Links into website that are unnatural - a paid article
-
I prepared an article for another related website and posted it on my website -
I was paid to write an article and provided a link to the related website at the end of the article - I declared the payment
a good 10 months later the page where the article sits has become the 2nd most linked to page on my website - SEOmoz is giving it a Page Authority of 48 and all the links are coming from a wide variety of forums using one anchor text link phrase
in the latest google update my homepage PR dropped by 1 - I am assuming the penalty came because of this article
is it worth changing the URL to remove these spammy links to my website?
-
At some point, someone has hired one of these worthless 'link building' packages online that pays for however many forum profile backlinks. Whilst many of them have been deployed incorrectly (thankfully for you) - You can tell this by the fact BBCode was used on the forums when some of the forums in questions don't accept this and use an HTML editor instead.
This kind of artificially generated link profiling was targeted in the Google Penguin algorithm updates, this could largely prove the outcome of any recent deterioration in your domain's performance as it is blindingly obvious most of the backlinks are from link spam.
Perhaps the company you wrote the article for, once published, then buy useless packages online to build lots of links to their content which then links to their own website...?
If it were me, I would take down the article and request a URL removal from the index in Google Webmaster Tools. It may even be worthwhile creating a 301 redirect to point to somewhere else so that lots of 404 errors aren't triggered on your site (if there is any worthwhile traffic coming via any of the links pointing to the article).
You can view the link profile for this URL here.
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 to decrease the spam score of website ?
Hello , Everyone I have my own website crawlmyline we are doing seo from last 2 years but didn't do any spammy work on my my site .Still I won't able to stop the spam score and now my website has 28 % spam score according to the moz.I have taken subscription of moz pro but still i can't understand the process. Can anyone please tell me how to decrease the spam score of website ?
Technical SEO | | kuldeep_chauhan0 -
Broken canonical link errors
Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
G1 -
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 -
Ratio of linking C-blocks to Linking domains
Hi, Our linkbuilding efforts have resulted in acquiring a high number of backlinks from domains within a C-block. We all know Google issues penalties whenever someone's link profile looks unnatural. A high number of backlinks but a low number of linking C-blocks would seem to be one of reasons to get penalized. Example: we have 6,000 links from 200 linking root domains coming in from 100 C-blocks. At what point should we start to worry about being penalized/giving off an unnatural look to mr G?
Technical SEO | | waidohuy0 -
Remove Links or 301
Howdy Guys, Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take. For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet... We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links. I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site? Or Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them? Has anyone had any success in 301ing? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Why is my website banned?
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Is link cloaking bad?
I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites. In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links. Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
Why would you remove a canonical link?
Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0