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!

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.