Removing inbound Spam Links
-
Hello,
Last February one of my clients websites was delisted. It turns out that some time ago that had attempted to launch a social network along time lines of ning. The project had fallen apart of the was still up. At some point spammers found it and started using it as part of a link farm. Once it was discovered, the subdomain it was posted on was removed and the website returned to search within 2 weeks.
Last week, the website disappeared again OSE shows that in the last 2 months the website has got 2000 (There are about 16,000 total spam links) additional spam links now pointing and the root domain. On top of that, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting about 15,000 404 errors.
I have blocked Google from crawling the path where the path were the spam pages used to be. If there a way to block the 1000s of inbound spam links?
-
Hi Mike,
Just wondering how this turned out, and if you're still looking for advice. Your question came through when we had a hiccup with the Q&A section and didn't get the visibility that it normally would, which is why you didn't have much in the way of answers.
-
There is no way to block tons of spam links except moving to a new site. Rand Fishkin made a great point in the recent webinar about finding opportunities with Open Site Explorer that if you have a strong link profile then spam links will look unnatural. But if your link profile is low quality, then the spam links will look like part of your linkbuilding strategy.
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
-
Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
Technical SEO | | AliMac261 -
Does reciprocal linking carry any value?
No matter how much I research this one, there's no definite answer and there's a lot of contradictions. Basically we're looking to launch an article on 24 expert interior design tips for 2015. Each tip is submitted from a different interior designer we have chosen who have a reputable, trusted website. The main goal for this article is to generate various inbound links for our site from the designers and it will help to create engagement on social media. Although if we're giving out links to these designers for their contributions, the inbound links we receive in return will be little or no value as this is reciprocal linking? Some say this is okay as it's completely natural within the blog posts, others say to avoid it as it can be seen as an obsolete practice to deceive Google. Does anyone have any more information on this and how it should be carried out? Would a better process be to link to their social media accounts? Rather than reciprocal linking? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Is it possible to export Inbound Links in a CSV file categorized by Linking Root Domains ?
Hi, I am performing an analysis of the total inbound links to my homepage and I would like to have the total amount of inbound links categorized by the Linking root domains. For example, the Open Site explorer does offer the feature to show you the Linking Root Domains to your page. Then when you click on the first Linking Root Domain, it also shows you the Top Linking Pages ( Which means all the pages that link to your page from this particular top level domain) Now I would like to export this data to a CSV file, but open site explorer only exports the total amount of top level linking domains. Does anyone has a solution to this problem ? Thank you very much for the help in advance!
Technical SEO | | Feweb0 -
Reciprocal links and nofollow tag
What happens if I link to a site using the nofollow tag and they are linking back to me with a dofollow link? Will it give me as much power and link juice as if it was a one way link (to me) or will Google discount the link because it's reciprocal?
Technical SEO | | Livet0 -
External Links Discrepancy
Hello folks Apologies for my ignorance, but a SEO novice here… One of our competitors boasts over 300,000 external links, however when we analysed their links via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org we can only see around 10,000 in there “Number of Domains Linking to this Page” section. Can someone please assist and point out something which I assume is painfully obvious! Cheers, Chris
Technical SEO | | footyfriends0 -
Removing some of the indexed pages from my website
I am planning to remove some of the webpages from my website and these webpages are already indexed with search engine. Is there any way by which I need to inform search engine that these pages are no more available.
Technical SEO | | ArtiKalra0 -
What loss of value would this link experience?
What loss of value would this link experience? If the link is actually a link to the from site that is 301'd to your site like this example below: i.e., www.domain.com/29834?=www.yourdomain.com My thought is that simply because you're going through a redirect (In this case a 301) you will lose slight value there. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and reasoning on any other affects if any (direct or indirect) you think it may have.
Technical SEO | | Webfor1