Never ending new links and our rank continues to plumet
-
HI everyone,
I've been having an issue with a severe drop in rankings (#2 to #36ish). All of my technicals seem to be ok, however I seem to be getting my images hotlinked (which I have killed in nginx) from these spam like pages that pull and link to an image on my site, then link again with a " . " for the anchor. Even more strange is that these pages are titled and marked up with the same titles and target key words as my site. For example, I just got a link yesterday from a site leadoptimiser - d o tt- me which is IMO a junk site. The title of the page is the same as one of my pages, the page is pulling in images relevant to my page, however the image sources are repos EXCEPT for 2 images from my site which are hotlinked to my pages image and then an additional <a>.</a> link is placed to my website.
I have gotten over 1500 of these links in the past few months from all different domains but the website (layout etc) is always the same. I have been slowly disavowing some of them, but do not want to screw up anything in case these links are already being discounted by G as spam and not affecting my rank. The community seems to be really split on the necessity of disavowing links like these. Because of these links, according to Ahrefs, my backlink profile is 38% anchor text of "." .
Everything else checks out in my own review as well as Moz tools and Ahrefs with very high quality scores etc. Webmasters is fine, indexing is fine, pagespeed insights is in the 90's, ssl is A+.
I've never had to deal with what seems to be an attack of this size.
Thanks.
-
Hi Nikki Thanks for the response.
I too am under the impression that with penguin being live that big G had figured out how to diminish value from spam links and it was no longer an issue. On the flip side The only real thing that's changed over the past 6 months for us is a massive increase in these spam links.
I will try to just bullet out a response so I don't write a novel
- Yes I have checked if it's hacked and it is not.
- I have no manual actions listed
- I did just look for weird traffic sources, and out of the 48 that I do have, the only weird ones are from urls with the spammy links.
- Also to note, our ranking has not dropped in any other search engines, only google. In fact we have improved in Bing and Yahoo.
- Another note. I have disavowed a few porn backlinks we have gotten from sites like gay.interracialsexcinema among others.
- In the past 7 days I have gotten 33 new links from sites like zenlaser.c0oo - thefreestates.commm prowp.neeet and lilucia02.coooommmm slash cantilever-coffee-table dot html.
- Many of the domains that are linking to us are literally created (whois lookup) 15 - 30 days before we get a link. All domains are registered private (except one that i caught just before going private and it was in china) and 90% of them are hiding behind cloudflare.
- An annoying thing is that over 90% of these links are on pages that the url path is the actual same url path or title tag that we are using on our page as well as the h1's and h2's with a "." anchor or the actual path anchor linking back to either our page or an image on our site.
I updated the disavow a few weeks ago but have not added all domains to it as I wanted to knock it down little by little. I have been hesitant to do a one shot one kill approach as I want to be cautious in the event that I make a mistake and cause an even larger issue.
Any further thoughts?
Thanks again!
-
Hello there, according to this article by Rand - https://moz.com/blog/what-if-my-competitors-point-spammy-links-to-my-site Google is pretty good at determining spammy links and if you have such pointing to your site, they should be able to discount these links. However, your site is clearly being affected by this as shown by your rankings drop.
Have you checked that your site isn't hacked? http://www.isithacked.com/
Have you checked that you don't have any manual actions on your search console?
Have you checked whether you have some traffic coming from weird locations? I ask because there was a time when a site we're working on published a harmless blog on children and the use of snapchat and there was a spike of visitors searching for explicit materials landing on that page. As a result, we suddenly had a ton of backlinks with explicit anchors that go to that page. Their rankings went down. The page was deleted though and all went back to normal.
This article might also help you: https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo
The author, however, said that for an attack with the same scale as yours, it is a good idea to audit your links regularly and submit a disavow file. Hope this helps.
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
-
Low quality links
Hi I have found a lot of links from a majestic report (not found on moz open site explorer). inwhich I have found lots of links from 2010 and possibly earlier which either I can't get hold of the webmaster. Is a disavow the right way to go if I can't get them removed myself? Also I have noticed that there are a lot of free directories listing new pages from our site and I am concerned Google are going to find these. I surpose there is nothing I can do about this, does anyone have any recommendations.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Ranking without SEO?
