Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thanks, Alex. You make some good points.

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

How often do you see them in the SERPS?

Not so much? There's your answer, then!

Is it worth getting links from Suite101 post-Panda?

They claim to have tidied up. But what does Google think?

I really can't see any reason for adding nofollow tags to these links. They are trusted sites, after all. And all that stuff about PageRank sculpting has been discredited now. Keep building the page - I'm going to bookmark it!

I agree with Steve. I would add that it makes sense that you could mark yourself as an author across various niches and sectors. After all, very few of us are interested in only one subject. Many of us have some expertise in multiple fields. So to limit authors to a single subject would be counter-intuitive and contrary to the way the world works. I don't believe Google wants to do that.

I would look for sites that are specific to your industry. You might find these through Twitter, or by using advanced search operators in Google, such as:

intitle:"guest post" AND [your keyword]

Lots of questions here. I wouldn't assume that your #1 position is secure. So rather than ask why, I would be working to shore up its position by establishing more quality signals, such as earning some links from high-authority sites and setting up Google authorship on the site.

Links from Pinterest are followed, so they may have SEO benefit. However, the fact that they are so easy to create suggests that Google would not want to give them the same credit as an earned link.

I don't think that should influence your decision about whether or not to use Pinterest. It probably depends on your business. I know somebody that sells quirky stationery online and finds that Pinterest generates a lot of sales. My sector is travel and - although travel images are popular on Pinterest - traffic generated tends to be minimal. Give it a whirl and see how it works for you.

You might want to use your analytics data to find the variations of terminology that your visitors use to find your pages, then use those variations in page titles, given that you're selling primarily one type of product.

Good plan. I would wait at least 4 weeks after removing the link before you decide whether or not it's worked

see my answer below!

I agree in part with easyrider2. There may be a problem caused by the sitewide header links from your own blog (blog.printsasia.com). These currently use the keyword-rich anchor text "Online Bookshop UK", although I suspect you previously had this as "Bookshop UK", as this is what OSE has picked up. Either way, they look like the kind of links that might be targeted by Penguin, as they don't use your brand name as anchor text.

If the blog was a subdomain of your UK site (blog.printsasia.co.uk), I don't think this would be a problem. But because it's a subdomain of a US site (albeit the same company), this could look like a spammy type of link.

Note: it may be that Google has not penalised you, but has simply decided to discount a set of links, perhaps these ones.

The good news is that as this is your company blog you can quickly change the link.

You could try one of the following:

1. Remove the sitewide link from blog.printsasia.com altogether

2. Change the anchor text to your brand name (eg Printsasia UK)

3. Remove the sitewide link and add a few more "natural" links into blog posts (as easyrider2 suggests)

Personally, I would try 1, assuming it doesn't drive significant traffic to your site. If that helps then you know you've identified a problem.

However, I don't think this is your only problem, and I'm not even convinced it is a problem. Looking at your link profile, you simply don't have sufficient volume or diversity of links, nor do you have enough links from high-authority sites within your space. So even if you "fix" this immediate problem, you still need to focus on some serious linkbuilding (by which I mean relationship building) within your industry.

I agree with easyrider2 about the spammy blog comments. These may not cause a problem with Google but they look very poor to users (and webmasters who might potentially link to your sites).

yes, great timing! I think Matt said in his webmaster video that disavowing will also take a few weeks. Please let us know how you get on. Good luck!

Ah. Well, at least you got a reply!

Geoff, you probably need to be a little more patient. You only registered your domain on 20 June this year and there's nothing yet on the Wayback Machine. I would focus your energies more on creating great content on your site, social media outreach, etc, rather than worrying about your domain authority just yet.

I'm seeing it less and less in the travel space. But when it does happen I agree that it's hugely frustrating. You simply have to keep on doing the right thing in the firm belief that Google will reward you in the end. Don't be tempted to copy spammy techniques because (a) you'll probably suffer in the long run, and (b) it might not actually be those that are causing your competitors to outrank you.

Have you tried a webspam report?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

On the first question I don't quite agree with Thomas. I think that social signals are an important part of the mix but I don't think that having 73k Facebook Likes will undo the damage caused by a manipulated link profile.

If you've been hit by Penguin - and if you're sure that's what's hit your site - then you simply have to sort out your unnatural link profile. That means getting links removed, or at least making every best effort to do this, and making detailed notes of your attempts, which you can submit to Google on a Googledoc if required.

High rankings would NOT have protected your competitors from a Penguin update. They are separate things. Google does not "think" along the lines of "Oh well, this site may have a crap link profile but at least lots of people seem to like it on Facebook, so let's give it a free ride". Penguin is algorithmic. There is not a committee of Googlers deciding which site to hit on an individual basis.

