Thousands of links - Am I being sabatoged?!
-
It seems that I am being sabatoged. I have been disavowing links every month because there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site and I'm not doing ANYTHING to allow that to happen. Does anyone have any insight?
A. do you think I am being sabatoged?
B. Is there a way to find out who is doing it?!
-
Most likely not. The links may have been created by a 3rd-party bot, a Fiverr project, or something similar that can't be easily traced. The only thing left to do is ask yourself who benefits from the negative SEO attack. Even so, that's likely a large pool of search competitors.
-
It's possible that you are being sabotaged. I've only looked at backlinks in Open Site Explorer, but I noticed a trend. Most of the questionable links appear to be pingbacks on the other websites.
Someone else may have insight as to why this is happening. It looks like pingback spam on the other websites. The question is why your site is part of that spam. I don't know how you would find out who's doing it.
Fortunately, they appear to be nofollow links, so they won't have a negative effect on your site. You may simply have to remain vigilant with your backlink analyses.
-
Yes, please share the URL.
-
Hi Veebs! Did Laura answer your question? If so, please mark one or both of her responses as a "Good Answer." Otherwise, we'd love to get an update on this! Have you learned anything more?
-
When you say "there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site," do you mean the links are actually on your site? Like blog comments?
You can scan your site at https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/. There are others as well, but it's a good idea to have a web developer actually look at the files on your server as well. Scanners don't always see everything. If your site is a WordPress site, you can install and scan for malware using the Wordfence plugin. (Note: Some hosts, like WP Engine, don't allow the Wordfence plugin.)
If you don't want to share your domain name publicly, you can send it to me in a private message and I'll take a look.
-
Are the backlinks pointing to actual pages on your website? I have seen cases where there was malware on a site that created new pages the site owner couldn't see. Then hundreds of backlinks were created that point to the malware pages. You may want to scan your site for malware.
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
-
Disappearing Links Black Hat ?
I have seen reports of Black hat spamming with dodgy links but we have another issue with a clients site. The site had a small number of solid following links about 60 which had been in place for years and in the past few weeks all but those directly under their control have ceased to link. At the same time a very aggressive competitor has entered their market which is owned by the officers of an SEO company. Could it be that they have somehow disavowed the links to the site to damage it how do we find out? there are now just 10 following links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
How Can I Safely Establish Homepage Relevancy With Internal Keyword Links?
My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages. However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about. One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking. I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks. Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage? There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.) Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword? I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | osaka730 -
Backlink, how to delete or find who is linking to me?
Hi there guys, Can someone tell me how I go about finding who is linking to my site or how to find backlinks to my site and if it is a spam site or a site I don't know or want linking to me, how to stop them from linking to me and also how to delete their link? Thanks appreciate the time Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Is it ok to ask for a non reciprocal link
hey guys, got mini discussion question. With rapgenius.com getting penalized today, it raises some questions about linking. What they did is definitely not ok. A link scheme involving their own affiliate network is against Google guidelines for sure. So is it ok to ask for a non reciprocal link if there is no incentive involved and no money changes hands? ie. Someone writes an article related to your article topic, or they reference you without a link. Then uou email the webmaster requesting a link... They add it. Is this against the guidelines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anti-Alex0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
It's not link buying, but...
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow. You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Spammy Links (from .ru) pointing to my domain! How to deal with it?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce store - I am just looking at the apache logs and I am finding a lot of spammy links that have been referrers to our pages - when I check the links, I cannot find our URL in an HREF on their page so I presume they may be using some country based cloaking? These are the domains that are targeting specific pages on our site:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
http://3xru.ru/
http://saldoconsult.ru/
http://euro-casino.ru/casino/
http://delaymoney.maroderi.ru/
http://intimhot.ru/ How to deal with this? Our site is about cookware and they seem to be pointing these links to very specific products and categories. Never seen anything like this before, help would be appreciated. Thanks, B0 -
Can someone explain how a site with no DA, links or MozTrust, MozRank can rank #1 in the SERPs?
I do SEO for a legal site in the UK and one of the keywords I'm targeting is 'Criminal Defence Solicitors'. If you search this term in Google.co.uk this site comes top www.cdsolicitors.co.uk, yet in my mozbar it has 0 links, 0 DA etc, I noticed it top a few weeks ago and thought something spammy was going on; I thought if I was patient, Google would remove it, however it still hasn't. Can someone explain how it is top in the SERPs? I've never seen this before. thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TobiasM0