links instead of pegging you with an algorithmic penalty. In the mean time, why not work on acquiring some relevant backlinks through outreach.
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
-
Inbound links to internal search with pharma spam anchor text. Negative seo attack
Suddenly in October I had a spike on inbound links from forums and spams sites. Each one had setup hundreds of links. The links goes to WordPress internal search. Example: mysite.com/es/?s=⚄
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arlinaite470 -
How to Increase US traffic for other GEO based website
Can you help me to understand why my traffic from the US is not increasing for landing pages/product pages whereas for our blog it has grown 2X to 3X past 2 quarters? I am afraid that I don't get any right answer for this. Could you or someone help me to discover the answer? Also, what should I do to rank in the US for a particular KW, we rank on 2 positions for KW "Hackathon" in India but for the US the no is 56. I don't understand what to do and the best possible way to rank in the US.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rajnish_HE0 -
Drastic surge of link spam in Webmaster Tools' Link Profile
Hello all I am trying to get some insights/advice on a recent as well as drastic increase in link spam within my Webmaster Tools' Link Profile. Before I get into more detail, I would like to point out, that I did find some relevant MOZ community posts addressing this type of issue. However, my link spam situation may have to be approached from a different angle, as it concerns two sites at the same time and somewhat in the same way. Basically, starting in July 2017, from one day to the other, a multitude of domains (50+) is generating link spam (at least 200 links a month and counting) and to cut a long story short, I believe the sites are hacked. This is because most of the domain names sound legit and load the homepage, but all the sub-pages linking to my site contain "adult" gibberish. In addition, it is interesting to see, that each sub-page follows the same pattern, scraping content from my homepage including the on-page links - that generate the spammy backlinks to my sites - while inserting the adult gibberish in between (basically it's all just text and looks like as if a bot is at work). Therefore, it's not like my link is being inserted "specifically" into pages or to spam me with the same anchor text over and over. So, I am not sure what kind of link spam this really is (or the purpose of it). Some more background information: As mentioned above, this link spam (attack?) is affecting two of my sites and it started off pretty much simultaneously (in addition, the sites focus on a competitive niche). The interesting detail is, that one site suffered a manual penalty years ago, which has been lifted (a disavowal file exists and no further link building campaigns have been undertaken after the cleanup), while the other site has never seen any link building efforts - it is clean, yet the same type of spam is flooding that websites' link profile too. In the webmaster forums the overall opinion is, that Google ignores web spam. All well. However, I am still concerned, that the dozens of spammy links pointing to the website "with a history" may pose a risk (more spam on a daily basis on both sites though). At the same time I wonder, why the other "clean" site is facing the same issue. The clean sites' rankings do not appear to be impacted, while the other website has seen some drops, but I am still observing the situation. Therefore, should I be concerned for both sites or even start an endless disavowal campaign on the site with a history? PS: This MOZ article appears to advice so: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin "In most cases, sites that have a history of collecting unnatural links tend to continue to collect them. If this is the case for you, then it’s best to disavow those on a regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) so that you can avoid getting another manual action." What is your opinion? Sorry for the long post and many thanks in advance for any help/insight.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hermski0 -
Is there a danger linking to and from one website too many times?
Basically my webdeveloper has suggested that instead of using a subfolder to create an English and Korean version of the site I should create two different websites and then link them both together to provide the page in English, or in Korean, which ever the case may be. My immediate reaction is that search engines may perceive this kind of linking to be manipulative, as you can imagine there will be a lot of links (One for every page). Do you think it is OK to create two webpages and link them together page by page? Or do you think that the site will get penalized by search engines for link farming or link exchanging. Regards, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoGri0 -
Can image links help improve my backlinking profile?
I recently spent some time looking at the backlink profile of a leading UK food & clothing retailer and noticed that a high number of their backlinks for very competitive search phrase's consisted entirely of image backlinks. 50% of the links contained no alt text and other 50% contained a mix of just the targeted keyword or a phase containig one mention of the targeted keyword. Has anyone had any experiance of this type of marketing producing any positive effect on SEO or search engine rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigJonOne0 -
Website is not stable on maps.google.com
My website is daily showing different position on maps.google.com and for the last few days like yesterday it was on 21st position on some keyword and today it is no where and same with other keywords. Is this a Google Dance ?? what can be its period ? and what is the solution to handle it ??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Website mallware attacks
I keep getting attacks to my website every time that are being blocked by OSE firewall Is there any way to stop this? I am affraid because they actually manage enter my website on the past, and i dont know if they can enter on the future or if having all the pluggins and wordpress updated. I am safe enough, and i am not sure if there is any type of virus on my computer Macbook as those attacked pages were recently updated from my computer. Is there any malware scan for Mac Thanl you == Attack Details == TYPE: Found Basic DoS Attacks DETECTED ATTACK VALUE: dDos Attack ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-25 11:48:18 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/75.126.24.81 URI: [http://www.propdental.es/](http://www.propdental.es/) METHOD: HEAD USERAGENT: N/A REFERRER: N/A == Attack Details == TYPE: Found Basic DoS Attacks DETECTED ATTACK VALUE: dDos Attack ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-25 10:13:17 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/107.21.150.82 URI: [http://www.propdental.es/blanqueamiento-dental/](http://www.propdental.es/blanqueamiento-dental/) METHOD: HEAD USERAGENT: N/A REFERRER: N/A ``` == Attack Details == TYPE: Found Malicious User Agent DETECTED ATTACK VALUE: curl/7.15.5 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8b zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5 ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-25 03:13:52 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/119.245.226.74 URI: [http://www.propdental.es/sonrisas/los-martinez/](http://www.propdental.es/sonrisas/los-martinez/) METHOD: HEAD USERAGENT: curl/7.15.5 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8b zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5 REFERRER: N/A ``` ```
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Buying a website and redirecting everything
We are considering purchasing an existing website in our industry with a domain authority of 52 and 20K inlinks and redirecting it to our new website with a domain authority of 26 and 1,000 inlinks. Would this be the best way to improve our new site's authority and inlinks? Would Google penalize us for doing that or would it effectively transfer the old sites authority to us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt0