Welcome to the Q&A Forum

One of the more successful competitors in my niche has embarked on new strategy that seems to be working well for him. I noticed that many new links began to appear to my site from my competitor's stable of many websites.

It appears that he has setup a link wheel to benefit a site that has been in the top Google position for several months now.  The rim of the wheel links back to authority sites, including my own main site (established 7 years, now hanging on to the lowly 10th place on the serp).  So the strategy seems to be: a) create a dozen sites that no-follow link back to authority sites including competitors, b) place links in a such a manner (bottom of page, uncolored links, from images) that a customer is unlikely to ever click on it, c.) do-follow to your own site and blast it to the top of Google.

I don't think this competitor is worried about getting penalized. I've been watching this for years. When one site gets burned, he just shifts things around and brings up another one of his sites. He seems to age them for years, calling them up one by one as they are needed.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a trend?  Because it sure seems to work. He's crowded the front page now with 4 of his sites.

Would it be appropriate for me to "disavow" his links? Would it matter?

If you noindex the page it will eventually be removed, but not immediately.

Why just remove it manually from Google from GWT, and also block it in your robots.txt file?

Ok, thanks. That's what I thought. I'll file a webspam report and see what happens. Won't hold my breath though.   Not the first tricky thing these guys have done, and won't be the last I'm sure.

Link wasn't hot, but I fixed that. It's working for me now. Thanks for your comments.

A competitor recently jumped very high in the SERPS after adding Ratings markup schema to his site. His site shows in the serps with a 5 star rating for a software product.

Here's his site: http://bit.ly/11hp2KX

The source of the "rating" appears just to be hard coded schema markup, not connected to anything external or impartial.It appears at this point that Google is taking this markup data at face value, and maybe is giving it some authorityHave you seen this kind of abuse in your vertical?

I appreciate the synopsis and the good feedback.

In our case, we feel that we have a very strong ability to guide users to the site of our choice.  Local seems like a misfire for a global software company.

Since there doesn't seem to be a loud consensus that we should be working with any specific site at the moment, I think we'll send reviewers to BBB, since customers sometimes tell us that is an important trust signal for them.

Really great links. Thanks!

I'm still getting great results from several EMD's that have very good content on them and which are updated regularly. My EMD's also do very well with Bing/Yahoo, who seem rank this signal higher.

I think you'd be ok if you found a unique purpose for the domains and put excellent content on them. In our case, we have some software products that solve some broad problems, but also several niche problems.  We used the EMD's to focus the product content like a laser on the niche.

Google doesn't like EMD's with spammy content, but thankfully it still likes great unique content.

There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally.  Google...

Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use?  From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others?

I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.

This happened to me, too. Google has been finding these links since last October, and I just keep adding the domains to my Disavow list. My rank has slipped a bit (from 2 to 4) but its hard to know if these thinks are the reason. Probably not.

When the links were first pointed at my site, Google moved me from 2nd to 1st place for my top keywords. The bad links seemed to give me about a one week a temporary boost, before we settled back to 2nd .

Google HAS to be aware of this. Their silence on this issue is deafening. Cutts gave it a little bit of lip service; but there must be tens of millions of these junk links being added daily judging from all of the people selling 100k bad links on Fiverr for five bucks.

So far I'm mostly annoyed by these bad links, rather than hurt by them.This has really screwed up all the intense work I did to scrutinize and analyze my link profile.

A nice feature for SEOmoz would be to allow us to UPLOAD our DISAVOW list so we can get some of our reports with the junk scrubbed out. After all, if I tell Google to ignore these 1,000 links and presuming they actually do ignore them, then it would be more useful to get SEOmoz reports with that data removed as well.

That helps lots, Matt. Thanks for being on the ball.  I'll sleep better tonight.

Cheers.

I logged into GWT today.  It typically reports that our page has about 9,000 inbound links, but today it said we have 225.   There are no warnings or messages about any manual action. In fact, this site has never received any penalties or warnings.

Since November I have used the disavow tool to remove porn links that a competitor has pointed at my site.  Typically I go through Google's "new" links list and add any of the obviously bad links to the disavow list.  That effort seemed to be going ok, and my site does not seem to be penalized for this negative seo.

The 225 links that remain are scattered back through 2010.  This site has been online since 2005 and has accumulated lots of links over the years. Some great, some not so great.

Queries are down about 1500 per day since last week, about a 15% drop.  There is a slight drop in some keyword rankings, but nothing huge, and most of the SERPS I track do not seem to be impacted.  The PR is steady at 4, where it's been for years.

So... what do you think I should do?  Just watch it for a week and see if they come back?   Try removing the "disavow" list just in case it some how messed things up (looks ok on the surface to me).

