People buying links to their profiles on my site
-
As we have a major Penguin update looming in the background, I am looking for expert advice on how to deal with professionals buying into link programs whether they are doing it deliberately or not. Our site provides detailed profile information on hundreds of 1000's of professionals and some professionals apparently believed that buying into link program will lift their profile in the SERPS.
About 10 professionals have paid shady link building companies to buy links to their profiles on our site. The biggest offender bought over 1,500 links to his profile. Aside from adding the known toxic links to our disavow file, what else can we do to avoid any link penalties?
I can think of three distinct options and would love to hear feedback especially based on actual experience.
Option 1. 404 the existing profile - "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith" and create a new URL "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith_1".
Option 2. Keep the existing URL and fully rely on the disavow file. Contact the professionals and kindly ask them to stop buying links and to contact their link building companies to remove the links.
Any other ideas?
-
I'd tend to agree - it's really tough to say without knowing more about the site, but a bit of bad behavior across hundreds of thousands of profiles shouldn't impact you that much. Of course, just having hundreds of thousands of indexed profile pages can have its own hazards, so it depends a lot on the site, authority, etc.
The other option would be to just NOINDEX any questionable profile pages - that should sever the offending links. Of course, it also means those pages won't be able to rank, which could irritate the people building the links to them, so I'm not sure how lightly you want to tread. If you 404 and change the URL, you're sort of doing the same thing - they'll still have to rebuild and won't be happy about it.
-
Would it be out of the question to ban the members for violating your TOS and delete their profiles?
Aside from that, if your site is big and has many members etc, I dont think people building spammy links to your site will hurt your SEO. What does OSE or ahrefs say about your anchor text profile? Are these user campaigns having any affect?
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
-
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 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
2 sites in one niche?
Hello, Can you be penalized for having 2 ecommerce sites in the same niche? Is there a way to do it white-hat? Please explain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
I think my site is affected by a Google glitch...or something
Although google told me No manual spam actions found i had not received an unnatural link request notice i figured it would be a good idea to clean these up so i did. So i have submitted 3 reconsideration requests from google. They all came back with the same response: No manual spam actions found. I really doubt that anyone at google really checked those out.You will notice that i don't even appear on page 1-10 at all...its clearly google filtering the site out from the results(except for my brand terms), but i have no idea what for.What do you guys think it is? If you see anythign let me know so i can have it fixed.This has been going on for 2 months now...my company has been around for a long time...i dont understand why suddenly im not showing up in searches for the keyword si used to rank for...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CMTM0 -
Fix Bad Links in Google
I have a client who had some grey hat SEO done in the past. Some of their back links aren't from the best neighborhoods. Google didn't seem to mind until 9/28, when they literally disappeared for all searches except for their domain name. Google still has their site indexed, but it's just not showing up. There are no messages in Webmaster Tools. I know Bing has the tool where you can disavow bad links and ask them to discount them. Google doesn't have such a tool, but what is the strategy when you don't have control over the link sources, such as in blog comments? Could this update have been a delayed Penguin ranking change from the latest Penguin Update on the 18th? http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomBristol0 -
Getting Credit for your own inbound links
Good afternoon, I have been comparing competitors with the Open Site Explorer looking at their inbound links. I have noticed that they have been getting credit for their own inbound links within their site. Is there something I am doing wrong as inbound links on my site aren't getting found? Could this have anything to do with Webmaster tools? Thanks in advance, SEO_123
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamesjd70