Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
-
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content.
Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx
A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs.
I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing.
Questions:
1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task.
2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better?
3. Any other thoughts or suggestions?
Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question.
Mark
-
thanks, Alex. You make some good points.
-
1. I don't think it will, Google has got very good at ignoring these spammy sites. Creating large disavow lists isn't technically that hard, but I don't think I would spend the time doing it seeing as you haven't seen any impact.
2. I don't think either of the response codes you're returning are appropriate.
403 for the indicates that the client doesn't have permissions and therefore it could be inferred that the file does actually exist and therefore the link is valid, which is definitely not something you would want Google to think.
While you have disavowed the links you are 302'ing, I still don't think 302 is the right response. For a start, 302 has been superceded now anyway, but 302 indicated moved temporarily. That is certainly not the case. The page doesn't exist and never has. The only reason to 302 is if you are expecting traffic from these links, but I think that also sends a bad message to Google.
I would definitely suggest 404 for both cases.
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
-
Inbound Linking
Hello, I manage a company that owns a bunch of schools (20) websites. They would like to create on each website a page which shows their schools in all the locations. Will this be ok as far as white hat practices and inbound linking?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel0 -
Spammy Website Framed My Site & Stole Rankings
Hi One of the pages of my website was starting to gather some real traction in Google rankings and hit 3500 visitors per day. This is the page: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/ On 11th January search traffic to this page fell to virtually 0. The rest of the site rankings were unaffected. Yesterday I tried searching for some of the main keywords I was ranking for and instead of my search listing, this was appearing: Image: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/weird-rankings.jpg It is in the exact position I was ranking in, but instead this evn . moe site has stolen my ranking. Upon opening the website, it is simply my original article page in an iframe. If you look at the source code of the offending website, you will see what I mean. Hopefully now you are getting a 403 forbidden error as my host blocked referrals from that site but they still hold my rankings. Has anyone ever seen this before? How was this done? And how can I get my ranking back? Thanks in advance, James
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesPenn0 -
Internal Links to Ecommerce Category Pages
Hello, I read a while back, and I can't find it now, that you want to add internal links to your main category pages. Does that still apply? If so, for a small site (100 products) what is recommended? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Does linking older posts help?
Asking a blogger to add an anchor text into their old post that relates to my niche. does that help with backlinks? does the quality of backlinks determine by how new the post is or the page rank determines all? for example a new post with lesser page rank vs a old post with higher page rank which one is better to put your link on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Multiple domains pointed at one site
I know things are changing and the things Google thinks are cheating searchers from finding what they are really looking for are changing too. So, I have multiple domain names that are related to my site, but not the actual site name. For instance, I have a certification program called Certified NetAnalyst that has a few domains for it... .com, .org and other derivatives like NetAnalyst. I would like to point the domains to my main company web site and not create a site just for the certification. Does Google think it is cheating to point domain names with my company branding names to my main web site? What about domain name forwarding to a specific URL, like taking the certification name domains and pointing them to the certification page instead of the main site? Wondering if one could no follow (don't know how to do that) the domain forwarding links so it is not duplicate content? Is that possible in some way? Could you put another robots.txt file with excludes in the domain forwarding url landing page so it would not be duplicate content? For the future I want all SEO "juice" to go to the main domain, but the keyword value of the domain names is valuable. I sure would be grateful if someone that has a good understanding and specific recent experience with Google policy and enforcement could offer some sage and practical advice and perhaps a case study example where Google "likes it" or on the other hand a good explanation of why I may not wish to do this! Thank You! Bill Alderson www.apalytics.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Packetman0071 -
Reviewing a competitors links
Using Open Site Explorer I was reviewing a sites links. This site happens to appear at position 2 in Google for a key-term that I am targeting for one of my sites. Most, if not all of the links appear to be coming from some very questionable sources that have absolutely nothing to do with their sites content or business. Some of the page titles are : Free Music - Free Music Tampa Bay Florida Fishing Guide Free BDSM and Bondage Sex, BDSM XXX, Fetish Por... LAX Car Rental Reciprical Links Page - Add Your Link Casino More Links Is this practice going to end up hurting their site and catch up to them at some point? From what I have read, these are not the type of links that you want to be going after.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrandonC-2698870 -
From page 3 to page 75 on Google. Is my site really so bad?
So, a couple of weeks ago I started my first CPA website, just as an experiment and to see how well I could do out of it. My rankings were getting better every day, and I’ve been producing constant unique content for the site to improve my rankings even more. 2 days ago my rankings went straight to the last page of Google for the keyword “acne scar treatment” but Google has not banned me or given my domain a minus penalty. I’m still ranking number 1 for my domain, and they have not dropped the PR as my keyword is still in the main index. I’m not even sure what has happened? Am I not allowed to have a CPA website in the search results? The best information I could find on this is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465 But I’ve been adding new pages with unique content. My site is www.acne-scar-treatment.co Any advice would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tommythecat1