Competitors Building Bad Back Links
-
Hi there,
I recently checked the back links for my site using Open Site Explorer, and I noticed a huge number of bad back links which I believe a competitor might be building to help lower my ranking for a number of highly competitive keywords.
Besides spending time disavowing these links, what else can be done? Has anyone else been faced with the same problem?
Any help would be appreciated.
-
This might help: http://moz.com/blog/to-catch-a-spammer-uncovering-negative-seo
-
More than likely the company is using some source like fiverr to create the links. Pay a guy in another country to run a program for a few thousand back links. So there really is no going to the person and asking them to stop.
By chance do you know which competitor it is?
-
Hi Lesley,
Thanks for your answer.
We're in web design and web development, so it's completely unrelated. Very sly tactics.
So basically there isn't much we can do besides disavowing the links?
-
Really nothing else can be done. You can try to contact the sites and see if they can take them off, but that might take forever to actually do.
Just out of curiosity, I saw what anchor text they were using, what is your industry?
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
-
Want to remove a large amount of links from spam sites. SEO company says we will lose a lot of link juice?
Hi, We have a lot of links that have a spam score above 30% and 60%. I don't know if someone has spammed our website. However our SEO company has said we should remove these carefully over a period of 3 months while they add new good links. I don't quite trust this advice. Are they trying to get more business?? They have put doubt in our mind. Can anyone please shed any light on this?? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YvonneDupree0 -
Link Getting Deleted for Few Days
If a link gets deleted for few days and re-appears... Will Google treat it as a "new link" or give it the same old link-age.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Akshayshr0 -
Canonicalize vs Link Juice
I recently wrote (but have not published) a very comprehensive original article for my new website (which has pretty much no domain authority). I've been talking to the publisher of a very high Domain Authority site and they are interested in publishing it. The article will include 2-3 follow backlinks to my website. My question is should I: Repost the article in my own site and then request a "rel=canonical" from the high authority site Not re-post the article on my own site and just collect the link juice from the high authority site Which would be better for my overall SEO? Assume in case 1) that the high authority site would add a rel=canonical if I asked for it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke20 -
Domain authority - Low quality links
I have a question I hope people can help me on. it is my intention for my next project to focus on domain authority, and a small number of high quality links. I have a couple of scenarios I would appreciate some advice on: 1. Can lower quality links lower domain authority? 2. Would you avoid links from low quality sites no matter what \ what domain authority levels should you avoid links from. 3. Should I be looking at link profiles of the sites I get links from. Does it matter if a site I get a link from has 1000's of spammy links (i.e. something to look out for when doing guest blogging). 4. Should I avoid directories no matter what, or is high pr \ domain authority directories ok to use, if I end up on a page of other relevant directory submissions related to my niche. Essentially, my aim is to have high quality links, but equally, there are some decent sites on the fringes that I will need to consider (based on a competitors link profile I researches).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
Getting Back Links When I Cannot Add Outbound Links to My Site
I have a collection of websites that I do not control in terms of content or page creation/editing. As a result, I have no way to add links to outside sites on any existing or new pages. Given this, how can I go about finding and requesting other sites link back to our sites/pages if I cannot offer them a link to their site in return? I know that content is a link driver, but I do not control the content, so I cannot develop new content to help drive links. I appreciate any help/advice any experts can provide.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
Potential Implications of using the Disavow tool to remove thousands of links
So here's the situation. My companies site has over 30 thousand backlinks from Rippling.info These links all point to 3 product pages, some of which are no longer in production. Apparently a former employee was experimenting with some link farm ideas. My questions are; 1. does anyone here have experience with rippling.info? Is it legit? It seems like a link farm but Google allows adsense ads??? I thought Google was against link farms... 2. if I use the Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools to tell Google these 30k+ incoming links are to be ignored, will there be any consequences? -Google Analytics shows zero referral traffic since jan 1st 2012.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mjmorse0 -
External links in a global footer
My company runs a real estate site (http://yochicago.com) that features editorial blog and video content. In our footer, we feature links to some of our client sites. That footer is global, i.e., on every page of the site, of which there are thousands. One of our clients has been hit by Google for unnatural links. While I am very aware of them using a network of junk sites (http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-our-white-hat-links-get-a-bad-rap-when-they-re-alongside-junk-links-busted-by-panda), could we be contributing to the problem? Our site has the most links into the troubled site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mikescotty0 -
Linking Profile Gone Bad?!
Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links. It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam. Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tqinet0