Is one of my competitors trying to get my site penalized?
-
Hi guys, I have been ranking #2 for a popular search term for several months now, and today I noticed a drop to #5, so I went to check my backlink profile, and I'm seeing thousands of no-follow exact keyword matched backlinks, all from spammy looking websites. I looked at some of the links and they do link to me, but I didn't generate these links, and I have never paid anybody externally to build links for me.
What is the best course of action for me here? link disavow tool?
-
Damn... this is always a horrible thing and the most frustrating aspect about this is that there is no effective solution that can help to protect anybody in advance from such black hat techniques... sorry to say that but this is a development which becomes more and more common... wish you the all the best!
-
Turns out the person built over 25000 links in a matter of 2 weeks. Pains me to think there are so called marketers that resort to these kinds of tactics. Thanks for the input @mrcensorius
-
That
s right - you already mentioned to use the disavow tool for those links. I don
t think that there is any other useful possibility to get rid of them.Theoretically you can write to the webmasters of these sites but this is not very practicable or helpful.
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
-
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
Ecommerce sites we own have similar products, is this OK?
Hello, In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche. The product descriptions are different with different product names. Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site. Let me know if Google is OK with this. We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog. Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
How did I get over 1000 backlinks in less then a month? help?
Hi Guys I'm a newbie and just started my website, im wondering if im reading this correctly, i use a tool called my seo tools and its telling me my website zenory.co.nz has over 1600 backlinks, this is scary since the site is only 5months old and i didn't see this till at least today and i check my sites backlinks on a regular basis. However when I check with moz it says I only have 2? I'm a little confused. Any advice here? Much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Whether to use new domain or old ecommerce site domain that has been incomplete for a long time.
Hello, We are starting a second store in our niche. Which of the following should I choose: A. We have a site from a year and a half ago that we put content on but never actually added products. The category and article content needs to be completely rewritten. We will completely rewrite the content to be much better and up to date. We're planning on adding products and rewriting the manufacturer descriptions. B. We could use a new domain that is closer to exact match for our main keyword. We'd just buy one for $15 I don't know whether A or B would be the fastest way to get the site going. I'm concerned that leaving a site half done for a year could cause an issue, but I really don't know. If you've got experience with this, please advise. Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Do searchs bot understand SEF and non SEF url as the same ones ?
I've jsut realized that since almost for ever I use to code first my website using the non sef for internal linkings. It's very convenient as I'm sure that what ever will be the final url the link will always be good. ex: website.com/component1/id=1 Before releasing the website I use extensions to make the url user friendly according the choosen strategy. ex: website.com/component1/id=1 -> website.com/article1.html But I just wondered if google consider both urls as the same ones or if it consider just as a 301 redirection. What do you think is the best to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AymanH0 -
Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!
I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having. I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY. What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS. My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail. At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name. I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time. i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords. So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May. I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail. I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation. Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites
A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market. My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!). This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty. Ideas? Thoughts? All help appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
Should this site be punished?
Every summer for the past 4 years one of our customer's competitors suddenly has a big jump in Google's (.co.uk) rankings for some of the main industry phrases, particularly "air conditioning". We were always under the impression that they bought links before the busy summer season, as they have these strange massive jumps in the rankings. (for the rest of the year they often drop down) I recently checked out some of the back-links going to their site and noticed something I'd not seen before. Of the (approx) 480 links that showed up, around 80% of the SourceURL's ended with "?Action=Webring" (see 1st attached image). To me it doesn't look natural at all and I'm surprised that Google hasn't picked up on. Their site is www.aircon247.com. It had been mentioned to me that this may be to do with link sharing sites (which I assume is black-hat) but I'm not 100% sure that they are doing this. They also have an identical long spammy-looking footer at the bottom of every page which is clearly only for search engines to see. We reported it to Google a year ago but no action was taken. Do you think that it is acceptable to have it on every page? (see 2nd attached image) I would be interested to know your thoughts on both of these, and whether this would be a dangerous tactic to try and emulate? Gc5MU.png iXGA9.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | trickshotric0