Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
50,000 backlinks in webmaster tools from one site???
-
Hi All,
I'm new to evaluating backlinks, but I just saw I got over 50,000 links from a backlink that was added on ONE page at this site here: http://www.netnewspublisherDOTcom.
I presume this is not a good thing, and if I contact them to remove the one link on the one page, it won't solve the other 49,999 links that Google is seeing pointing to us, so what do I do??.
Should I contact them and ask to remove it and see if they don't and then disavow? Or would you just tell Google to disavow the whole site?
Thanks!
-
Hi there, you've received some great responses. What is the current status of this issue?
-
PS - I just realized that OSE says the 50,000 netnewspublisher .com links are NOFOLLOW - If that's the case, should I not bother with these (can no follow links cause you a problem)?
Thanks -
Hi Sha,
Yes - there is one post comment with our URL in it on one page from this site. The pages that are showing in OSE are not identical copies of each other, but unique URL pages with different content - but these pages do not have a link to my site that I can see.
As best I can tell, all the links coming from so many pages is because each page has a "recent comments" section on it. I'm "guessing" when the comment containing the backlink to my site was on each of these pages in the "comment section", it was discovered as a backlink when the page was crawled - could that happen?
I'd be happy to share a URL if I could do so privately with you?
And per what luwhosjack says, my home page that was linked to so I can't really change the URL.
And, I have seen significant drops in my traffic on some pages since May 22 when Penguin hit, but I have no manual penalties. Upon investigating my backlink profile, I have many malicious sites linked to me from Poland (Google says not to open their site) -I'm hoping I can just disavow these since Google agrees they are not good sites.
Plus, I'm seeing at least one competitor and MANY other sites linking to me, but when I go to their page, my url is in their source code, but the webpage is different than all the text that's in the source code (like the source code is a bunch of text on the subject - but the visible webpage is salescopy or optin forms). I don't know what to make of this??? I would presume this is something Google would not approve of and I shouldn't be associated with it - do you agree?
Thank you
-
Hi luwhosjack,
That's about the best you can do if the issue is as I described above - if every 404 on the site generates a new version of that one page then it is generally happening because of poor backend configuration.
Where it gets really messy is in the case where new URLs are being generated by hacking. I've seen several instances where every attempt at injection by a hacker generates a new copy of the page and if the anchor text happens to be exact match, the result is a disaster for the linked site
Sha
-
I had this same issue and it really affected my stats. I tried to contact the website with no luck to get the links removed. Then, when i looked into it more they had linked to the same pages about 30,000 times so I deleted the pages that were linked that I could afford to and slightly altered the addresses that I needed to keep. It made a massive difference
-
Hi mim12,
Afraid I am a lot more risk averse than most when it comes to unnatural links (and I have seen similar situations that emanated from nasty goings on at a couple of sites), so I have a couple of questions to clarify:
First, my read of your description is that there is a single page on that site which contains a link to your site and since you are saying there are now 50,000 links that would mean that there are 50,000 different URLs all originating from that one site and pointing to your site?
So, are you saying that these 50,000 individual URLs are actually identical copies of that one page which contains the link? If so, can you test whether new copies of the page are being generated from 404's by typing a new non-existent path and hitting enter? For example, if the URL of the page in question is http://www.netnewspublisher .com/strangepage.php, what happens if you change the address to http://www.netnewspublisher .com/anotherstrangepage.php and try to access the page? Do you simply get a not found error, or does it generate a new copy of the page with the new URL?
Alternatively, can you give us the actual URL where the original link was placed so we can take a look at it?
Sha
-
Have you seen any signs of algorithmic penalties or SERP fluctuation? If not... forget it. Yes I would ask to have it removed if it's a garbage link from an irrelevant site. But I would avoid the disavow tool and use it as a last result. I don't trust that tool as much as others seem to... You can usually do well without it too. If you start getting manual penalty warnings and your SERPs are dropping without any response from the webmasters... then it might be time to break out the disavow.
Whatever you do, DOCUMENT it! All emails, contacts, discoveries.. keep these documented in a separate folder in case you ever have to submit a re-inclusion request to Google.
That's all I can really say.
-
Actually, with 50,000 OSE might not be the best choice. I would keep an eye on your Google Webmaster Tools # of inbound links and perhaps monitor via http://ahrefs.com. There may be some other suggestions from the good folks here that I haven't thought of. Good luck!
-
Hi Dana,
Thanks for your response. Well, it's not paid. I had 8000 backlinks in WMT before, now I have 58,000. This is the biggest spike I've had before for sure (that I'm aware of) - so it is a big jump for us.
This apparently has been going for for a few weeks to a month - the post that was added to their site has linked (perhaps a blogroll is the best term) through all of their pages, creating all these links.
Still think that's "ok"?
What would I look for in OSE to see if we are "dropping over time"? Not sure what you are referring to?
Thanks! -
I wouldn't panic about this. Getting a sudden spike from a post that gets carried on a news site isn't really that unusual. Did you pay for the backlink? If not, I wouldn't worry about it. If you did pay for it, and now you're feeling a little queezy, then yes, have them take it down if it makes you feel better.
I would NOT use the disavow tool. The site is a PR4, you could do a lot worse than to get 50,000 links from a PR 4 site. I'd also take this in context with your overall link profile. If you only had 10 links and now you have 50,010...yes, this might be a problem, and I stress "might." If you have 100,000 and now have 150,000 it could still be a problem, but far less of one. Also, if you've had spikes in inbound links before, then no worries.This can happen for a number of natural reasons. For example, we have an industry publication that occasionally posts a ton of info about our products. It can add 20-30K links in one month, and they might all be gone the next month.
Honestly, I'd sit tight for a couple of days and watch OSE and Fresh Web explorer to see if they are dropping off over time. My guess is they will and anything that you may have done while in "panic" mode may end up hurting rather than helping.
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
-
Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded in Google webmaster tools.
In Google Webmaster Tools, I have a coverage issue. I am getting this error message: Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded. It gives the below blog post page as an example. Any idea how to resolve? At one time, I was using handl utm grabber, but the plugin is deactivated on my website. https://www.savacations.com/turrialba-costa-ricas-garden-city/?utm_source=deleted&utm_medium=deleted&utm_term=deleted&utm_content=deleted&utm_campaign=deleted&gclid=deleted5.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alancito0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
How do I add https version of site to Bing webmaster tools?
I could add my site to Google Webmaster tools with no problems, but when I try to add it in Bing webmaster tools it just redirects me to what I already have. Everything is staying the same but the switch from http to https. Anyone else experienced this? This is what I just received back from Bing and it doesn't seem right- I understand that you switched to the https version of your site and you're now trying to use the Site Move tool. However, in order to do this, you must verify the https version of your site first. You cannot do this because it just redirects you to the dashboard. We thank you for reporting this to us. We've investigated on this matter and can see that you're already put a redirect from the http to the https version of your site. We also checked the /BingSiteAuth.xml file and this also redirects to the https version. At this point, we suggest that you remove the current website (http version) that is verified through Bing Webmaster Tool and add your https domain. When done, use the Site Move tool. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite1 -
Why is my servers ip address showing up in Webmaster Tools?
In links to my site in Google Webmaster Tools I am showing over 28,000 links from an ip address. The ip address is the address that my server is hosted on. For example it shows 200.100.100.100/help, almost like there are two copies of my site, one under the domain name and one under the ip address. Is this bad? Or is it just showing up there and Google knows that it is the same since the ip and domain are from the same server?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0