What is Happening to Me?!

[jesse-landry]

Okay so this morning I logged into webmaster tools and saw this notice of manual penalty for "unnatural links" affecting "some incoming links." (see attached photo) This is a different notification than I've seen before.

Keep in mind this website had been building unnatural links up until I took over in December of 2012. I have since cleaned up a TON of them and thought I was making progress... Until this morning that is.

So the next thing I did was head over to the incoming links in GWT. What I saw here shocked me. Whereas the last time I checked (maybe 2 days ago) we had approx 6,000 links we now had 195,565 !!! WTF?!?! Okay so somebody is screwing with us, right?

But here's the real confusion: I can't find any of these links anywhere else other than GWT. As you can see on the other attachment I have included, Google is reporting some 39,000 links from a domain called "itbriefing.net" however when I search this domain I find absolutely zero of these links. There are a few mentions of our brand but not one single link.

Also, looking through ahrefs.com and OSE I don't see any of the data that GWT is reporting here; everything looks normal to me.

Now isn't GWT the last to report all of these changes? What could possibly be happening here? Am I losing my mind?

We are still being indexed although I've been frustrated trying to get one of our main keywords to re-rank. This was one that had the most poison links built over the years so recently I gave up and changed the URL of the page completely sans redirect. This worked, and GWT reported a ton of lost links (99% of which were poison and the other 1% of which I regained with the new URL).

But now this.

Is this a GWT fluke? Am I under attack? What is going on.. Please weigh in on this one as I'm baffled.

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[CleverPhD]

Good to hear.  Does lend support to the trend that GWT link data can be slow to update and in this case even go off the rails.

[jesse-landry]

Either way I hope this thread helps somebody else in the future. I should have titled it differently to make it searchable in Google. But there's some great advice from yous guys here...

Onwards!

[jesse-landry]

No it did not. I was pretty sure those were unrelated though. This is a site that had a ton of blackhat links purchased about 9 months ago and I've been fighting them for ...well, 9 months. So I'm not too surprised by that although when I started there were about 6,000 links so I've gotten rid of a good 3,500 poison links so far.

My rankings haven't been hurt at all and the warning says it is taking action only on the links in question so I'm thinking it's actually a good thing and it's helping... not sure I'll keep watching.

Thanks again!

[Carson-Ward]

Glad to hear it! Did the warning in WMT also disappear?

[jesse-landry]

Good Bizarre News Everybody (or maybe just me!)

This morning I'm back to a normal amount of links displaying in GWT. What once displayed 196,000 links now shows a more accurate 2,400.

No explanation, no ranking changes. Just gone now.

Thus closes one of the more bizarre chapters in my SEO career. I will forever wonder if this has happened to anyone else. Either way I'm glad they're gone.

Thanks for all the support and help in this. Glad it's over!!

[jesse-landry]

Interesting thanks for that info..

I've dug into all of these URLs and yeah I noticed that they were referrals as well.. tried to get into any/all of them and have yet to find even one with a link to our domain.

3 days later and I'm still baffled. Haven't seen these links show up on any other reports (ahrefs, OSE)

The good news is I haven't seen any of my rankings hurt yet either.

[CleverPhD]

I had "via this intermediate link" when I had a link from another website to an old URL that I had a 301 redirect to the new URL.   The link was credited in GWT to the new URL.   I had a bunch of links that were being caught by a default 301 to a main directory.  I used the "via intermediate URL" to then find what old URLs still had links and then change the 301s for those specific old URLs to more appropriate URLs on my site.

Run those intermediate links through your browser etc and see if that tells you anything. What is strange is that the parameter in the URL is another URL.  You may want to check those out too separately.

[jesse-landry]

something happened and my last post didn't go i'll try again..

So this morning these links are all still showing in GWT and nowhere else. They don't show up when I download the latest links CSV... But when I go to the links in GWT I see this "via intermediate URL" thing.. Does anybody know what that means? Here's what it looks like: http://gyazo.com/13f45a6978ee9bfbab046cfb74cebc2f.png

[jesse-landry]

Thank you Carson!! You're awesome.

[Carson-Ward]

Updated to "discussion"

[CleverPhD]

Maybe the Moz folks can change this from a "question" to an "ongoing discussion"?  Not sure if that is possible.  Thanks for the updates Jesse.

[jesse-landry]

Thank you this is helpful.

Although I wish this thread wasn't marked "Answered" as nothing has been answered here... I'm looking through as Googlebot and seeing nothing different. I'm going to wait a few days and see if this changes.

But if it does not I would like the "Answered" marking removed so that others will be more likely to contribute advice.

I do appreciate all of the advice given so far, however. Thank you for that.