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

Just a followup to this old thread for anyone working through similar issues.

We are monitoring what Google finds through their "Download Latest Links."  We add the domains where the bad links are to the Disavow Links tool.

Google no longer ranks the site for any "sex" terms. No warnings have been issued to the site in 4 months. Things are stable at the moment, but we're going to be picking the lint out of this link list for a long time.

I'd suggest keeping it to 2 links. That' s just my gut talking, though. Less can be more.

I have some inbound links from press releases I published on PRWeb from 2006 that are PR3 now and don't seem be hurting me at all. They occasionally send traffic to my site.

I can tell you're smart enough to steer clear of the half-million or so free Press release services that host web spam.  You would never  hire a service or buy software for posting to "10,000 press release sites" for $4.99.   If you're willing to spend $50 to $200 to put your story on a curated release site like PRWeb where it will be edited, and where it may be picked up by bloggers, then that sounds legitimate to me.  Those links shouldn't bite.

I never post to a PR site that doesn't give me the right to remove the content at some point in the future. Just in case...

So send a note to the webspam team? I'm not into public shaming. I don't think these guys have any shame.

It's pretty obvious to me based on my history with a certain company. There's only about four of us in this particular niche. Lo and behold, only 3 of us were spammed ( I saw in some of the web spam that 2 other competitors were often linked to from the same page). They targeted a very specific page on my site, so that tells me clearly the keywords they are trying to knock me down for. Given this other company's history of aggressive tactics (spamming our blog posts, spamming comments on shareware sites where we are listed, spamming our ratings and simultaneously saying their product is better, building out dozens of EMD sites, etc etc), given that some of the spam was in their native language, and that I recognize some of the aliases they have used in the past,  I have a pretty strong hunch I know who I'm dealing with.

My hope is that nothing happens to my serp so they won't be encouraged to keep doing it. That's the real danger I see; if it works, certainly they'll keep doing it.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I spent about 5 hours yesterday picking out bad links from good, and sent them to Google through their disavow tool.

I wondered how this could happen (I guess I live in Candy Land) and it took me about 2 minutes to find people on Fiverr selling 25,000 "bad links" for $5.  That's scary, and it seems Google has wrought this with Penguin. I can't work this hard everytime someone wants to spend $5.

My hope is that my site withstands the attack. So far so good, really, but it sure is annoying when you're trying hard to clean things up and do the right thing going forward.

Maybe Google should offer a Disavow Query tool, whereby you could tell it if certain queries are misdirecting traffic to your site. That way I could let them know at the front end that my site has nothing to do with "free sex."

I've seen some discussion here about whether or not negative seo is real.

I've just spent 6 months recovering from Penguin, rewriting content, removing hundreds of bad links, and seeing our traffic slowly improve.

Yesterday we noticed in Google webmasters tools that we're ranking for the term "Free Sex."  Here... http://screencast.com/t/ezoo2sCRXQ

Now we have discovered that thousands of "sex" links have been directed at our improving domain. I am convinced I know who the culprit is.

What would you advise a client to do in my situation?

Forget about removing these damn links. I don't have the time, money or energy to go through that again. I'm sure he can add them much faster than I can ever remove them.

Is the disavow tool best answer in this case? Or is there an international court of seo justice that I can appeal to?

1. Penguin is the problem.  Have never received any notices from Google, but the drop corresponds exactly to the date.

2.  Ok I hear you. I'll 301 it to a competitors site   (it's a joke!)

3. Good point.

After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website.  Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake.

Our original site,(call it   mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the  engine in the old one.

We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page.  There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net.

Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign.  All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new.

We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again.

We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net.

My questions are:

1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go?

2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html   what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html  ?    Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site?  It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site.

3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block?  Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help

4. What have I forgotten?

Cheers, all

You know what, Ausaf, one of my sites was in a similar situation.  In April it tanked, and there was no warnings from Google and no obvious reason for the fall. No deathly hallows links to my site that I could find. It may be that certain sites that were providing you juice were devalued by Google, and caused your drop. Quality link building might help.

I tried everything I could think of for 2 months, tried to get questionable sites to unlink, added new content, fixed a few minor html errors, and nothing budged it. The site just seem to fall further.    In mid June I just started a new site with a well chosen domain name, rewrote the content, carefully built a broad variety of new links... and voila!  I'm back on page 1 (result #3 currently). I was previously #1, but I tell you after 4 months of this I'm glad to be on page 1.

Sometimes its good just to start over if you're able to.

I know that 2 months is nothing in SEO time, but when you're running a business it's an eternity. I couldn't afford to wait around a year and hope.  If the other site comes back, great. If not, we have plan B.