Social signals are important and they will likely come into play once you've fixed your link profile. But, in my opinion, not until then.

Try Followerwonk.com, now part of the Moz empire. Even if you don't have a PRO account, you can use this tool to search Twitter bios.

So for example you can type "travel blogger" into the search field and it will show a list of people on Twitter who have words "travel" and "blogger" in their bios. These are sorted by followers, so you are likely to see the most influential first (there is also an option to sort by influence).

Click on "more options" and you can add filters. For example, you might want to find travel bloggers in the UK or the US.

A search that I like "Huffington Post travel" (replace it with your area of interest).

In my experience, most bloggers are active on Twitter, so this is a good de facto blogger search tool, and free.

Hi Diane

I suggest you make your postings public. This will help people find you, and know if what you're sharing is interesting, so they can put you in their circles.

One of the most useful things you can do with your Google+ page is verify your site for authorship (so your image appears in Google search results).

To set this up you will need to do a couple more things:

1. Add your site under "Contributor to" section on your About page.

2. Make your +1s public.

3. Add links from your site to your Google+ page using the rel="author" tag. (This completes the circle so Google knows you are contributor to your site, and that your site verifies you as the author).

I wrote a short guide about setting up authorship, though you'll doubtless find many more on the web.

I would also advise you to add a bit more content to your page - images and info about yourself - then publish a few posts and start circling people you find interesting.

Good luck

Mark

also, Google will sometimes replace a homepage title that is full of keywords with the brand name. This is usually fixed when you put your brand name back into the homepage title

Since Google's Penguin update earlier this year, it is generally accepted now that links from within blog posts are more valuable than blogroll links.

This is because blogroll links and other sitewide links, such as footer links, have a higher likelihood of being paid for, or otherwise manipulated. In fact, many webmasters hit by Penguin have requested the removal of blogroll links. Links from within blog posts, on the other hand, look more natural.

There is no real distinction between links from "static pages" and links from posts. If a page has been around for a while it is likely that the page will have accrued more Page Authority than a newly-published blog post. On the other hand, a blog post has the advantage of being current, and may itself accrue authority over time.

If the press release is likely to earn links (eg bloggers treat it as the primary source) then clearly it makes sense to host it on your own site. But - and it's a big but - your site may not be crawled by the engines sufficiently quickly for the demands of today's news media. Once a story is out, it must be findable. Therefore using a PR site that gets crawled regularly makes sense. A smart workaround is to publish the release on your site and on a PR site with a link on the PR site page to the corresponding page on your site. that should ensure your page gets crawled more quickly and the engines should treat your page as the primary source. Of course all this assumes that you have some real news to announce.

Hi Christine

I've used Bluehost a couple of times for small WP sites and found it very straightforward to operate and good value. The one-click WP install makes it particularly attractive for beginners. I can't comment on security as I haven't had any issues.

My best tip: get to know the sales team. I think a lot of SEOs fail to look up from their screens and recognise they are working for a real business - and that it's the sales team that have first-hand, all-day access to your paying customers.

I've just started working for a small travel business with a sales team of three who answer phones all day from clients. I spent a session with them, explained briefly what I'm doing and asked them a slew of questions such as:

• How do people describe the products? How do they categorise types of product. This feeds directly into KW research.

• What do people ask for that isn't on the site? Great for content development ideas / usability.

• What questions do people ask about the company? For instance, if lots of people seem unsure about whether this is a real company or just a website, create a prominent "about us" section.

• At which points in the booking funnel do customers call to say they are stuck ? This is a great way of identifying usability issues. Users don't call the UX guys, they call the sales team.

It's important to remember that sales people don't give a stuff about SEO, so your first task is to explain to them that your job is to send them more leads. At this point you'll see their indifference slowly turn to interest.

Give it a try, it's incredibly valuable. Perhaps a subject for a future YouMoz post?

There is one strong benefit for companies to use press release sites: those sites are likely to get crawled and indexed by the engines much more quickly than the company's own site.

I've run my own tests of 15 PR sites over a period of several months and found that some get crawled very quickly (others don't). I like Pitch Engine for paid services and I've found the best of the free sites to be Prlog.org (if you don't mind competitors' ads on your releases).

It's often said that press releases are an outdated mode of getting out information and, in a sense that's true, because journalists and bloggers don't rely on them for stories (arguably, they never have done).

However, journalists and bloggers do rely on Google to provide news and research material. So if you put out some company news - whether or not you call it a press release - you want it to be crawled and indexed immediately.