Link Attack

[rockpaper]

Here is an interesting situation. Overnight SEOMoz is now reporting about 1.1 million new backlinks to my site.

The links look like they were added in March of 2011 and they are all on porn sites and link back to me with the words like "Indian Sex", "Sex Bathe", and "insex."

This appears to be yet another attack on my site and it looks like it happened right before the April Panda update that hosed me.

As an example of one of the pages you can look at seapotentialdifference.com/inurlife/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3081 and look for the link for Indian Sex. They linked to my forum and not the home page.

At the same time SEOMoz discovered these links my DA dropped from 62 to 58. I'm wondering if anyone thinks these issues are connected.

More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this? For some reason the PA and DA of the porn site pages is above 70.

This will probably be an ongoing battle for me since I am a journalist that covers the debt relief world and scammers don't like for me to expose them in an effort to protect consumers.

[irvingw]

Apparently my company doesn't have websense blocking objectionable content

Nothing stated by this person here is true:

"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site.  Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages.  It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites.  "

a) you absolutely can be penalized by the actions of others, it's just difficult and takes time and money and determination.

b) that's a PHP forum, it hasn't been hacked, the mod is just allowing anything and everything to be posted on there. Spammers sell link dumps to people who use throw away sites to spam for themselves, all of those peoples sites listed there paid a link builder to dump as many adult links as they can. It's incredibly cheap, you can get something like 4000 links for $20. It's totally automated using software. This throws you in the pool with many shady sites, I bet if I check those sites i'll see at least half of them are penalized.

see i just posted below all those links, it's just a crappy forum

http://seapotentialdifference.com/inurlife/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3081&sid=a74e22ce8b4674ad4541a79cb562424e

Well Google makes it hard to contact them, don't use the paid link form. Contact them via reconsideration request in webmaster tools. Although it isn't a reconsideration request you're still talking to the people who have the power to forgive and manually reinclude sites who have been penalized.

[rockpaper]

Thanks. But here is the issue, contact who? The Google webmaster forum says there is nobody to specifically contact regarding these issues.

"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site.  Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages.  It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites.  "

Do you have some special contact information to share?

[irvingw]

If your forum wasn't so well established, I would say change the URL of the forum homepage and you'll instantly 404 all of those crappy links and your problem would be solved with one quick change.

Since that is not an option, the best thing you can do is to notify Google that you are being attacked by someone attempting to get you penalized. Email them once every couple of weeks with updated information, for instance if you see your incoming links number going up dramatically from the last time you emailed them point that out.

Basically, if you send Google enough messages they may listen and flip some switch or raise some incoming link spam threshold on your site (no one knows exactly what they do, but they can manually adjust things)

I think because of the nature of your site, it is not hard to convince Google that there are people out to sabotage you since you are exposing already shady people.

Be proactive, and make Google aware that this is not you doing this before they penalize your site. Good luck.