We have a client that we've been doing white-hat SEO for for over 3 years and they've always been number 1 in Google for all their targeted keywords. This year, their competition has been ranking above them and our client has been pushed towards the bottom of the first page. After thorough research, we discovered that this competitor is doing no SEO at all, just regular PR which our client is also doing. Our client is even spending money in Adwords and their competition isn't. Can anyone explain how a website that does zero SEO can magically be ranked at the top now and above our competitor who we're doing everything possible for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOhughesm0 -
Please Please Please help (not ranking any more)..
my website is: www.tcclinic.com it was a static website which was ranking well. total about 400 pages. I also had my blog hosted on another domain (www.shopify.com) about 800 pages. I was told if I bring the blog to my domain, then I will have more content on my site and will rank even better, and also was advised to switch to WordPress. so about two weeks ago I did the following changes: I moved the site and blogs to my domain (tcclinic.com). and switch to WordPress. total of 1200 pages Since it was changing to WordPress all the URLs was changed and named differently. I did 301 redirect for all the pages. all the URLs now contains "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" which is the name of my clinic example: www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-liposuction-surgery/ www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-tummy-tuck/ most of my pages are indexed by google now BUT Now as the result I am not ranking anywhere in first 5 to 6 pages. I am not sure what is happening. have I been hit by a penguin, panda or any other black and white animal ? if this is the case how do I know this happened. Haveing "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" in all the URLs is considered as keyword stuffing ? moving 800 pages of blog to my domain caused it ? (blogs are removed from shopify.com) Is it just the matter of time to come back to the first page? Please let me know what you think.... Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Link Audit: How do I decide what is a good or bad link?
I am conducting a link audit for one of my formerly high-ranking pages. But despite reading quite a bit on the issue, I am still quite confused as to how to decide whether to keep or remove a link. Some links come from directories and social bookmarking sites. I know that generally speaking, you do not want to be on these types of sites, but what if their domain authorities, pageranks, and mozTrusts scores are good? For example, here is one of my links for "envelopes": http://www.folkd.com/detail/www.jampaper.com%2FEnvelopes The page itself has no MozRank, MozTrust, or links but the domain has an authority of 88, a MozRank of 6.41, a mozTrust of 6.31. Should I be looking on a page level or domain level basis? It also has over 5 million links, with over two million of those being external followed links. Is the high quantity of links a warning sign? I also used a free online tool (thesitevalue.com) to determine how much traffic the domain gets. Apparently it receives over 350,000 unique visits daily, so it must be useful to people. This, combined with the fact that we've received 5 visits from the link over the last year (not a lot, but something), makes me believe that the link's intent wasn't purely to "trick" Google. Despite this, I still have a feeling the link could be considered low-quality based on the domain's appearance. Similarly, some of our links are coming from domains named linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com. Is it safe to assume these are harmful links strictly because of their names? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Links to partner sites
I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0 -
What's been your experience with profile link-building?
What have your experiences been? Short Term? Long Term? There isn't a lot written about it, and I'm wondering where it falls in the order of things. I was very hesitant to jump in, but have launched a few campaigns, both for local geo targeting phrases, and national accounts. Surprisingly, I've seen a surge in rankings, but also wonder how short lived they will be. I've noticed the links still don't come up in tools like open site explorer, but I'm able to find them when searching for the unique username I used while building the profiles. The sites I'm listing on have no relevance to industry, unless by chance, although the PR's I'm using are all 4 or higher. Is this considered gray hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skycriesmary720 -
Using Canonical Tags to Boost Lead Form Ranking
I presently have a number of whitepapers that bring traffic to our site. If a visitor elects to download the whitepaper they are taken to a lead form with an abstract of the whitepaper. The abstract is present because the visitor may or may not have come to the lead form directly. I imagine this would be a "no no," but how do you feel about placing a canoncial tag on a whitepaper that points to the lead form w/ abstract? The obvious idea being to take the umph of a whitepaper to direction search visitors directly to the lead form.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shoffy0