What do I do with these back links?
-
In the last two weeks, I've got 10 pingbacks from this http://caraccidentlawyer.cc/coroner-ids-berkeley-bodies-who-were-killed-in-recent-car-accident/ and sites like it. The featured attorney is a competitor of ours and, since the links aren't sex/drugs/rock&roll related, (and he's linked too) I doubt this is a negative SEO campaign, but I want it to stop. These blogs are basically pure spam. Any suggestions?
-
Any time! It's definitely wise to err on the side of caution. If you ever want to chew the fat on SEO/digital stuff I'd be happy to help.
-
Thank you very much. I'm still new, so I get nervous. I really appreciate you taking the effort to explain this in such detail.
-
Great answer, Tom.
-
Hi Ruben
This looks to me to be an auto-scraper and trackback tool. It's pretty primitive and useless, by all accounts.
The bad news is that there's very little you can do to prevent it, other than contacting the person themselves and asking them to look into the issue.
The good news is that I'm very confident that this will be having no negative effect on your site. As is the case in the web, blogs and tools exist like this and work away on literally millions of sites. I have no doubt that the algorithm takes this into account and simply devalues/ignores any of these kind of links. With the pingbacks being so little, it certainly won't be having an affect.
If it was nearing the hundreds of thousands, it may become an issue - and so my advice to you would be to make a weekly note of these kind of links and if/when they appear. Save the URLs away in a spreadsheet and should they become very large in numbers, add them to a disavow file and submit that to Google. Just this week we've had Matt Cutts encourage the use of pre-empting bad links and negative SEO attacks by submitting a disavow file, even if you haven't received a warning/penalty or any ill-effects.
I don't think this is anywhere near the stage where you need to concern yourself with that, but in order to be future-proof, make a note now and weekly as you go along. Only if the links started being really big in numbers (10,000+) would I look at submitting a disavow file. But I'd be pretty confident that you won't have the need to do this.
Hope this helps ease your concerns a bit.
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
-
Internal link structure for my loan website
Hi folks. I own a Norwegian consumer loan/financing website, which has been monetized with links. I've created various silos for my content, according to what I believe is most relevant to the user.
Technical SEO | | llevy
However, as a result each article now has a sidebar list, which in turn links to all other articles within the same category (silo). As you can see here, it has about 30 links in the sidebar: forbrukslån.no/beste-lån. With 30 articles in a silo, that corresponds to over 900 internal links, in just one silo alone. I wonder if this could be hurting me SEO wise? I know G cares a lot about relevance and user experience. So I have a feeling it could be interpreted as spammy. Reason I did this in the first place, is that the header links are also being repeated on all pages, without any issue. T4FHxHw0 -
Unnatural Links on Forum Posts
Google responds to my reconsideration request. They give me like 2 links of the many unnatural links which are actually people mentioning our website in their conversation. How can that be unnatural, legitimate people discussing about our website services? Even if it's unnatural, how can I possibly remove a backlink from a forum post?
Technical SEO | | Droidman860 -
Is this duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content?
Hello, My question is: Is it duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content? For example, here is the original page: http://www.saugstrup.org/en-ny-content-marketing-case-infografik/. But that same content can be found here: http://www.kommunikationsforum.dk/anders-saugstrup/blog/en-ny-content-marketing-case-til-dig, but there is a link back to the original content. Is it still duplicate content? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JoLindahl912 -
Paid outbound links - do they have juice?
Hi, A client is asking about a website that has a business model I don't normally work with - it's a site full of very informative articles - no harm there - and they are sponsored by companies who provide the service being discussed. Not really any harm there. But attached to the link is an outbound tracking device. The business model is pay per click. Has anyone had experience with this, specifically if larger search engines have picked up on this and filtered out those types of links to not count very much if at all? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lilactree0 -
No-follow links on advertising pages
Hi I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site. These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow? From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information. I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for. What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow? I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CelestialChook0 -
How Does Link Juice Pass?
Say there is a link on an authoritative site to my site, and the link points to www.mysite.com. However, I have set all URL variations (https://mysite.com, www.mysite.com, mysite.com, etc.) to redirect to http://mysite.com automatically. Does the link juice from this authoritative site pass through the www.mysite.com URL to http://mysite.com automatically due to the automatic redirect? I guess my question is does the link juice automatically pass on to the destination URL, even though it is not the original URL the authoritative site pointed to?
Technical SEO | | NiallTom0 -
Are multiple links devalued on the same domain?
I'm in negotiations to get links placed on a popular blog with good stats. I'm allowed to pick older posts on the site, and I get to pick the anchor text. Is it best practice to diversify the links by having different keywords pointing to different pages or am I better off pointing as many links as I can at one page (varying anchor text)? Also, is it best to pick a more recent blog post, or is it ok to pick one from say, 2009?
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Any value in external links to image files?
Let's say you have www.example.com. On this website, you have www.example.com/example-image.jpg. When someone links externally to this image - like below... { is < {a href="www.example.com/example-image.jpg"} {img src="www.example.com/example-image.jpg"} {/a} The external site would be using the image hosted on your site, but the image is also linked back to the same image file on your site. Does this have any value even though the link is back to the image file and not the website? Also - how much value do you guys feel image links have in relation to tech links? In terms of passing link juice and adding to a natural link profile. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw1