Competitor's 'hidden' links harming my site?
-
Hi everyone, I'm new to both Moz & seo, and am attempting to tackle our site's issues after being hit by panda / penguin, so would be grateful for any advice offered.
I bought a website 3 years ago after the previous company that ran it went into administration. Having bought the website, it became apparent that the employees of the previous company had copied the entire site content, and relaunched it with a new look / brand. Over the last 3 years they've rewritten much of the content, but there remains a lot of links from their site back to ours which have had the anchor text stripped out, and point to images on our site which have since been removed, example below...
<a href="http://www.MyCompany.com/catalog/images/filename.pdf" target="<a class="attribute-value">_blank</a>"><strong>strong>a>
What I'm trying to understand is whether the 404 errors being returned by the broken links, and the presence of 'hidden' links on their site, is likely to reflect badly on our site or theirs?
I'm not interested in outing anyone here, and I realise the standard recommendation for these kinds of situations is to write to the company telling them to remove the offending content, but if at all possible I'd prefer to fix our site by improving content & links etc, rather than 'force' them to take action and inadvertently improve their own site's content / rankings.
As I say, all advice gratefully received
-
Thanks Mike, much appreciated!
-
DO NOT just blindly Disavow Links. The tool is really only intended for use when you have received an Unnatural Links warning or you have a massively spammy link profile that you're preemptively taking care of. Disavowing Links improperly can wind up hurting you.
If another site is linking to pages on your site that don't exist then the correct course of action is the 404. You could always try contacting them to tell them about the broken links pointing to your site and ask if they can be fixed or removed them as needed. Ultimately the 404s on your site are not harming you and they are also not benefiting you via any link equity because your page does not exist so there is nothing to pass the equity on to.
If you actually receive a decent level of traffic via those links or if a large number of valuable links are pointing to the 404'd pages, THEN you may want to consider redirecting somewhere else. If the other site is a spammy mess or you have 1000s of crap links pointing to you, then I'd say you might need to do a Disavow. But currently it would seem to me that you could let the pages 404 and get on with your day.
-
Many thanks for the response Mat. I'm in the middle of preparing a disavow file, having spent the last month trying to get rubbishy links removed from suspect directories....a whole other world of pain
I guess what I'm trying to understand is whether our competitor's links are likely to be harming or helping us?
If the 404's and hidden links are either de-valuing their site, or benefiting ours by passing link juice, then I see that as good news for us.
If however, the 404's / hidden links reflect badly on our site, then I'd certainly want to get them disavowed quick smart.
-
Hi Sandy & welcome to the wonderful world of SEO!
Sounds like an annoying situation. It smacks a little of either dishonesty or bad sales agreements too, but that is another issue entirely.
Luckily Google has recently made this very very easy to deal with. They have introduced a tools to "disavow links" - literally tell them which links you don't want them to take in to account when dealing with your website. You can do this on a per website basis, so if you disavow all links from the competitor site it will stop any of those taking effect.
(Note - one idea might be to do this on a link by link basis so that you can keep one or two that might be helping you! However that is getting a little more in depth)
In order to do this you need to first get your site registered on google webmaster tools if you have not done so already. See here : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
You then want to disavow the links : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
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
-
Thousands of 404's showing up from Wordpress Blog!?!?
Hey guys, Have recently seen thousands of 404 errors thrown up from my wordpress blog in Google Search Console. These are URL's trying to link (i'm not sure where from) to other parts of my site, but they are not relative to the site root... infact they are a mix of random folders/subfolders and pages on my site. E.g: http://www.MYSITE.co.uk/blog/how-to/driving-to-the-alps/attachment/2013-land-rover-range-rover-evoque-front-snow-1/st-martin-de-belleville/chalet-st-martin-de-belleville/ski-holidays/ski-holidays/summer/st-martin-de-belleville/summer/your-stay-st-martin-de-belleville.html This is a link to a picture on the blog: http://www.MYSITE.co.uk/blog/how-to/driving-to-the-alps/attachment/2013-land-rover-range-rover-evoque-front-snow-1/ And the rest of it is finding it's own way there! Any ideas? This is Wordpress by the way. Cheers, Paul. p.s. I got no help from the Wordpress community so am posting here! p.p.s I forgot to mention that MOZ is reporting these issues too, but running Screaming Frog does NOT show any 404's at all on my site...
On-Page Optimization | | SnowTrippin0 -
Can Javascript Links Be Used to Reduce Links per Page?
We are trying to reduce the number of links per page, so for the low-value footer links we are considering coding them as javascript links. We realize Google can read java, but the goal is to reduce level of importance assigned to those internal links. Would this be a valid approach? So the question is would converting low-value footer links to js like below help reduce the number of links per page in google's eyes even though we're reasonably sure they can read javascript. <a <span="" class="html-tag">href</a><a <span="" class="html-tag">="</a><a class="html-attribute-value html-external-link" target="_blank">javascript:void(0);</a>" data-footer-link="/about/about">About Us
On-Page Optimization | | Jay-T0 -
Does 'XXX' in Domain get filtered by Google
I have a friend that has xxx in there domain and they are a religious based sex/porn addiction company but they don't show up for the queries that they are optimized against. They have a 12+ year old domain, all good health signs in quality links and press from trusted companies. Google sends them adult traffic, mostly 'trolls' and not the users they are looking for. Has anyone experienced domain word filtering and have a work around or solution? I posted in the Google Webmaster help forums and that community seems a little 'high on their horses' and are trying to hard to be cool. I am not too religious and don't necessarily support the views of the website but just trying to help a friend of a friend with a topic that I have never encountered. here is the url: xxxchurch.com Thanks, Brian
On-Page Optimization | | Add3.com0 -
Which pages on my site should I back link to
The majority of the back links I have been creating link directly to our home page and to the store page. Is this the best approach or should I be trying to spread the links throughout our site to include product categories and subcategories etc?
On-Page Optimization | | Hardley0 -
Multiple H1's
Hi, My SEOMOZ report states that I'm using two H1's on most of my pages, for example on this page: http://www.absolutepower.nl/eiwitshakes/proteine-shakes/ I only see one though. Anyone who could clarify this? Thanks! Jasper
On-Page Optimization | | Japking0 -
Do footer links apply too many on-page links?
We tend to put a a lot of links in the footers of some of our websites (e.g. www.AlohaWhistler.com). Our CAMPAIGNS report is showing that several pages on such sites have "too many on-page links". We understand the logic that having more than 100 links per page is "too much". Does this also apply to footer links?
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0 -
Is it good to have dashes in url's
When using keywords in url's for internal pages, isn't it a good idea to use dashes or underscores in the url between the keywords?
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0