Strange Pingback/Blog Comment Links
-
On one of my sites I've noticed some strange links from Google Webmaster Tools recent links feature.
They are pingbacks/blog comments but they are using keyword anchor text and linking to my site. I know we are not doing this. Should I be concerned about this possibly being negative SEO? Here's a sample (be careful, shady site)
-
If that site is representative of the rest of the sites, then I'd say you might have a problem. This is going to involve a judgement call on your part, because as you say, Google has no hard and fast recommendations for these situations.
Looking at that site, the "Name" links are do-follow. Yours is one of 965 comments on the page. My guess is the site recently got itself added to someone's "do-follow comment sections to spam" list (yes there really are such lists) as all the crap links are from the last 4 months.
So to Google, this will absolutely look like the crap it is trying to hammer down with Penguin.
As for "not worrying about it until penalized" - just read through the miserable (and often futile) experiences all over the Q&A section here of site owners who have spent a year trying to dig out from under a Penguin penalty. And as for these links helping you at the moment - not bloody likely. Crappy internal pages with a PA of 1 and 965 links sure aren't passing you any ranking value.
So... how to decide what to do?
- How strong is the rest of your backlink profile and what percentage are these crappy backlinks?
- What's your link velocity for quality links compared these crap ones? (i.e. how frequently do you earn quality links compared to how often these new crap links are showing up?)
- how many of the crap links are actually do-follow?
If your own backlink profile is overwhelmingly strong, there may well be less to worry about, especially if the majority of the crap links are no-follow.The problem of course is that there are also plenty of reports of people running into issues after using the disavow tool too. So that's where the judgement call comes in.
If it were my site and I depended on it for income, the crap links were coming quickly and many were do-follow, I would collect the crap links as they come in, and once every 6 or 8 weeks, or when the links really start to mount up, I'd submit a disavow request. I'd also keep excellent records of the crap links and the quality links I'd been earning so I could respond quickly to a manual penalty should one come up.
Like I say - judgement call. Interested to know what others would do.
Paul
-
Yeah that's what I've been hearing from some people. I usually hear one of two things on this subject.
A. Wait till you know for sure that you have a penalty.
OR
B. Take them out now!
It's a shame that Google isn't more forward with which approach should really be taken.
-
That is possible but the links could be helping them. I would wait to disavow until its actually a problem. you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot.
-
"Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it."
You will be in for a rude awakening when the site triggers an algo penalty. I would be proactive and disavow the links. GWT lists links by date so routinely keep an eye on the recent links you get and disavow them. Also, pingback/comment links are generally nofollow - if that's the case, then it shouldn't trigger penalties.
-
I have had something similar done to my site. One of my competitors "targeted" our business for negative SEO. I noticed a bunch of spammy links pointing to our site with outright X-rated / vile anchor text. The good news is that we haven't seen a drop in traffic or rankings and it's been going on for a while now. Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it.
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 many links can you have on sitemap.html
we have a lot of pages that we want to create crawlable paths to. How many links are able to be crawled on 1 page for sitemap.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
What is really a bad link in 2017?
Hi, Routine answer is: A link which doesn't provides any value. Tired of listening to this statement where we can see number of back-links been generated with different scenarios. There are still many low DA websites which speaks exactly about a brand and link a brand naturally. So, is this a bad link or good link? Let's be honest here. No one gonna visit such pages and browse through our website; it's all about what it's been doing in-terms of SEO. Do these websites to be in disavow list? Beside the context how a brand been mentioned, what are the other metrics to disavow a domain? Expecting some real answers for this straight question. If it's a low DA site and speaking about exactly our website- Good or bad? Vice-versa...high DA website mentioned website with less matching content. What is the proportion of website authority and content context? Can we keep a medium DA backlinks with some Moz spam score?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Competitor Black Hat Link Building?
Hello big-brained Moz folks, We recently used Open Site Explorer to compile a list of inbound linking domains to one of our clients, alongside domains linking to a major competitor. This competitor, APBSpeakers.com, is dominating the search results with many #1 rankings for highly competitive phrases, even though their onsite SEO is downright weak. This competitor also has exponentially more links(602k vs. 2.4k) and way more content(indexed pages) reported than any of their competitors, which seems physically impossible to me. Linking root domains are shown as 667 compared to 170 for our client, who has been in business for 10+ years. Taking matters a step further, linking domains for this competitor include such authoritative domains as: Cnn.com TheGuardian.com PBS.org HuffingtonPost.com LATimes.com Time.com CBSNews.com NBCNews.com Princeton.edu People.com Sure, I can see getting a few high profile linking domains but the above seems HIGHLY suspicious to me. Upon further review, I searched CNN, The Guardian and PBS for all variations of this competitors name and domain name and found no immediate mentions of their name. I smell a rat and I suspect APB is using some sort behind-the-scenes programming to make these "links" happen, but I have no idea how. If this isn't the case, they must have a dedicated PR person with EXTREMELY strong connections to secure this links, but even this seems like a stretch. It's conceivable that APB is posting comments on all of the above sites, along with links, however, I was under the impression that all such posts were NoFollow and carried no link juice. Also, paid advertisements on the above sites should be NoFollow as well, right? Anyway, we're trying to get to the bottom of this issue and determine what's going on. If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom to help us compete with these seemingly Black Hat SEO tactics, I'd sure love to hear from you. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much. Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Submitting url to link directories seen as un-natural link building?
Hi I have been a lurker for a long time, so I finally took the step to make my 1st post, and will hopefully start giving back more in the future since I have gained invaluable info from this great site Background I hired a new freelancer on our team of SEO consultants ("specialists") During the course a month he (the new consultant) submitted our website to numerous link directories (he assured me this is good), today I received the report of the work he had been doing for the past 4-weeks. I opened the report and I was furious and wanted to sack him there and then The Problem / My Question He had submitted our website to 150 directories with various levels of page rank, ranging from 7-1. Most of the directories are totally irrelevant to our niche (we are in the catering business) and he had gone and submitted the site to directories such as "finance busters", "questfinder" etc For all 150 submissions he used: exactly the same url exactly the same title exactly the same description exactly the same keywords My Concern Am I right to be worried about this? Or am I completely wrong and may this actually have an effect (even if none)? The way I see it is that Google is seeing 150 duplicate links coming from irrelevant directories all within a months time, which will trigger a red flag and possibly do major damage to my site, which has always been strictly white hat and been doing pretty well. p.s does link directory submissions even count these days anyway? Thanks for reading and advice very much welcome
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | timthetanker0 -
Why should I reach out to webmasters before disavowing links?
Almost all the blogs, and Google themselves, tell us to reach out to webmasters and request the offending links be removed before using Google's Disavow tool. None of the blogs, nor Google, suggest why you "must" do this, it's time consuming and many webmasters don't care and don't act. Why is this a "required" thing to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RealSelf0 -
Some pages of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped crawling in Google
hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | unitedworld0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Partners and Customers logo listing and links
We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites. I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software. But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PerriCline0