[Carson-Ward]

The good news is that so far action has been taken on the unnatural links and not on your site. It's worth figuring out what's happening, but Google does try - usually successfully - to avoid penalties for things you aren't responsible for.

The suggestion to inspect as Googlebot is a good one. I use this for Firefox:

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

For some reason I had problems with the Chrome UA switcher.

[jesse-landry]

This is very helpful, thanks Clever. I'll keep you posted on what I find.

[CleverPhD]

The annual price you pay to Screaming Frog is worth it.  Considering your situation, I would just go ahead a buy it.

As far as browser plugins for user agen switching the plugin I use in FF is

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

and Chrome is

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher/ffhkkpnppgnfaobgihpdblnhmmbodake/reviews

These are not spidering programs per se, they change what user agent your browser shows to web servers so you can see what they show.  You can also use this to emulate an iPhone and see what your mobile site looks like for testing.

It may or may not be that these other sites are hacked, I am just saying, if you want to see how Google sees these sites, it may be instructive to figuring out your issue.

[jesse-landry]

Oh and to answer your first question, no our traffic data looks identical to average.

[jesse-landry]

Interesting. So I don't have a licensed version of Screaming Frog which means I can't change the user agent.

You say you used a plug-in to spider sites as a Google bot with Chrome? Can you direct me to this plugin?

Would it be plausible for these types of cloaking links to be sunk into sites like yahoo, cnbc, etc? Seems odd... Or as a "hack" how does it work.. if our server was hacked how would it report backlinks from other domains. Oh man my brain is fried already and it's only 9:22am

[CleverPhD]

FWAP!  (sound of virtual slap)

Wow, this does sound like a nightmare.  Are you seeing changes in traffic?  I would wait a few days to see if it sticks.   It seems that there is a disavow in your future with a reconsideration.  I would document, document, document as this will make both the disavow and reconsideration more effective so that when your stuff is reviewed Google can dip into it.

Have you tried screaming frog on any of the domains.  One key point is to set the user agent to Google Bot - the sites may show something different to bots than to people

I had a site hacked once.  Screaming frog picked up the links, but you would not see them when you went on the site.  I changed the user agent in my browser (using plug in) and boom they were there.  So the site was not only hacked, but was effectively cloaking.  It may be what happened to these other sites and why Google sees them and you don't.  Luckily in my case we caught it pretty fast and got rid of it.  One other point, we were load balancing servers on this site and only one of the servers was infected.  So even as a bot, you only saw the links sometimes.  It made it trickier to find, but point being, you may want to check these sites a couple different times as well.

[jesse-landry]

Yeah I use tools like that on Chrome and also the moz bundle of tools. Literally haven't found one single page reported in GWT that actually contains a link to my site.

I keep thinking I'm still in some sort of bad dream this morning and any minute I'll wake up in my bed. Don't imagine one of yous guys can give me a virtual slap in the face, can ya?!

[PremioOscar]

That's interesting!

Try to use tools such as check my links on google chrome, it highlights every link that s on a page. Moreover it is a bit weird that other tools don't show it.

I did experience sometimes that GWT sent me messages with one week later.

Two weeks ago my site was down due to server problems and it reported this week.

What you could do wait another day and see if those links come up on other tools, and I'd start worrying if the site has been hit.

[jesse-landry]

Hi Oscar,

Thanks for the response. I agree that display ads shouldn't do this I just can't figure out what else would cause it. I've certainly never seen anything like it. I've gone through about 50-60 of the URLs reporting links in GWT now and not a single one of them have any links to my domain. I can confirm this easily by viewing source and searching for our domain within. Nothing...

Some of the URLs are actually print versions of news articles that don't have any links at all on them.

What in the world.. This has to be a fluke. Perhaps the manual action notice is unrelated and this will go away? I don't even know where to begin with this..

As I said, no other tool is reporting these links, only GWT..>!

[onlinechester]

I also had a similar problem with embedded links too! I think this might be where the problem lies.

[PremioOscar]

I don't think that display ads will generate links otherwise everyone should receive tons of links from it.

what I suggest you to do is to check each link and look at everything, I had a similar problems and it took me ages to find the links which were embedded within the images.

[jesse-landry]

I just downloaded the "latest links" CSV report from GWT and it gave me a ton of domains reporting links to my domain... But when I go to these URLs there are no links to my domain. They are like, news articles on CNBC about NASDAQ activity and the such..

I'm wondering if my AdWords Display campaign has anything to do with this? The only consistency I'm seeing in these links is that there are display ads (haven't seen one of my own on there but surely the potential exists)...

I recently separated our Display & Search campaign and made a Display ad separate to our regular search ads.. Do you think this could have something to do with it? If so, WHY!? Why would these count as links in GWT?