Detected a bad site linking to you? what to do?
-
I have detected on linkdetox site that had stolen a face photo of a smile from a star my website and is linking to the page.
I uploade a disavow with that site very bad domain. But my question is if should a take that picture of my site or rename so the link goes to 404.
It is not an important or relevant page for my website
-
There's no harm in disavowing the link but it's probably not necessary. The point of the disavow tool is to allow webmasters to ask Google to not count links that were made for SEO purposes. If you had placed this here so that you could increase your rankings then sure, I'd disavow it. It's unlikely that it's a negative SEO tactic...not with just one link. But, if you had a pile of these and you felt it was negative SEO then I'd disavow.
Every site, even the ones with the cleanest backlink profiles have bizarre links that appear like this. I would just ignore it.
If, however, you are trying to get it removed because you don't like the idea of your face residing on a page filled with porn, then if you can't contact the webmaster, you can try reporting the site to its host. Sometimes the host will remove spam pages/sites.
-
That's really helpful. Thanks Jeff.
-
You can always email -
postmaster@
and/or
webmaster@
Those two should go through to some one who looks after the site. Disavow will be enough to stop the link causing you any problems.
-
This bad site has no contact information. Impossible to reach the webmaster to ask for removal.
I am wounder if the disavow will be ok. But in this case i will rename the page and delete the photos.
-
Agree with Peter & Jeff,
If you're really upset with a link you can disavow it if you want to do it correctly you should email them prior, but if you jsut want it done, add the domain to the disavow list and job done.
-
FYI, Google's Matt Cutts has broken from the previously stated mantra on the disavow tool, and now is encouraging Webmasters to use it if they are worried if a link is from a bad domain, due to poor SEO (or someone else trying to hurt your site by creating bad links):
-
I would ask the site owner to remove the photo and link. If that fails then if the page is not important to you then it will be simpler to remove it than wait for the disavow to take effect.
Peter
-
I have more than 3000 original pictures on my website with the water and they are constantly stolen. I dont mind about that.
In this case is a porn site. On other cases among with good sites there are sites that i dont want the link of the credit and i delete the linked picture the link remains but goes to a 404.
I mean deleting the photo because i community advice deleting or rename the page i wild do that also with the disavow.
What would you do?
-
So a site is using a photo from your site but giving you credit for the photo by giving you a link?
How are you sure it's a "very bad domain" ?
The disavow will be fine it tells Google you don't want that site linked to your in anyway. If you don't want people stealing your images you could look into water marks.
-
Hi Dario
The first thing you should really do it contact the site who created the bad link and ask them to remove it and the photo if you are not happy about that also. If they are unresponsive then sending in a Disavow should really be done after speaking to the offending site's owner.
If though, as you say, the page is not important to you, then if the above doesn't work then yes, just remove the page.
Peter
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
-
Clean up bad links or start again?
I am looking to take on a new client but when I looked at their current backlinks they have 420 low quality spammy irrelevant backlinks, all with keyword anchor text and no branded links at all. The site is still ranking well at the moment but I don't expect this to be the case long-term. Would you try and remove the old links and then disavow any that you can't remove or would you start again on a new domain? Not sure which way to play it! Thanks! Karen
Link Building | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Google Disavow Tool: which kind of links do harm and which do not harm my site?
Recently a guy asked at GoogleWebmasterHelp: Should I be worried if a couple of sites that I don't want to be associated with are linking to me? In this case there have been 2 porn sites linking to his site... that clear.
Link Building | | inlinear
But my question is if for example sites like e.g. : http://www.linguee.de Linguee is one of the best dictionary sites where you can search for phrases and receive common translation examples which are very helpful. Liguee set some links to my site because they take texts usually from multilingual sites to gather examples.
A dictionary site does not have nothing to do with my business but also I don't consider that this might my harm my site? What do you think?0 -
Back linking to t foreign sites
One of our major competitors seems to be linking to an Asian speaking website that has a blog/product review formant. I was wondering how they are achieving this. Are there any non English /Asian sites worth submitting to and what is the best way to go about this if English is the only language you speak! And of course is it worth while doing this from an SEO perspective.
Link Building | | Hardley10 -
Can these unnatural links from a site that was hacked hurt me?
After reading the article http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012 I decided to do some investigating to see if I to have suffered from link penalties. After using site explorer I found a ton of over optimized unnatural links from jnjbtw.com and other pharmacy sites. See screen shot: My site is a website about kayak fishing we clearly have nothing to do with pharmacy, doctors or drugs. I know similar questions have been asked before about spam sites linking to you and if they affect you or not but this is about how overly optimized the links that are going to my site are. Would this flag penguin to add a penalty to my website? Any idea how jnjbtw.com has all these links to my site were they hacked?
Link Building | | mr_w0 -
I have 87,636 links to my website from a single domain, is this bad?
Hi guys I have 87,636 links from one website, of which 75,189 of those link to my homepage using my website name as the anchor. Another has 29,811 links back to my website, again the majority of the links using my website name as the anchor. Is this a bad thing? Let me explain how this has happened - a company by the name of Daylife uses our RSS feed and distributes this to hundreds of their clients, which include indiatimes, usatoday, dallasnews etc, now I noticed that the majority of these websites all link back to our website with the same anchor text used several times on a single page. Attached is an example. Would this be a bad thing seen as the majority of these links have the same anchor text and link to my homepage? Looking at my GWT there is an estimated 183,373 backlinks that are all like this. Our traffic has dropped since Mr Panda hit and I am trying to find out if this could be adding to the problem. Thank you for you time links.jpg
Link Building | | hstdigital0 -
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.loveandlucky.com/
On FEB I got a message on my Google Webmaster Tools saying "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.loveandlucky.com/" How can I know what inbound links Google considered as unnatural? thanks.
Link Building | | cardif0 -
Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?
We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5... We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process. I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us. Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.
Link Building | | donford0 -
Where to link?
Hi I need to gert this page up in the rankings http://www.kerryblu.co.uk/wedding-headbands-70-c.asp but am getting no where fast. When applying for links should I direct them to this page or to the homepage, and let them filter through. Thanks
Link Building | | Yorkie0