Link Attack
-
Here is an interesting situation. Overnight SEOMoz is now reporting about 1.1 million new backlinks to my site.
The links look like they were added in March of 2011 and they are all on porn sites and link back to me with the words like "Indian Sex", "Sex Bathe", and "insex."
This appears to be yet another attack on my site and it looks like it happened right before the April Panda update that hosed me.
As an example of one of the pages you can look at seapotentialdifference.com/inurlife/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3081 and look for the link for Indian Sex. They linked to my forum and not the home page.
At the same time SEOMoz discovered these links my DA dropped from 62 to 58. I'm wondering if anyone thinks these issues are connected.
More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this? For some reason the PA and DA of the porn site pages is above 70.
This will probably be an ongoing battle for me since I am a journalist that covers the debt relief world and scammers don't like for me to expose them in an effort to protect consumers.
-
Apparently my company doesn't have websense blocking objectionable content
Nothing stated by this person here is true:
"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site. Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages. It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites. "
a) you absolutely can be penalized by the actions of others, it's just difficult and takes time and money and determination.
b) that's a PHP forum, it hasn't been hacked, the mod is just allowing anything and everything to be posted on there. Spammers sell link dumps to people who use throw away sites to spam for themselves, all of those peoples sites listed there paid a link builder to dump as many adult links as they can. It's incredibly cheap, you can get something like 4000 links for $20. It's totally automated using software. This throws you in the pool with many shady sites, I bet if I check those sites i'll see at least half of them are penalized.
see i just posted below all those links, it's just a crappy forum
Well Google makes it hard to contact them, don't use the paid link form. Contact them via reconsideration request in webmaster tools. Although it isn't a reconsideration request you're still talking to the people who have the power to forgive and manually reinclude sites who have been penalized.
-
Thanks. But here is the issue, contact who? The Google webmaster forum says there is nobody to specifically contact regarding these issues.
"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site. Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages. It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites. "
Do you have some special contact information to share?
-
If your forum wasn't so well established, I would say change the URL of the forum homepage and you'll instantly 404 all of those crappy links and your problem would be solved with one quick change.
Since that is not an option, the best thing you can do is to notify Google that you are being attacked by someone attempting to get you penalized. Email them once every couple of weeks with updated information, for instance if you see your incoming links number going up dramatically from the last time you emailed them point that out.
Basically, if you send Google enough messages they may listen and flip some switch or raise some incoming link spam threshold on your site (no one knows exactly what they do, but they can manually adjust things)
I think because of the nature of your site, it is not hard to convince Google that there are people out to sabotage you since you are exposing already shady people.
Be proactive, and make Google aware that this is not you doing this before they penalize your site. 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
-
Link juice from links that are not on the page?
Hello, Thank you in advance for your help! I was doing research for backlinking opportunities by looking at competitor backlinks using Open Site Explorer and I ran into a puzzle. When I do an Open Site Explorer search for http://whatsdavedoing.com/ I find that link equity is being passed to the site from a number of pages on the http://www.travelsupermarket.com/ blog with the anchor text "What's Dave Doing" When I go to these pages and do a source code search I cannot find this anchor text. When I do a google search with the following: site:travelsupermarket.com "What's Dave Doing" I find that there are tons of items that come back with a list of blogs in their description: "Dec 5, 2013 - ... foXnoMad · Inside The Travel Lab · itravelnet · The Mad Traveler Blog · The Mad Traveler Online · Uncornered Market · What's Dave Doing?" Where is this coming from? What is going on here? Is this a linking tactic that sites use to pass link juice to contributors without linking to them directly? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!
Competitive Research | | overlandundersea0 -
Via this intermediate link?
I'm doing some work on an ecommerce site for an electronics distributor and I've been seeing these "Via this intermediate link" notations from GWT under our "Links To Your Site" section. I understand how and why these notations would normally be displayed, however, these links are mainly coming from our direct competitors. Fearing that we might be a victim of a negative SEO attack, I looked into the situation and noticed that all of the links are from PDF's (technical data sheets) provided by the manufacturer that both we and our competitors use on our product detail pages. This still seems odd to me because, we download these pdf's and host them on our own site on our own servers under a completely different name (as I'm assuming our competitors do as well), yet, there still seems to be a connection between our sites through these PDF's. I've included a screenshot of some examples. Since we have thousands of SKU's on our site - with technical PDF's for nearly all of them - we're seeing a lot of links from competitors sites. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I'm just trying to understand the situation more clearly. Has anyone had any similar experiences or some information from Google that might explain what I'm seeing here? fpWvB5T
Competitive Research | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Tool for discovering outbound links?
I want to find a tool where I can put in a url: www.site.com and it will tell me all the people that site links to. If this is in the Moz tool set, then I apologize. I couldn't find it. I can only find tools that tell me who links to a site, but not the other way around. Thanks, Ruben
Competitive Research | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Why are my paid vendors not showing on our links?
We pay a hefty amount to site that claim to bring in leads. ie... Cars.com, Edmunds.com, Cargurus, and I also have my dCard (digital business cards) with links to our URL. Why aren't they showing on our PA or DA? Could it be our web host? We have on;y 2 options for web hosts per Acura (a compliance thing) Please help with any thoughts or answers to this. I see many other dealers with strong links who use the same companies. Our site is http://findlayacura.com and thank you for any help. We appreciate it greatly.
Competitive Research | | ModernPallets0 -
Rankings & Linking Root Domains
How are the Linking Root Domains under Keyword Rankings being found? We've noticed for many of our key terms that big brands like Amazon, eBay, Home Depot, etc. only list 1 linking root domain, while much smaller competitors in our industry have hundreds. Clearly big brands are going to get more links than a company most people haven't heard of and the idea that these companies only have 1 linking root domain to a specific subcategory on their site is not believable. What's going on here?
Competitive Research | | Kingof50 -
Why such a difference in external followed links details?
I love using seomoz and have done for a few years. I am no SEO expert, but like to think I can get away with making out I know what I'm on about! I use opensiteexplorer regualrly and usually enjoy delving deeper into it's metrics, but one thing is bothering me (before I start with this, please forgive me if I am missing something obvious - you may have to point it out in your answer!) So I run a comparison of a few sites and pay attention to the external followed links section. On checking this number at root domain level, company A has 12,666 external followed links. So I want to dig a little deeper as to the qulaity of those links and click along to the inbound links tab, here I select the following: "followed & 301" > "only external" > "all links to this root domain" > leaving the results ungrouped Downloading this table I only have results for 3,416 links - why such a big difference to the previous 12,666 or am I missing something here? Would just like a bit of clarification 🙂
Competitive Research | | iThinkMedia0 -
As anyone used this before the hoth for Links building???
http://www.thehoth.com Links building company Is it safe or waste of money
Competitive Research | | spidersite1 -
Important link building question for me!
Hi, When building backlinks how important is the location of where the website resides? For example, if I was targeting a search term in Google UK, will link building from websites hosted on UK servers have a higher positive impact on rankings then building links from websites hosted on US servers? Lets say in the above UK hosted is better, what if you have 2 websites hosted in the UK but one with .com and one with .co.uk, I take it from a domain point of view the .co.uk will have a better impact on SERP's then the .com. Now looking at the above from a more wider scale lets say I have the following: A .co.uk website aimed at a search term in Google UK. Example: 1. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the US with .com extension. 2. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the UK with .co.uk extension. Is it a FACT that number 2 will 100% be more beneficial in UK rankings? Cheers
Competitive Research | | activitysuper1