Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
-
Hi,
I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT.
Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s.
The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore?
The linking domains are listed below:
http://www.basalts.cn/
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/Thanks
Steve
-
Linda,
OK, thanks. Grateful to have another opinion on it. It seems like this site has suffered, but the rest of links look reasonable. However, the previous SEO done appears to have been link building with complete absence of keyword research and subsequent optimisation of pages, posts, etc.
Regards,
Steve
-
As strict as Google can be, I have never heard of them penalizing anyone for something bad they used to do (but didn't get caught at) and have now stopped doing. I think they reserve their penalties for current bad actions. [Which is not to say you were doing something bad--we are talking about your wanting to be sure that it doesn't appear to Google that you tried something bad.]
In general, I think it's best not to disavow unless it is an extreme situation. As Google itself says: "In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
-
Linda,
Thanks. It appears that the domains are all owned by the same / person entity and could it be that there is any legacy effect of having these links prior to 302?
Regards
Steve
-
Since the links are using 302 redirects they are not passing any link juice, so I can't imagine that you'd be penalized for them.
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
-
Too many dofollow links = penalty?
Hi. I currently have 150 backlinks, 90% of them are dofollow, while only 10% are nofollow. I recently hit position #10 for my main keyword, but now it is dropped to #16 and a lot of related keywords are gone. So I have a few questions: 1. Was my website penalized for having an unnatural backlink profile (too many dofollow links), or maybe this drop in positions is just a temporary, natural thing? 2. Isn’t it too late for making the backlink profile look more natural by building more nofollow backlinks and making it 50%/50%? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathalieBr0 -
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Exchange link from sites in same google account
Hi everyone, Anybody have experience when you have some websites which stored in Google Webmaster Tool and they exchange links between sites. So is it good for sites? We are hosted on different server. Thank you so much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jeepster0 -
How does Google determine if a link is paid or not?
We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content? This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Subtle On-site Factors That Could Cause a Penalty
It looks like we have the same penalties on more than one ecommerce site. What subtle on-site factors can contribute to non-manual penalty, specifically rankings slowly going down for all short tail keywords? And what does it take to pull yourself out of these penalties?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Which links should I remove?
What is your general approach when removing links for a new client? Just taken on some new work and found links that I wouldn't dream of building now (unrelated domain name, blogroll, single word, exact match anchor, dead sites). However some of these are brand anchor links, and some of the pages have decent Page Rank (2/3/4). Obviously I don't want to remove links that might actually be helping the site in a weird way. It would be good to get an idea of other peoples approach to link removal - what goes, what stays etc?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Trying to determine if my site was de-indexed...
I ran a search using the allinsite:floridainboundmarketing.com command and found that virtually all of my pages are not being returned in the results. I'm one of those who (foolishly) used ALN blog network for a few months, got the unnatural links notice in WMT and on advice of other SEOs (including some here) I ignored it based on the idea that if my SERPS dropped due to alog update that a request for reconsideration was of no value. As I watched my SERPs dropping I was confident that it was simply because those links were no longer being counted and overall link profile was poor, so the results started dropping. I've not read where G has gone back and started de-indexing pages for such sites but it may be happening as (unless I'm wrong) my site is gone... Anyone got any ideas? Am I searching correctly?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sdennison0