How/Why do I have so many Spam backlinks?
-
I was looking in GWT yesterday and found we have several thousand "spam" backlinks...I am curious why this happens and how this happens?
There are some links from websites/domains that are not mine that appear to be spam. However, we own a large group of domains and have noticed some of the links are coming from 2 of those sites/domains we own to my main site. The sites/domains are not active, we just own them. I am wondering how someone could access these domains that are not active and create spammy backlinks to my main website? (They created about 20,000 links).
Thanks.
-
I don't think so...We had owned the domains for several years and the bad links have just come up in webmaster tools recently.
-
Could it be possible that you are not the original owner of the domain and that in a former era the domain was once active and used for dodgy linking?
-
Thanks! No we haven't hired anyone to do any backlink building for us in the past which is why were really curious to know how one of our domains got hacked (loyaltyexpo-europe.com) which isn't even active and had made thousands and thousands of backlinks to our main site loyalty360.org.
-
Hi there
Have you done any link building in the past? Or have you had any SEO companies do work for you?
With the 2 sites that are linking to the other sites, are there footer links or site-wide links of any kind?
I would run through a backlink audit and look into removing any potentially spammy backlinks or disavowing.
If you feel your site has been hacked, you can look into this resource from Google about what you can do to remedy the situation.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals
Hey everyone.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheITOteam
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows. My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet? Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain? I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these1 -
How to find Spam Website?
Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami0 -
Backlink Question
I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4. According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed. Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is? Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Palmbourne0 -
Need help determining how toxic this backlinking is
Okay, so my company has an SEO company already. However, we're trying to get people internally cross-trained on SEO, so I've been selected to kind of do a crash-course in SEO and look at our site from a new perspective. We are in the process of getting our old site ported over to a new one we've also created on Wordpress. I've been doing a LOT of online research, but this is definitely a very new field for me. Here's our current site: www.cedrsolutions.com So, here's my question: While doing some SEO-optimizing automatic tests on our site, I came across some weird backlinks to one of our pages: http://www.cedrsolutions.com/dental-office-manual/ http://en.calameo.com/read/003415063525a885728e7 Here's the thing: We didn't make this. It looks HORRIBLE, the copy is gibberish, and it looks weird. Doing some more searching, I started finding stuff like this https://lessons.engrade.com/dentalofficemanual/1 http://pumosust.over-blog.com/2014/09/how-to-get-customized-dental-office-manuals-online.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egMonqa5eRo (???? I don't even understand how someone did this, the photo in the book is just the photo from our page) http://www.tuugo.in/Companies/cedr-hr-solutions/0150008267958#! http://www.webjam.com/dental_office_manual/$my_blog/2014/09/12/how_to_get_customized_dental_office_manuals_online Conservatively, I'd say there's at least 100 of these types of pages out there linking to us, maybe more Then I started finding comments on blogs http://blog.kenexa.com/hr-focus-on-increasing-revenue-not-just-managing-costs/ http://geekologie.com/2012/05/bad-ideas-boyfriend-visits-dentist-ex-da.php (some NSFW language on that one) So, my first thought is obviously "Okay, these are gibberish, over-optimized, and ALL of them are trying to bump our relevancy for something along the lines "Dental office manual" EDIT: I should also mention these links ALL just appeared out of thin air. A whole bunch in early July, and more in mid-September. They didn't just slowly accumulate. So (finally) here's my questions: 1. Did our current SEO company probably do this? The only thing they've mentioned before is that they were going to create some backlinks for us, with an assurance they'd be genuine links that would build Pagerank without getting us slapped by Google. 2. Am I correct in my opinion that these are toxic links that could get manual action taken against us by Google? I'm not sure how LIKELY it is (as again, there's only about 100 or so) but they seem to be violating multiple Google principles. With how often Google pushes out algorithm updates I feel like we could still get busted for this even if the links are like 6-7 months old and not sending us much traffic. I'm asking because I've been told to set up a conference call with the account manager at our current SEO place, and I want to know what I'm getting into. I might be wildly over-reacting about nothing, I might be kind of right but it's not that bad, or I might be 100% right and what they are doing is not cool at all, and could kill our SEO if we get busted by Google. I'm not sure which it is. Checking Google webmaster tools and analytics, I don't see any drops in organic traffic between July '14 and now, so I don't think we've been smacked by Google algorithm-wise. And there's no notice from Google of manual action being taken, or anything being wrong with our backlinks, so I'm fairly confident these links haven't hurt us at least as of today. I'm just worried going forward (especially when we finish the new site and submit it to Google to get crawled, the URLs will be the same) Sorry this was so long. I'm kind of nervous, honestly. On the one hand, these backlinks seem SUPER sketchy to me, but on the other hand, I don't KNOW any of this stuff. It sounds kind of ridiculous for me, someone with maybe 3 weeks of intense Google-education in SEO, to be questioning something a real, established SEO company is doing. I mean, I kind of have to assume they know better, right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CEDRSolutions1 -
The differences between XXX.domain.com and domain.com/XXX?
hi guys i would like to know which seo value is better? for example if i would put a link in xxx.domain.com or domain.com/XXX which one will give me a better seo value? does it give the same? assuming that domain.com have a huge PR RANK itself. why do people bother making XXX.domain.com instead? hope for clarification thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
Many sites added some excerpts of my Blog post and linking back ? Most of them are Spamy site !
Many sites added some excerpts of my Blog post and linking back ? Most of them are Spamy site ! Some are great blogs, but some blogs just copy some excerpts and link back to them - which i never approve. Will it affect my blog. i ask them to remove it. no use. !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Esaky0 -
Can you block backlinks from another domain
Wondering if this is somehow possible. A site got hacked and created a /data folder with hundreds of .php files that are web pages selling all sorts of stuff. We deleted the /data folder and blocked Google from indexing it. Just noticed in Webmaster Tools that the site has 35,000 backlinks from other sites that got hacked with the same way. Is there a way to block these sites? I am assuming there isn't, but wanted to see if anyone ran into the same problem. It is a wordpress site is that helps.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phatride0