Someone is building anchor text links with child porn keywords..help :-(

[Circa]

Hey Everyone;

I recently found that there are tons of links to my url (30+) from several sites with the anchor text "download child porn, kiddie porn, and the likes". Although the sites linking to us where the person built the links do not have this content (thank god) it is just my url + the horrible anchor text someone is putting.

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Obviously I would not do that to my own site especially since I was ranked for over 15 keywords in the top 5 spots on Google and Bing. I am guessing its a competitor and I am wondering that is there any way I can remove them?

Is this negative seo?

Also could this be the reason my site has dropped off google page 1 last month for all my positions? I am consistently trying to rebuild but my positions are flying all over the place.

Im going from ranking #12 one week to #198 the next; then to #60 and finally not even on google or bing anymore; then back to #50, etc for the past month and a half...

Its very aggravating and it has hurt a few of my websites; im at a total loss on how to recover now if this is the case...It seems they have started to build these links in January from what I can find on the postings.. Thank you SEOMOZ im so happy im a member now.

Any suggestions on how i can get these links off or if it is why my site has lost its original rankings.. Should I just can my website and start all over with a different URL? How can I watch out for this in the future?

Any help would be so so so greatly appreciated and valued

xpVjMw8

[Carson-Ward]

First off, make sure your site has not been compromised. Are there sections on your site where users generate their own content? Are the links pointing to spam comments or pages you didn't create? Spammers whose sites Google has already banned will often hack or otherwise compromise a site and use it as a gateway to their site. More on that from Google here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=163634

Next, if you're not dealing in anything like the anchor text indicates, don't worry about it. Spam attacks are generally ineffective, and this is especially true when they're completely different from the terms on the page or the terms you seem to want to rank for.

Really, this is probably not worth worrying about. I wouldn't disavow unless you think it's negatively impacting your site, or unless you have had a warning from Google Webmaster Tools.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

You didn't provide the address of your site, but I've seen on larger sites with user generated content, or sites that have some type of forum, this type of anchor text may be indicative of a larger problem - that you have problematic pages on the site with content relating to child porn, or your site has been hacked and code/links have been injected. Thus, the spammers are linking to you with that anchor text, and your site is part of a larger chain.

I would take a close look at the landing pages for those links - are they forum pages/user profiles of spam, or are they linking to a page on your site that was hacked into.

To check if your site was hacked into, I would view the cache of Google for the page/site. If so, you can often see the stuff they have put on your page - if it doesn't show up in the regular view of the cache, try clicking the link for the text only version. While this may be negative SEO, I've seen lots more cases where this is a result of a site being hacked or user generated content sections not being moderated and which have run completely wild.

Mark

[mememax]

Hey Circa, this may be negative seo from a competitor it may be spammers or fishers and so on, it's difficult to know.

Your drop may depend on that depending on how much those links are part of your whole backlinks portfolio, as generalzod said, if you have a 75% of your links like those one they could have hit you if they're kind of 10% you may  have different issues there, since every site has some porn or spam links pointing to them and google knows that.

If I were you I'll buy a subscription to ahrefs or majestic seo, get all your links, find the crappy ones, and ask for removal. then the ones which remains can be disavowed.

After that wait for a couple of days and submit a reconsideration request to google saying them you've also submitted a link disavow. Explain them what happened in details.

To prevent this in the future you can use ahrefs/majestic new/lost links feature so you can watch which links you're acquiring everyday and if there's something wrong you can ask for removal /disavow them.

Hope that helps!

[generalzod]

That depends on what percentage of your links are made up using those keywords. Negative SEO usually takes a LOT more effort than building a few crappy links to your website. The same has been done to some of my client sites in the past and it's not made any difference to their SERPs

Anyway, the simplest solution here is to login to Google Webmaster tools and use the Disavow Links tool so that at least they won't count towards your backlink profile.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487

Hope this helps.