Unwanted spam pharmacy links
-
Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure.
However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts.
Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?
-
Hmmm. Their situation is further complicated by a less than clean link profile (not counting the spam links). They have very few high quality links. Makes me think that a new domain is a possibility to consider.
-
You should also checkout this Whiteboard Friday video, which covers that preemptive reconsideration request I mentioned along with a bunch of other tactics:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday
-
Honestly, think kind of problem exists industry wide and if your regular link profile is good, natural enough, you should be good. However, if a relatively high percentage of links exist compared to the rest of your profile and / or if you received the un-natural link profile notice from Google, I would lay out some of those examples and tell Google exactly what happened. If you think about it, anybody could buy spammy links for their competition and hurt them. The links are essentially supposed to be discounted so that they are not helping you and definitely not hurting you. Just file a re-inclusion request if you received a notice or if you are seeing a considerable drop in rankings.
-
Rand recently talked about this in the latest SEOmoz email newsletter where someone asked a question about negative SEO. Rand had an idea that I liked and hadn't heard before. He suggested submitting a pre-emptive reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, letting them know that someone is building those links and that you all are not responsible for them. Be as detailed as possible.
I guess the caveat there is that everything else you are doing is whitehat, since you are potentially inviting a reviewer to look at all of your backlinks.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How not to lose internal link juice?
Hi, I just added some photography content to my site to showcase my skills, specifically 360 virtual tours. I first tried to have those on regular pages and have the 360s in responsive iframes, but it caused usability problems. So I've chosen instead to have a master page with thumbnails that lead to individuals 360's. https://gregmoinephotography.com/360-virtual-tours-hdr-vr-ready/ Links look like that: http://gregmoinephotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/360/maverick-helicopters/ Each pano takes over the whole page. My concern is losing internal link juice as each pano page doesn't link anywhere. Also, external link juice when people start linking to each 360. What should I do to fix that? Should I just link back to the master page in the body & noscript area, even though content won't be visible? Fine with Google? Lack of content problem? Thank you for reading, and for your help!
Technical SEO | | GregMoine0 -
Internal Link Rank Flow
I've read in many articles that pages can "pass" rank to other pages internally. Is anyone aware of any well done internal linking case studies which confirm this? If my homepage has the strongest Page Authority, would linking to another page deeper into my website from my homepage boost my rank for the deeper page in Google (more so than linking to the deep page from a page with lower page authority)?
Technical SEO | | poke10 -
Webmaster tools not showing links but Moz OSE is showing links. Why can't I see them in the Google Search Console
Hi, Please see attached photos. I have a website that shows external follow links when performing a search on open site explorer. However, they are not recognised or visible in search console. This is the case for both internal and external links. The internal links are 'no follow' which I am getting developer to rectify. Any ideas why I cant see the 'follow' external links? Thanks in advance to those who help me out. Jesse T7dkL5s T7dkL5s OkQmPL4 3qILHqS
Technical SEO | | jessew0 -
Should I nofollow Geo-located links on a site?
I run various sites that use Geo-location to place related links in navigation menus on a page. For example, if you land on the home page, we will see that you are in Florida and then in one of the content boxes on the page, show job listings that this site has in Florida. We also give the option to search for other jobs or use other navigation options. The idea is to try to help the user along the best we can, but ..... What opinions do persons have here on if these links should be nofollowed as GoogleBot will always see links to places in California etc. - wherever Googlebot is crawling from? Would this then be confusing as we are a site that focused on the entire US and not just California etc Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Links from Instructables.com?
This is a silly newbie question. But will posting on www.instructables.com with some valuable content and url link back to my site help with "linking"? Or do they put a no-follow on all links on their site? Thanks for answering! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Why would a link shown on OSE appear differently than the page containing the link?
I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Link Juice flow control
Hi, I'm really interested in a good explanation of how to control the flow of link juice. Most of my inbound links currently go to my home page, and I was just wondering how to maximise the link juice flow to those pages that I want ranking. Is there any benefit to nofollowing pages in my navigation that I don't need to rank? As above, but with links in my footer, such as privacy policy and the like (can i not waste link juice on these pages?) Does more link juice flow to pages higher up in my code? These are just some of the questions I'm concerned with. Basically, I'd really like to know the best-practices for sending link juice to where it is needed most. Thanks, Matt - No Yelling Driving School
Technical SEO | | strilliams0