Has your site ever been targeted by malicious link building executed by a competitor?
-
I'm pretty sure one of my client's sites has been targeted by malicious black hat link building tactics employed by a competitor site. Over the last few weeks we've gotten 100s of super low quality spammy backlinks. No one has been doing link building, so the only thing I can think of is that competitor entered our URL into some spammy backlink building sites.
Has anyone else experienced this?
It's the real estate industry, so I wouldn't be surprised considering how competitive it is, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
-
As I understand it Penguin is no longer penalizing sites for bad links but just devalues them/don't count them. So I imagine getting targeted by such methods by a competitor, or even acquiring questionable links from PBNs can't hurt you anymore, but just return 0 value?
-
Hi Justin,
Happy I could be of help. My personal favorite crawling tool is https://www.deepcrawl.com/ I know you can try it for free right now.
Screaming Frog is also an excellent tool I personally prefer the interface and capabilities on deepcrawl.
Monitoring backlinks via Ahrefs is a very comprehensive and good way to detect spam. Majestic is really the only one with the same reach but the most important is Google search console/Google Webmaster tools which is surprisingly very close to Moz OSE.
Ahrefs will definitely do the job.
One tool I should have also included is https://www.distilnetworks.com/ ( unparalleled bot detection) & https://www.stackpath.com/ a new WAF that starts at only $19 and offers MaxCDN's enterprise features like edge rules its price will probably go up but right now it's a steal.
I agree reading the disavow using Ahrefs is never a bad way to go however I've always submitted using Webmaster tools.
All the best,
Tom
-
Thanks!
-
Hi Justin,
I wouldn't be very concerned about a manual action tbh. If these links do fall under manual review, I am confident that the Webspam team will be able to identify these as a spam tactic against your website. I believe the manual action my old client experienced was more of an uncommon occurrence.
Normally, you would respond to the Webspam team via a reconsideration request after they have applied a manual action penalty (will receive message through Google Search Console). In terms of proactive options, you can report these as webspam to the Webspam Team through Google Search Console here. Unfortunately, doing so will not prevent new links such as these from being created.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Tom -
Thanks so much for your insight - and the tools you've recommended. I also experienced a hacked site in the past where new URLs were created on the client site for nike shoes and what not.
I will disavow for now, but agree - I need to add a crawl with the intention of uncovering those spam URLs in my technical audit process moving forward.
I detected the "attack" simply by monitoring backlinks via Ahrefs. I will disavow using same tool.
Again - your insight is appreciated!
-
Hi Joe -
Thanks for the insight. I agree that disavow is the best course forward, even if Google is devaluing them. A manual penalty is what I'm worried about. How do you directly let the Web Spam team know? I can monitor and continue to disavow, but this could continue to go on indefinitely.
-
I too have seen many clients, unfortunately.
They are targeted by competitors (most likely) sending both fake links for instance in one case a client has a travel site many of the backlinks that were clearly targeted to hurt the site, for instance, the competition / spammers would use the name of an authoritative travel site all they would do is change the TLD so example.com becomes example.co, even though they were tracking their backlinks they were simply looking at the URLs, not the authority of the URL or domain sadly, this is spam, was not detected immediately by the client until they were hit with a manual penalty.
That is when I was brought on and ran a check using Link Research Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic & Moz OSE. Checking for hacks sitecheck.sucuri.net is great & https://sucuri.net/website-security-platform/ to clean and protect.
The worse thing in their case they were not getting a lot of the clear spam that as Joe states above Google does not think anybody is crazy enough to include help their site. mainly Viagra/pornography URLs which I agree with him take Google devalues quickly however you should disavow them. in my experience, Viagra-style spam attacks are the work of a combination of both competitors & black hat SEO spam/hacks in the form of Link injection on hack's, database hack's, content injections and BlackHat SEO that spread the pornography URLs. Like if you look Fiverr at https://www.fiverr.com/gopo2k/provide-you-1-unregistered-domain-for-pbn-with-link-from-nytimes
In cases where the site is seemingly hit over and over again or use a tool like deepcrawl.com or screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider and find out that your database is full of URLs that have been created to spread for promote the spammers site. I always suggest using a web application firewall incapsula.com or sucuri.net ( CloudFare is really not as good until you hit the Pro plan)
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/08/cleaning-hijacked-google-seo-spam-results.html
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2011/04/link-injection-on-hacked-wordpress-sites-blackhat-seo-spam.html
- https://digwp.com/2009/06/spam-link-injection-hacked/
if you're on WordPress you can also save money by having a faster site on a managed wordpress host monitor and you will not have to pay to the fix hacks.
Hope this helps,
Tom
-
Hi Justin!
Yes, I have seen this with multiple clients before. One of my older clients (about 4 years ago now) actually received a manual action as a result. We were working with product reviewers at the time that would include a disclaimer and occasionally leave a link dofollow but we decided to focus on the low quality spam links first. Let the Web Spam team know that these were not our work and that we had no way to contact the webmasters to have them removed. The manual action was lifted a few days later.
I have a client now that also gets links such as these, someone is building thousands of spam links to their site using generic prescription 'pill' anchor text ("buy hydrocodone online", "generic viagra" etc). I have no idea who is doing it. I don't think it is having an impact and frankly shouldn't according to Google's claims with Penguin 4.0 being able to devalue such links. I do still add them to the disavow file to cover all bases though.
Do you feel this is impacting your organic performance?
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 Building where link building is dead. Latest tactics in a land of content.
Hello, What is your latest link building techniques considering manual link building is basically dead, and you should really build good content to drive results. Link building has really become less important. It seems to be much more 10X content now. What would you recommend for basic link building considering this besides the 50 first Links video by Rand, which is excellent. Thanks, Bob
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Spam Links sent to my site.
Hello, I'll try to be concise as I can. I run a coupon codes site.
Link Building | | affigroup
Today when I loggein in webmaster tools I noticed many new links to my website. And all to a single page. (mydomain.com/stores/companyname).
I tend to think that spam was made by the person who owns that company because he/she used achors related to his bussiness rather than the company name + coupon or company name + discounts. Besides the fact that these links have no value and created automatically by software there are also links from pornographic websites. (bet he paid someone on fiverr for link building and made my website tier 1) I was thinking of 2 options:
1. I remove that page from my website. (mydomain.com/stores/hiscompany) and use disallow. Not sure I can find all the links poiting to that page.
2. Redirect that page mydomain.com/stores/company to hiscompany.com so he can enjoy his spam. I would appreciate if someone can answer me.1 -
Link building during link removal
We were advised by out outsourced link removal vendor not to build any links while they are removing links pointing to our site. I am worried that our site will lose significant traffic if we dont build any new links while waiting for them to remove links that caused our site to be penalized. What are your thoughts?
Link Building | | WizardOfMoz0 -
Someone not removing a link to our site
Hi Mozzers, We recently worked with an SEO company that bought a few sitewide links without our permission which caused us to get a huge slap by the last panda/penguin update. We managed to remove most of the links except one site (The biggest one).
Link Building | | Ouzan
He simply doesn't reply to our emails etc... What should I do in such case? Thanks.0 -
Contests For Link Building?
I have been seeing a trend that a lot of people are hosting contests with prices in the high end XXX $ or low end XXXX $ as the first price. Usually it's arranged via a number of sponsors and you'd have to link to all the sponsors using the keywords given. Some people provide a text file with everything pre formatted to make it easy. I have seen several sites paying 50$ to be part of a contest so that they can get some link juice from participating sites. Since the prize money is huge, many people will participate and will get lot of links. There was a person who built an entire business out of this (Not naming him. He's still doing the same thing but with a small twist). What's your take on such strategies? Don't you think it's high time Google caught these sort of "link schemes"?
Link Building | | ConversionChamp0 -
Link-Building update in SEOmoz
Hello, I have been doing some link-building and Im worried because I still dont see those links pointing to my website in SEOmoz. How long it takes to see those links in SEOmoz? ( I started last wednesday) Tks in advance, Regards, Pedro Menezes Pereira
Link Building | | PedroM0 -
One client, one b2b site and one b2c site - linking relationship
I have a client that has 2 websites in a particular industry. The first website concentrates on advertising services and products to other organisations/companies but does not sell anything online. The second website is an ecommerce site with many products from the same industry and is more a b2c operation. Would it be considered ok to add maybe 5 footer links from one to the other and vice versa? considering that they are footer links and will ultimately increase total links pointing to both site exponentially. Both sites are hosted in the same location.
Link Building | | Gareth_Cartman0 -
Are 36 links from one site to nested pages better than one link to the root domain?
I have a Driving School website www.1stclassdriving.co.uk. The site is structured geographically with 36 area pages, one
Link Building | | Brian_Worger
page per area post code and one page per Driving Instructor. I am trying to develop links and have found a site (da91 pa
63) where I can create area links to each of my area pages if I
wish. Is it best to just create one link to the root page or
should I create 36 individual links to each area page? - which is most valuable?0