Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Chris, that's true. Most of these blackhat techniques work temporarily but that doesn't seem to pose an issue since the blackhatters can put together a new site within hours. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in joining them. I'm just trying to figure out how can a whitehatter ever succeed in a market that's filled with blackhat techniques.

I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so.

How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total.

As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords.

I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this?

Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful.

I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!

Thanks for all the responses!

Thanks Marie. I went ahead and deleted that page and submitted a disavow request. Hopefully that will prevent any future issues.

Thanks Chris and Marie! I was thinking of doing a 401 (page permanently moved) and transferring the content to a new page with a new url.

Someone decided to run a negative-SEO campaign, hitting one of the inner pages on my blog I noticed the links started to pile up yesterday but I assume there will be more to come over the next few days.

The targeted page is of little value to my blog, so the question is: should I remove the affected page (hoping that the links won't affect the entire site) or to submit a disavow request?

I'm not concerned about what happens to the affected page, but I want to make sure the entire site doesn't get affected as a result of the negative-SEO.

Thanks in advance.

Howard

Check out these pages by Google that talk about Pagination: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

In your case, the best way would be to use rel="next" and rel="prev" tags.

Are you using wordpress? If so, the Yoast plugin will take care of this for you.

Howard

Also check out this thread which discusses the same question: http://moz.com/community/q/too-many-on-page-links-31

On-page links (or internal links) are links pointing from Page A (in this case your homepage) to any other page on your site.

Currently, your homepage is linking to many other pages within your site. But I think this is a normal practice. Take a look at any other popular site and you'll see the same thing (ex. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/). What I would suggest though, is to analyze user behavior and identify what links are being clicked on the most. If some of your links are never clicked on, is it really useful to have them there?

Howard

My site has been a victim of Negative SEO. During the course of 3 weeks, I have received over 3000 new backlinks from 200 referring domains (based on Ahref report). All links are pointing to just 1 page (all other pages within the site are unaffected). I have already disavowed as many links as possible from Ahref report, but is that all I can do? What if I continue to receive bad backlinks?

I'm thinking of permanently redirecting the affected page to an external website (a dummy site), and hope that all the juice from the bad backlinks will be transferred to that site. Do you think this would be a good practice? I don't care much about keeping the affected page on my site, but I want to make sure the bad backlinks don't affect the entire site.

The bad backlinks started to come in around 3 weeks ago and the rankings haven't been affected yet. The backlinks are targeting one single keyword and are mostly comment backlinks and trackbacks.

Would appreciate any suggestions

Howard

Just to clarify, let me be more specific about what I initially planned to do:

Let's say my current website is at: example.com. Rel canonical is set so that if a user lands on www.example.com, they're redirect to the non www version.

For some reason, the negative seo targeted the www.example.com instead of the main url. So I'm thinking since all the bad links are pointing to the www version, redirecting that to somewhere else may help.

What you say makes sense, that google can detect that both versions are from the same domain.

I didn't see any major drops from the penguin last night. The main drop started middle of March and continued through April. This seems to have been an algo penalty vs. manual penalty as I didn't receive a warning.

The entire homepage wouldn't redirect, just the www domain. I doubt anyone would be affected by this since the rel canonical is set to the non www.

I think I agree with Chris on this and just wait it out and see if the disavow request goes anywhere.

Thanks Chris. Thankfully I wouldn't lose all the traffic since most links are pointing to the non www url. This would only be a temporary redirect until I clean up the bad links but I thought doing the 302 redirect before the penguin may give me a chance to clean up those links while not being completely affected by them.

Hi,

I am considering making the 301 redirect from the domain to a 302 temporary redirect.

Currently if a user lands on "www" version of the site, they are redirected to the non "www" version. But after the redirect, they will land on an external webpage (so if a user lands on the "www" version, they are redirected to a different website, not related to my domain).

Reason I'm considering this is because I have received a large number of spammy backlinks on the "www" version of the site (negative seo). So I'm hoping that the temporary redirect will help me recover.

Your thoughts on this:

1. Is this the best way to do a 302 redirect (redirecting the www version to an external domain)?

2. Will the redirect help the main domain recover, considering all spammy backlinks are pointing to the www version?

3. What are the pros/cons, if any?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Howard

Matthew, much appreciated.

Thankfully I don't need to worry about redirects since it's just a transition to a new template. About 90% of the other elements will remain intact.

Checking webmaster tools after the transition sounds really helpful.

ps. Thanks to everyone for your great responses!

Thanks for the detailed answer. This, in itself, could make a great article

After reviewing the items you mentioned, I actually realized some of the things I had neglected.

Apparently after transferring all the content to the demo website, some of the elements had changed, including: date of the posts, H tags, Authors, and few of the meta tags. So glad I caught your response in time to fix those issues.

For the most part, the new site is an improved version of the current site so if the rankings drop, I'll be surprised.

After I make the transition, I'll let you know the results. Hopefully this could make a good case scenario for the community.

Thanks again!

Howard

Hi - I am planning to redesign my blog and I was wondering if this will affect my rankings?

The new website template (custom designed) is much more user and seo friendly. The content, url structure, internal linking structure, meta tags, and site structure will remain exactly the same, but the visual design will be different (new sidebar widgets, and slightly different layout on inner pages).

The current website is ranking very well (mostly top 5), has a healthy backlink profile, strong social media presence, and great traffic.

I have heard that switching to a new template will dramatically hurt the rankings. Is this true? Are there any exceptions? Any ways I can prevent the rankings from dropping?

Would really appreciate your input. Thanks in advance.

Howard

Thanks so much! I'll have a look at issues with respect to the Panda update and I'll see if I find anything there.

Thanks for your suggestion. The site owners could probably care less about removing those links but I'll definitely use the disavow tool followed by a reconsideration request.

Hello,

For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack

I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently.

Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself.  So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site.

Questions:

1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack?

2. Should I worry about this?

3. If so, what is the best way to go about this?

Would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Thanks in advance!

Howard