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?
-
I'd like to add that there's a lovely Moz Academy video that covers this sort of competitive link analysis.
-
I would recommend taking a look at your historical referral data, to see what sites have sent traffic to this site historically that aren't anymore - that will give you an idea of where the links were that went away. Even if you can't get the old link back, you may be able to form a new relationship with those sites' owners, which could result in future link opportunities.
It sounds like, whatever the cause, the site has had a bunch of inbound links to it disappear. This is frustrating, but without knowing where the specific links were, it's going to be hard to get them back. I would focus on getting some new, high-quality, high-authority links to the site. Since you've got this new aggressive competitor, you could use Open Site Explorer to see where they're getting links from, and see if any of the sites that link to them would be good candidates for link outreach from your team as well.
-
The links are all pretty historic so there is no direct relationship and but we do not have a record of what the links were for this site.
Peter
-
Hi Domain Authority has plumeted and sessions that were running 20% up year on year are now down 50% year on year. There will be other factors but this is indicative.
-
The competitor should have no way to disavow links to your client's site. Even if they had somehow managed to disavow the links, the links themselves would still be in place. Have you checked the linking pages? Do they still exist? Can you tell why the links were removed? Do you have a good enough relationship with the owners of any of the linking sites to be able to reach out to them and see if you can get the links put back, or at least see why they were removed?
-
Have your rankings dropped as well ?
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
-
Should I 301 redirect my old site are just add a link to my new site
I used to offer design and web services on a site that is current blank (no content, no links). My questions is should I add a little bit of content, maybe a brief explanation with a link to my new site. Or should I just add 301 redirect. This is purely a question of what is better for SEO and ranking for my new site (not a branding question).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tyrell0 -
Outranked by link farm
Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
If I am getting links on competitor websites, is it safe to assume those competitors are doing this to hurt our SEO?
We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brits0 -
White hat link technique to banned domain
The question is: I have branddomain A (manually penalization by google, one year ago and after 4 consideration requests and more than 3/4 of links removed, stills banned) authority 42 And and new branddomain B (with fresh content created after penalization in the case of no recovery as it happen) authority 26 There are no links from A to B, both are now with same traffic but i want people that find me on domain A (partial penalized) to come to my new web brand. Both domains have same name, different extensión. So the question: Can i link with photo domain A to domain B, if i place nofollow and no ancor text on those linked photos. I want to have my traffic unified and i dont want to go against google guidelines
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Are back links from audio sites any good?
In light of G's view of links from directories and other sources I have heard that links for audio sites like soundcloud.com can be beneficial. Has anyone had any positive experiences building likes from sources like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
People buying links to their profiles on my site
As we have a major Penguin update looming in the background, I am looking for expert advice on how to deal with professionals buying into link programs whether they are doing it deliberately or not. Our site provides detailed profile information on hundreds of 1000's of professionals and some professionals apparently believed that buying into link program will lift their profile in the SERPS. About 10 professionals have paid shady link building companies to buy links to their profiles on our site. The biggest offender bought over 1,500 links to his profile. Aside from adding the known toxic links to our disavow file, what else can we do to avoid any link penalties? I can think of three distinct options and would love to hear feedback especially based on actual experience. Option 1. 404 the existing profile - "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith" and create a new URL "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith_1". Option 2. Keep the existing URL and fully rely on the disavow file. Contact the professionals and kindly ask them to stop buying links and to contact their link building companies to remove the links. Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | irvingw0 -
How to Remove Unwanted Links
I dropped like a rock in Google rankings on the 24<sup>th</sup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rdominey
of April. After having to become familiar with Google webmaster tools and doing
allot of investigating I discovered that there is a website www.siteloki.com that has 6,742 links to my website. I have
tried to contact siteloki with no response. I tracked them on Whois to an
office suite in LA called the building to find that the suite listed is the
building management suite. I have had
the following sent to them via email, their contact page and posted on their website
forum and still no reply: Please take action to remove all links to this website
immediately! I have been notified by my client that your website has a
malicious attack using links from www.siteloki.com
against www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com. My client did not solicit these links, pay for these links or authorize any
third party to build links for them. They just appeared. The links are even
pointing to my client’s old website (same url). This is a big problem and I
don’t understand why these links exist. There are currently 6,471 links from
your domain. Please remove these links immediately or we will consider legal
action against your company. We have contacted Google on the behalf of our
client and informed them of this malicious act. I expect to see these links
removed immediately! Regards, I have submitted the site in the malware reporting section
of webmasters tools. I have searched but cannot find any documentation on how
to block this type of attack. It seems that Google failed to provide any means
for an honest website owner following the rules to block this type of attack and
as a result we have been unjustly penalized by Google with a drop to the bottom
in our page ranking. I would appreciate ANY HELP in removing these links and getting the Siteloki website blocked from linking to my website? Any Ideas?0 -
Is it worthwhile to remove a large quantity of lesser quality links if you are able to do so easily?
So I've recently started working at a new company where I lead up their SEO efforts. In regards to link building I've discovered that a little over 75% of the anchor text on the links to the homepage (at least of the 10k SEOmoz provides) are non branded keywords. We don't appear to have any penalties, however, in my opinion we have what is an unnatural link profile for our homepage. As I investigated further I've noticed that a lot of these links (not all) are from irrelevant blogs where the link is found in the footer. (Clearly this was the result of some less than ideal get links quick strategy that was implemented in the past.) At first I was overwhelmed thinking that I'd have to try and contact these sites individually to see if I could get the link removed, however, I soon discovered that the site these links are actually linking to is not our domain, but is instead a domain that redirects to our site. So this brings me to my question: Should I remove the redirect from this other site to rid myself of these links. The white hat side of me strongly thinks this is a good step forward, however, a small part of me wonders what the ramifications would be. These types of redirects seem to account for a fairly high number of links, however what value that actually contribute is difficult to know. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Poindexter0