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
-
Thank you Barry. I took your advice and went to the Google Webmaster forum.
If anyone would like to track this question further, please check it out here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=47ea8f99d39f510d&hl=en
Thanks
-
First thing to do is head over to the webmaster central forums (though I'm not sure which is best; malware and hacked sites? A mod should help you) - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en - as being pre-emptive is about your only option here.
For the short term you'll probably see a decent boost in SEO traffic, but if you decide just to roll with it then if you do get penalised, you've little comeback. Although an old post, points one and two here should be of interest - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/learning-in-london-some-fantastic-material - specifically "Unless you can remove those external links (by whatever means neccessary) or become a major brand in your space (such that Google will overlook any past indisgressions), you're basically up a creek."
Now this generally refers to a site after it's penalised in some form, but realistically once you're caught it's going to be a bitch to remedy unless (even if?) you can prove you were trying to fix it.
You could try reporting all the sites for spam - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html - but I'm not sure if that would end up harming you as well. You could try contacting the webmasters that the links are on and asking them to remove ir (and any others on their network). You could try setting a redirect based on incoming referrer to state that this site is not authorised to link to you (shows you're actively trying to combat it at least).
But definitely try to get in touch with somebody on the official help forums for more advice.
-
I would imagine the best way to proceed is to find all the spammy links and contact the owners of those blogs to remove those links. I can't imagine penalties being applied to your site as I would think Google would just stop those links having any effect at all, though I am no expert on this.
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
-
Bad backlinks is it possible that Google is penalizing me?
Hi guys, since December I'm receiving thousands of bad backlinks from websites that copy my content and content from other websites. I also noticed a drop in the organic visits each month. Is it possible that Google is penalizing me for those backlinks? I know that I can ask the webmaster to remove the links but I don't believe that they will do. Look like it's a robot that does all this automatically. Should I use the Google disavow tool? Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
Check images below please.
Thanks! OjAFwgT mni5lke UPVp9bW0 -
Can I Use Meta NoIndex to Block Unwanted Links?
I have a forum thread on my site that is completely user generated, not spammy at all, but it is attracting about 45 backlinks from really spammy sites. Usually when this happens, the thread is created by a spammer and I just 404 it. But in this instance, the thread is completely legit, and I wouldn't want to 404 it because users could find it useful. If I add a meta noindex, nofollow tag to the header, will the spammy pagerank still be passed? How best can I protect myself from these low quality backlinks? I don't want to get slapped by Penguin! **Note: I cannot find contact information from the spam sites and it's in a foreign language.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TMI.com0 -
Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
This related to a previous question I had about satellite sites. I questioned the white-hativity of their strategy. Basically to increase the number of linking C blocks they created 100+ websites on different C blocks that link back to our main domain. The issue I see is that- the sites are 98% exactly the same in appearance and content. Only small paragraph is different on the homepage. the sites only have outbound links to our main domain, no in-bound links Is this a legit? I am not an SEO expert, but have receive awesome advice here. So thank you in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
Link Removal and Disavow - Is Page Rank a sign directory is okay with Google
Hi, Currently cleaning up a clients link profile in preparation for disavow file and I have reached the stage where I am undecided on some directories as I don't want to remove all links. Is Page Rank an indication that Google is okay with a particular directory? For example the following domain is questionable, but has a PR of 3. Do I need to consider scrapping all such links in anticipation of future updates? http://www.easyfinddirectory.com/shopping-and-services/clothing http://www.toplocallistings.co.uk/Apparel/West_Midlands/Shropshire/ Thanks in advance Andy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
Links from automated translations can damage the source?
I've a website dataprix.net composed by automated translations in diferent languages from original contents from another website, dataprix.com. Is good for dataprix.com to be linked by the contents of dataprix.net as the source of translated content, or could be considered by Google as a lot of low quality links and result on penalties for dataprix.com?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xiruca0 -
Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?
Hi all, I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages. These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs. I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs. Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it? Thanks in advance, Luke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Anchor text for internal links
there has been a lof of discussion on this forum and elsewhere about over optimized anchor text, partial match anchor text vs exact anchor text match, etc. I am wondering iwhether or not exact anchor text matches are good or bad for internal links? Does anyone have anythoughts, or better, any studies? Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0 -
Too many links with the same Anchor-text?
My first question at SeoMoz: Recently my gambling site has been experimenting a subtle yo-yo effect for our most sought-after keyword. A month ago we legitimately added a PR-6 inbound link with that keyword (tragamonedas) from an institutional site of our own development. We are worried that google might have regarded that move as an illegitimate link acquisition, since those apparent troubles with our keyword appear to have started right after that link was processed. Is it too late to change the anchor text, in case that action might deliver positive results? Also, we might have focused too much on the very same keyword in our link building campaign. Can a constant repetition of the same anchor harm our indexing reputation? Thank you in advance and good SEO luck, Andi.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | castano0