Published Articles + Spam Links
-
Can you be a victim of your own success?
So your write a quality article on your website. You educate your audience and hope quality trusted authority sites will link back to your article. Great, all those plus points adding to your SEO.
On the down side you get poor quality sites with no real SEO value linking to your article.My Question Is This: What impact will poor quality sites have on your SEO?
What impact will changing the Anchor Text to something unrelated to the article content have on SEO?
Are there any other considerations?
Thanks Mark -
I agree with Devanur. Just about every site get's scraped and has other poor links to it. Google knows this. They are looking for a pattern indicating intent to manipulate the rankings.
-
Hi Mark,
You have a valid concern here. While we cannot control everyone who links to us, we can take good care that we do not exchange or plant links on web properties that can devalue our website's reputation online. Here I think, the intention is what matters the most. If you do not intentionally build low quality links to your website, you should be in a good shape most of the time.
Having that said, there have been few instances where websites were penalized for something that they never intended to do but, this is very rare. Google can recognize the link building patterns that are intended to manipulate the search rankings. The best thing that we can do is, do the good work by publishing quality content, never get involved in spammy techniques. We don't need to worry much about something that is out of our control. But if you feel that someone is linking to your website and which might have a negative impact on your rankings, you can approach the other party and try to have the link removed and may God forbid, if your site gets penalized for spammy links, you can use the disavow tool and take it from there.
Most of the time, out of my personal experience, if you do not do anything bad intentionally, you won't go down. Just my two cents.
Wish you good luck.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Analyzing a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages on Magento and not getting much organic traffic to level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: Primary Keyword Target: BODY MOISTURISERS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/bath-body/moisturisers.html Primary Keyword Target: LIP MASKS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/masks/lip-masks.html Plus another 40 other URLs at level 3 with low organic performance. Authority of the domain is strong, so it's not an authority issue I believe its internal linking. Besides linking form the blog and breadcrumbs is there anything we can do to improve internal linking to these level 3 pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Multiple Instances of the Same Article
Hi, I'm having a problem I cannot solve about duplicate article postings. As you will see from the attached images, I have a page with multiple variants of the same URL in google index and as well as duplicate title tag in the search console of webmasters tools. Its been several months I have been using canonical meta tags to resolve the issue, aka declare all variants to point to a single URL, however the problem remains. Its not just old articles that stay like that, even new articles show the same behaviour right when they are published even thought they are presented correctly with canonical links and sitemap as you will see from the example bellow. Example URLs of the attached Image All URLs belonging to the same article ID, have the same canonical link inside the html head. Also because I have a separate mobile site, I also include in every desktop URL an "alternate" link to the mobile site. At the Mobile Version of the Site, I have another canonical link, pointing back to the original Desktop URL. So the mobile site article version also has Now, when it comes to the xml sitemap, I pass only the canonical URL and none of the other possible variants (to avoid multiple indexing), and I also point to the mobile version of the article.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
<url><loc>http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=1300357</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://mobile.neakriti.gr/fullarticle.php?docid=1300357"><lastmod>2016-02-20T21:44:05Z</lastmod>
<priority>0.6</priority>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
image:imageimage:lochttp://www.neakriti.gr/NewsASSET/neakriti-news-image.aspx?Doc=1300297</image:loc>
image:titleΟΦΗ</image:title></image:image></xhtml:link></url> The above Sitemap snippet Source: http://www.neakriti.gr/WebServices/sitemap.aspx?&year=2016&month=2
The main sitemap of the website: http://www.neakriti.gr/WebServices/sitemap-index.aspx Despite my efforts you see that webmasters tools reports three variants for the desktop URL, and google search reports 4 URLs (3 different desktop variant urls and the mobile url). I get this when I type the article code to see if what is indexed in google search: site:neakriti.gr 1300297 So far I believe I have done all I could in order to resolve the issue by addressing canonical links and alternate links, as well as correct sitemap.xml entry. I don't know what else to do... This was done several months ago and there is absolutelly no improvement. Here is a more recent example of an article added 5 days ago (10-April-2016), just type
site:neakriti.gr 1300357
at google search and you will see the variants of the same article in google cache. Open the google cached page, and you will see the cached pages contain canonical link, but google doesn't obey the direction given there. Please help! duplicate-articles.jpg duplicate-articles-in-index.jpg0 -
Own Domains shown as Spam Links in Open Site Explorer
Hi ! I have 7 Domains that I bought that point to the same webspace as my main domain. In Open Site Explorer they are showed as spam links. So to solve the issue I redirected the links to an empty subdirectory on the same server which is different from the directory the main domain is linking to. But nevertheless the domains are still showing up as spam. Why might that be? What can I do to get rid of these domains? In fact I only need the main domain. Cheers, Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Link from Google.com
Hi guys I've just seen a website get a link from Google's Webmaster Snippet testing tool. Basically, they've linked to a results page for their own website test. Here's an example of what this would look like for a result on my website. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.impression.co.uk There's a meta nofollow, but I just wondered what everyone's take is on Trust, etc, passing down? (Don't worry, I'm not encouraging people to go out spamming links to results pages!) Looking forward to some interesting responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Bad links
Well just set up SEO Moz to find out someone thought it funny to build a load of links to our site http://bluetea.com.au/ with the anchor txt "Buy Cocks" .... PLEASE PLEASE let me know how much I should worry about this and how can I get rid of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intrested0 -
Link Building Tactics for 2012?
Hi all! Happy New Year! Just wanted to pop in here and start a discussion to see what are some of the most effective link building techniques you'll be using for 2012? -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan1