Are there tools out there to determine when a link linked to your site? I want to know when a link farm was done a site.
-
In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links. The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done. I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out. Does anyone know how to find this out?
-
If you know the sites in question, look in your analytics refferal data for any traffic from them.
-
Ahrefs and Majestic SEO both track historical link acquisition, though the reliability of this information isn't the greatest given that they're reporting when they found the link, not when it was actually created. Obviously, Google has more resources to crawl the web and would find the link sooner than these services would. Despite this problem, it should still be enough to give you a rough feel for when a large chunk of links were created.
-
Ahrefs and Majestic SEO both track historical link acquisition, though the reliability of this information isn't the greatest given that they're reporting when they found the link, not when it was actually created. Obviously, Google has more resources to crawl the web and would find the link sooner than these services would. Despite this problem, it should still be enough to give you a rough feel for when a large chunk of links were created.
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
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Is a Link Wheel Safe If I Control the Wheel?
Hi, folks. Our company operates over 50 disease-specific, nice websites. Currently, we're building resource/landing pages for some therapies and other related topics. One experimental therapy is being investigated across four different disease types: cystic fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Hemophilia, and cancers. We have sites for all of them, and have created original landing pages for each site. Question: is it safe / does it make sense to "link wheel" these pages, especially since the wheel is composed of all our own sites? The other option of course is to simply interlink all of them, but will I get more visibility with a cyclical linking scheme? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Michael_Nace1 -
Competitor Black Hat Link Building?
Hello big-brained Moz folks, We recently used Open Site Explorer to compile a list of inbound linking domains to one of our clients, alongside domains linking to a major competitor. This competitor, APBSpeakers.com, is dominating the search results with many #1 rankings for highly competitive phrases, even though their onsite SEO is downright weak. This competitor also has exponentially more links(602k vs. 2.4k) and way more content(indexed pages) reported than any of their competitors, which seems physically impossible to me. Linking root domains are shown as 667 compared to 170 for our client, who has been in business for 10+ years. Taking matters a step further, linking domains for this competitor include such authoritative domains as: Cnn.com TheGuardian.com PBS.org HuffingtonPost.com LATimes.com Time.com CBSNews.com NBCNews.com Princeton.edu People.com Sure, I can see getting a few high profile linking domains but the above seems HIGHLY suspicious to me. Upon further review, I searched CNN, The Guardian and PBS for all variations of this competitors name and domain name and found no immediate mentions of their name. I smell a rat and I suspect APB is using some sort behind-the-scenes programming to make these "links" happen, but I have no idea how. If this isn't the case, they must have a dedicated PR person with EXTREMELY strong connections to secure this links, but even this seems like a stretch. It's conceivable that APB is posting comments on all of the above sites, along with links, however, I was under the impression that all such posts were NoFollow and carried no link juice. Also, paid advertisements on the above sites should be NoFollow as well, right? Anyway, we're trying to get to the bottom of this issue and determine what's going on. If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom to help us compete with these seemingly Black Hat SEO tactics, I'd sure love to hear from you. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much. Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Should I Disavow More Links
My SEO website got hit with a very severe penalty about a year ago and it was totally banished from the rankings for all of the money terms like SEO, SEO company and search engine optimisation (before the penalty I ranked in the top 10-15 for all of those phrases, top 3 for SEO company). I was probably hit for being listed in shed loads of paid directories, low quality free directories, footer links in client sites, keyword forum signature links and articles with keyword rich text links. A month or so after I got hit I started trying to clean up my link profile, I got rid of all of the client website links, I changed the link text on the majority of forum signature links and article links, I managed to get rid of about 50 directory links and the ones that I could not get taken down I disavowed - about 150. During that time I sent 2-3 separate reconsideration requests and I got this message each time: "Links to your site violate Google's quality guidelines" After doing all of that work and being rejected I pretty much gave up - things just seemed to get worst, not only was I no longer ranking for the money terms, but all of my blog posts tanked as well. I got my site redesigned and switched to Wordpress - I used 301 redirects and everything but they totally didn't work. My organic traffic went down to less than 50 hits a day - before the penalty I was getting over 300 a day. Then on Saturday just gone, almost exactly a year after I got hit with the penalty I noticed my site ranking in position 23 on Google.co.uk in the UK for the competitive phrase SEO company from being absolutely nowhere and I do mean nowhere. This sign has given me hope and the motivation to get rid of the penalty altogether, update all of my articles, get rid of bad advice in old blog posts and get rid of the rest of the bad links. Thing is that I am nervous to go getting rid of more links and disavowing, what if I do more harm then good? Do you think the penalty has been removed and I should just leave the rest of the bad links or should I continue trying to clean things up? By the way, my website is http://www.seoco.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy1 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
Why is this site not being punished!?
I guess this is the usual reaction to a seeing a domain rank above your own website is "They must be cheating"! However... in this case I feel more than justified. The website is aircon247.com they rank top 3 in the UK for "air conditioning" and other quite generic terms in the industry. I'm interested to know your thoughts and what (if any) action should be taken. Here are many of the links that I think contravene the Google Guidelines : Spammy Article Submissions with Inorganic Anchor Text: http://www.furniturearcade.com/decorative-furniture/decorative-accessories-lamps/ http://www.sys-con.com/node/2308271 http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/imagine-a-world-without-air-conditioning-units-7-112555 http://www.retail-digital.com/press_releases/appliances/diy-air-conditioning-installation-options http://www.livingwithwhite.com/three-fun-uses-for-antique-grates-and-floor-registers/ http://www.mcrjk2008.com/2009/04/best-air-conditioning-ever.html http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/comfort-your-business-needs-1682737.htm http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/diy-air-conditioning-installation-options-1677015.htm http://www.housetohome.co.uk/topical-advice/531054/regulating-your-home-environment http://homeklondike.com/2011/01/10/country-style-bedroom-design-ideas/ http://professorshouse.com/Building-a-house/Plumbing-Heating/Articles/Energy-Efficient-Air-Conditioners/ http://www.greenscenedebate.com/2009/04/take-good-luck-at-air-conditioning.html#.URzEmh17L5w http://www.harlynn.com/2009/04/wanna-chill-out.html http://www.loveshaven.com/2009/04/we-are-all-so-excited-for-my-sisters.html http://asiwaspassing.com/2009/05/ Spammy Links in External Website Footers / Side Bars with Inorganic Anchor Text: http://www.w-int.com/ http://www.g-dir.com/home/gardening/ http://www.s-dir.com/ http://www.sefdir.org/popular-listings.html http://www.ribcast.com/ http://rapidcoolsite.com/Home.html http://www.index-guide.org/ http://e-dir.org/ http://www.singaporerealestate.info/blog/?s=%27the+solitaire+call%27 http://www.onlinepureherbs.com/acidity.htm http://erostours.com/cheap-flights-Chicago.html http://www.search-way.com/ http://koolergazi.persianblog.ir/ Blog Spam Inorganic Anchor Text: http://edcel.net/2009/05/ http://www.bluehatseo.com/quick-answers-1-link-building/ Spammy (Link exchange etc.) Directories: http://ireland.accommodationforstudents.com/info/reciprocal_links_ad.asp http://baliscript.net/barter-links.php http://www.abacushosting.ca/linx.php http://www.whelphelper.com/links.php http://www.spectramedi.com/links_shopping.htm https://www.midwayautosupply.com/linkexchange.aspx? http://artsellart.com/links.html http://www.linkalizer.com/directory/39-1/ http://dogdir.com/region/NA.php http://www.easyezinearticles.com/ezineresources/Outsourcing.htm http://www.patchhomeinspections.com/Links.html http://autoharpusa.com/index.html?p=10 http://www.baliscript.net/webdesign-links.php
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | trickshotric0 -
Site Maps
I have provided a site maps for google but although it craws my site www.irishnews.com at 6:45AM the details in the site map are not seen on google for a few days - any ideas how to get this feature working better would be great. example <url><loc>http://www.irishnews.com/news.aspx?storyId=1126126</loc>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Liammcmullen
<priority>1</priority>
<lastmod>2012-01-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>never</changefreq></url> thanks0 -
Feedback on link building idea
We came up with this idea at work for a client but before I initiate it I was wanting to get feedback on if this would be considered whitehat and alright to use. It is for an ecommerce site. On the order confirmation and thank you page (not email cause they are on some old system that does not send out emails) we are wanting to put a thank you for your order message and continue with a statement about how they can save money on future purchases with a link that takes them to a page with info on how to do so. That new page will have info about linking to the site from a blog or website. And will say if you link back to us and send us an email with that link as proof we will give you a promo code for your next purchase. Is this alright?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webfeatseo0