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.
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
-
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche.
It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing.
They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page.
The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text.
The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart).
The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords.
There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site.
Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites.
Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop.
???
-
Hi,
I'm completely agree with Andy because if a spammy link is nofollow then there is no reason to worry.
"When a link is disavowed, the next time that Google crawls that link they essentially add an invisible nofollow tag to the link."
You can also read this @ http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2330944/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-googles-disavow-tool
Thanks
-
Hi John,
As these are nofollow, I wouldn't worry about this at all. A nofollow flag is essentially what you get when you disavow a site through Webmaster Tools (Search Console).
There is no harm in disavowing these links if you feel there is a potential to switch to dofollow, but by the sounds of things, this probably wouldn't happen - even if it did, it sounds like a spammy technique that wouldn't cause you issues. Google would probably see hundreds (thousands?) of links all of a sudden appear with a dofollow tag and just ignore them.
-Andy
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
-
Are backlinks from the Episode Description field on Spotify "follow" or "no follow"?
Are backlinks from the Episode Description field on Spotify "follow" or "no follow"?!
Link Building | | FLLocal0 -
Can Foreign Language Backlinks Be Valuable?
I've done a lot of searching on this subject, but I keep seeing conflicting answers. Are backlinks from foreign language websites valuable? For example, a travel website in English picks up a couple backlinks in Indonesian language (and other languages) from foreign sites that have a DA of 60-70 or higher. The topic is partially related, but the language is totally different. Would those links still be valuable for the English website's DA? Has this ever been answered conclusively? Thanks
Link Building | | David56751 -
Backlinks from different TLD's impact
Hi MOZ'ers, I'm wondering what the impact of different TLD backlinks is for same language pages. For example: we're on a website that has a German national TLD .de. We're earning backlinks and they are coming from .de as well as .ch (Switzerland) or .at (Austria) pages. What would be more desirable, and how big would you consider the difference? Looking forward to hearing your responses 🙂 Justen
Link Building | | Justen_H0 -
PR1 and PR2 backlinks
We're doing some content marketing. I've heard that it is a good idea to target even PR1 and PR2 sites (small DA sites). I'm concerned about these sites disappearing after a few months, as we've found that losing a backlink can sting a bit and be worse than never having it. Though this isn't as big a deal any more. Anyways, can somebody say when a PR1/PR2 backlink would be appropriate to go after? Some of them would be easy and if it's appropriate I'd like to include them. So far they would only pass our standards if they are Above PR0 Look like a white hat, quality site from the outside Have a clean backlink profile Look like they're going to stick around Successful Social Media Accounts a plus What are you guys' criteria for including these sites? Do you gain value from them?
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Backlinks From Scraper Sites - Should I Disavow Them?
I'm going through all the links (hopefully) to my website and I've found so many links from site scrapers. For instance: http://www.fzccg.com/cmsteam/dvbbs/boke.asp?zkhod76681.showtopic.148760.html ... which links to my site with anchor text "abercrombie uk How To Change Your Wiper Blades" It is surely not realistic to think that I can contact all the scraper site owners. So what should I do with this kind of links?
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Backlinks From Press Releases - Should I Disavow Them?
About 2 months ago, I published a press release through PRWEB with a link back to my website of course. Now it must have been one of those morning where the coffee wasn't strong enough as my website already has a Penguin penalty I'm trying to get lifted. The intent wasn't to spam the web but rather to gain some traction in the business hosting world. Like I've said, the coffee must've been too weak that morning as it didn't even cross my mind to see if I could "nofollow" the links in the press release. I just hit the submit button... As I'm in the process of submitting a disavow links request to Google, I'm wondering if I should include the URLs to copies of those press releases? I mean, there's no way I can find all those links as it was submitted not long ago. Google and link tools will keep discovering other copies of the PR for months to come probably.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Trading Backlinks a good idea?
New to the "backlinking" party. Wondering if its 'good practice' to trade links with other websites within a like-industry. We've been receiving a lot of emails from other websites asking us to trade links. Is this a good link building practice anymore? Thanks!
Link Building | | asa-php0 -
Adding backlinks in old articles?
I am trying to get a few more links to get a few of my pages to rank and I am thinking about adding some more backlinks on my own site on some of the old blog articles as well as some of my other related blogs. My question is - is it still beneficial to link from these articles that are say 1 year old or more, or would it be far more valuable to write new articles on the blog containing those same links?
Link Building | | bloggingyourpassion0