Someone's been spamming my client...
-
Hi all
Bit of a strange one....doing a backlink analysis for my client's website (a handmade oak furniture supplier) and noticed there are about 13,000 spam backlinks to the domain from dozens of websites for keywords related to replica watches. Odd! Obviously neither us nor them have made these backlinks.
Would a disavow be enough action to take in this case? I would rather the client not see a penalty in WMT for spam backlinks for this. Not sure how, or why, we have acquired this links. I can only think someone has been trying to do a spot of negative seo against the site
Thanks
Carl
-
Thanks, Michael.
have put in the disavow so hopefully that's fine. One would hope that Google could tell that a furniture site wouldn't intentionally spam for jewellery related terms!
-
Hi Carl,
I do a ton of penalty recovery work, so I've got some experience here. I would disavow those, whether there appears to be a penalty or not. What's probably happening is that your client has a Penguin penalty for specific keywords...but, you don't really care, since you don't ever care to rank for those terms anyway. But what you want to prevent is that mass of backlinks causing a manual review and then getting a penalty that takes time and effort and loss of traffic to get past.
What might have happened, by the way, is that the client's site might have been hacked at one point to do a redirect to a site that actually is selling replica watches. The technique there is to take a site with a decent backlink profile and redirect a page on the site by injecting Javascript or a meta refresh into the source. Then, building a mass of spammy links to get that page to rank because of anchor text and drive traffic through the victim site to the site that's selling whatever. I've seen this done to WP sites (including one of mine...sigh) before. Typically it's a short-run strategy, as pretty quickly the site owner realizes their site is compromised, and fixes it. In the case of my site, there was a server in China that reran its hacking script to reinstall the redirect crap every 30 minutes or so. So I'd fix it, and half an hour later, it'd be back. Took me a long time to figure out how to block the vulnerability they were exploiting.
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 does a business have a link back where I can't see the anchor text?
So, I'm running competitor websites through Open Site Explorer and following the link from Moz to where their link is coming from. It has the anchor text 'Christmas Gifts'. When I go to that page there is no mention of this anchor text. No mention of that persons website. No display ad's that could be providing that link. How is this link pointing to their page?
Link Building | | Byron_Bay_Gifts0 -
Paid Subscription Directory with Low Moz Open Site Explorer Spam Score
Looking at different backlinks of my competitors and came across a few directories that require a 1 time payment for the year. Is this considered the same as paying for a link or would this be considered something like getting a listing on your local Chamber of Commerce site? Also, I put the site through Moz's Open Site Explorer and it had PA:22 and DA:20, which is nothing incredible, but also had a spam score of 2. So would a site like this hurt my rankings? I know that's a good spam score, so I am a little confused with what to do. Here is the site: http://scl-online.net/en.htm Thanks for any help! Love this site.
Link Building | | aua0 -
How important are 'anchor' text links now
We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
Link Building | | nick-name123
I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there. What's your recent experience?0 -
I have well over 110 identical backlinks of widely varying quality - is it worth taking the page they're linking to down?
The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.' We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links. Has anyone dealt with this before?
Link Building | | travis-taylor0 -
Links from spam sites
Hi! Thank you in advance for your help. Few months ago we suffered a content spam attack. Now, We have discovered that we have imbound links pointing the spam content from external spam and untrusted sites. Could be this affect our ranking? In this case... How can we notify to Google that we refuse these imbound links? Cheers, Luis
Link Building | | delcerro0 -
Should my client stop their large-scale spammy link building immediately or taper off slowly?
I'm working with a company that that is doing a lot of black-hat link building, and they got hit by Penguin 2.0. Should they stop all spammy link building immediately or slowly, over time? Is it possible that stopping all the spammy link building immediately will hurt the site? Thank you for reading!
Link Building | | DA20130 -
Buying Branded URL's
Hello A competitor of mine has a bunch of branded terms that they purchased, with backlinks point to their main site, is there a specific reason they do this? If I analyze the links on the "branded url" theres it has very little juice/authority? Is it worth it to do this? ex www.siteCOUPON.com. or www.mainsite.biz I have a .ca and something similar to our site re-directing through register.com in Iframe. But would they just be using those terms because it has high search volume? Would this help me in anyway? Thank you!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Linkbuilding for Clients? Do I create new email account for outreach?
Hey Guys, So in the past when I would build links for a client I would create a new email account or have them create a new email account for their website which I can use for email outreach for building links. Also I would try to use their twitter user accounts to get in contact with other niche bloggers for a potential link back or a social mention. Is this how you guys suggest I should continue going about building links for a client? Or do you suggest using my email (agency email) or a random gmail account for email outreach? Thanks
Link Building | | asimahme0