My site backlinking search came back with 19k results, that's WAY above the usual number
-
Looking into the results I found over 18,000 instances of the same 2 websites having links in every single page, staging version of their site.
How do I get rid of these? Are they damaging my SEO?
-
I'm glad I helped.
As these are sites you closely work with, you can notify them regarding the issue and their webmaster can look over the issue, as excessively generated links do hurt their site even more than yours. As for the links being do-follow that would be beneficial to your website is they weren't so excessive, so no need to mention that.
On the pages that you can't find the link, try opening "inspect element" or right-click on the page and click "view page source" and then find (ctrl+f) your site name.
If your URL shows up, then it means that the link is in a hidden section of the site. If it doesn't show up it means that the link has been removed but Moz hasn't crawled the site yet to update it.
If the links seem too spammy for you and the webmaster doesn't fix them, then you can disavow the domains until a later time when the issues are resolved.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com -
Hi Daniel,
Very helpful answer thank you - I had a good look through and was able to spot the obviously spammy ones and will be submitting them to Google Search disavow. However, that probably only makes up 200-300 of the 19K+ inbound links.
I think I can identify the main cause for the huge amount of links are from the same two domains. Quite literally, from rows 200 - 18,000 these two websites show up in various different ways, e.g. Staging sites etc. These are actually sites we work closely with. think it's an overlooked issue on their part.
I'm guessing I can't fix that from my end. Is it worth notifying them that there seems to be an issue with their website?
Also on a linked note - one of the sites for example, has the URL as an image link on EVERY page, now I feel as though that is a poor design choice on their part, or they are not using nofollow. Am I right in thinking I need to inform their webmaster that their links are creating negative SEO?
In some cases I followed the link from the data export sheet to the linking page, but couldn't find a link to our site anywhere. What might be the cause of that?
-
As there are 19K new links to your site that appeared out of nowhere, most certainly they are spam links, that could be done by a competitor as a form of negative SEO. It can be very harmful to your site and lower your rankings or ever de-index you from google and bing.
What you should do is disavow the backlinks. In order to remove the spam links, you need to check all the backlinks one by one. Moz Spam Score is a very useful tool to filter some of the links, but mainly it's manual work and you need to be very careful not to disavow the positive links that your site already has. You can read more about it at my answer here: Advise Help on Bad Link Removals
If you need any help with the disavow process, feel free to let us know.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com
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
-
Other sites linking to our site through sitewide footers
Hello, We have other sites linking to our site through images in sitewide footers, resulting in a link from every page of each site. Those sites are not owned by us and they decided to link to us on their own. They usually link to us as their "sponsor" or "partner", sponsor as in sponsor of some event and partner as in we sometimes work together on joint initiatives. I've searched Moz forum and other articles, but haven't been able to find an answer to this question. We'd like to make sure Google doesn't consider it to be spammy and we don't get any sort of penalty. Should we ask them not to link to us through those images in a sitewide footer or ask them to simply add "nofollow"? We don't want to remove those links if they are not considered to be harmful and removing them will hurt our DA/PA.
Link Building | | marynau0 -
Gained a number of new 'do-follow' links - Good or Bad?
So, my client's site is on a subdomain of the parent site and there were a number of links previously pointing to the subdomain site from the main site which were all no-follow so were purely for referral/traffic benefits. Around the end of February, the main site changed all the links to 'do-follow'. Is this likely to have caused the decline we've recently seen in organic traffic to the site and a drop in rankings? I'm curious as to how that could have affected the site as we didn't know and have only just found out about it but I'm not sure how to show that it's led to a decline. Any help is appreciated!
Link Building | | soapmed1 -
Spam sites republish a article with 'money keyword' anchor text and causing a pentalty.. how to prevent.
About 6 weeks ago we had a DA50 / PA50 homepage site publish an article on our company which included a money keyword anchor text to our site.. Great. Once this happened we shot up the SERP for this term, but quite a few other spam / crawler sites seem to automatically republish everything this DA50 site publishes. This didnt seem to be a problem up until a couple of weeks ago, but now with the new penguin update it seems we have been slapped with a penalty, for having 20 sites all with the same article and anchor text. (the rest of our profile is pretty natural, so this is the main culprit for the penalty) Im now going to write to all the webmasters apart from the DA50 site, and ask them to remove the article, failing that ill have to disavow them. For future reference what is there a way of avoiding this issue of spam sites republishing a propper article and triggering a penalty.
Link Building | | jpeg800 -
Link Building/ Off page strategy. Do we have already have a 'hook' or should we create more specific content.
Hi Guys. As part of our link building campaign I've been creating a database of people who might link to our site. We're a diary company. So I’ve been focusing on people interested in stationary, paper, pens, etc who also blog. We have a unique product at TOAD diaries, it's essentially an online tool that allows you to design your own diary. You can choose size, colour, duration, etc and also personalise the cover. So the product (we think) is very compelling and interesting. First of it’s kind. Check it out here: http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/designer/diary/a5/everyday-diary-week-across-2-pages/coil-bound/toad-plum/12/1/8/2014 So.... question. Do you think that the site itself would considered 'good content'? i.e) It's already a very interesting idea that's worth linking to. Or Would it be better to create a high quality engaging blog (with info-graphics etc) that really speaks to that community of people? Say, about our love of the humble paper diary, and why it's still useful. Then use that blog content to try get links? You thoughts would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance. Isaac.
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
Does Adding Affiliate ID's to Link Affects it's Value
Hello, I have a question about adding Affiliate ID's to links. I receive a DoFollow link to my website with an affiliate ID in order to track the leads and the traffic that comes from each affiliate link/website. does this link (with the affiliate ID) pass Juice from the affiliate website? (I use canonical link element on my website pages)? how does Google deals with links with affiliate IDs ? is adding Affiliate ID to links reduces it's value?
Link Building | | JonsonSwartz0 -
SEOmoz's ranking of links on competitor question..
I am Perplexed about SEOmoz crawl for new links on a competitors website. When I looked at a company who received very high ranks for the links...on SEOMoz...such as. 95, 96, 97 etc..... I couldn't figure out how they ranked so high. One company bought 20 links for a couple hundred dollars and all of them were ranked very high on SEOmoz but when I used the page rank tool on them individually they were either "0" or "1" and none were over a 2. I was debating submitting for those since I am just starting out and wanted to get our name listed in the internet world. Are the high rankings by SEOmoz related to something else? Would I be better off buying a listing in some of the premium directories instead. Like Yahoo or BBB or Manta. ( After I get my site optimized first) Thank you, Greg
Link Building | | Boodreaux0 -
How long does it take for crawlers to update links? As in number of back links
How long does it take for crawlers to update links? As in number of back links
Link Building | | tom14cat140 -
How good is a backlink that's in the footer
Hello, The strongest site in our industry (according to domain authority and excluding wikipedia) said that they would put a sitewide link to us in their footer. We're good friends with them. It would be right next to the copyright. Our site is nlpca (dot) com The partner site is nlpu (dot) com The link will say something like "More NLP Training" with the "NLP" as the link. We're targeting the keyword "NLP" How much will this move us up for the keyword "NLP"? Right now we're on the 3rd page for that term. I also want to make sure that it's a white hat move. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0