Linking Profile Gone Bad?!
-
Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links.
It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam.
Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed!
Thanks
-
Thank you Barry. I took your advice and went to the Google Webmaster forum.
If anyone would like to track this question further, please check it out here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=47ea8f99d39f510d&hl=en
Thanks
-
First thing to do is head over to the webmaster central forums (though I'm not sure which is best; malware and hacked sites? A mod should help you) - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en - as being pre-emptive is about your only option here.
For the short term you'll probably see a decent boost in SEO traffic, but if you decide just to roll with it then if you do get penalised, you've little comeback. Although an old post, points one and two here should be of interest - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/learning-in-london-some-fantastic-material - specifically "Unless you can remove those external links (by whatever means neccessary) or become a major brand in your space (such that Google will overlook any past indisgressions), you're basically up a creek."
Now this generally refers to a site after it's penalised in some form, but realistically once you're caught it's going to be a bitch to remedy unless (even if?) you can prove you were trying to fix it.
You could try reporting all the sites for spam - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html - but I'm not sure if that would end up harming you as well. You could try contacting the webmasters that the links are on and asking them to remove ir (and any others on their network). You could try setting a redirect based on incoming referrer to state that this site is not authorised to link to you (shows you're actively trying to combat it at least).
But definitely try to get in touch with somebody on the official help forums for more advice.
-
I would imagine the best way to proceed is to find all the spammy links and contact the owners of those blogs to remove those links. I can't imagine penalties being applied to your site as I would think Google would just stop those links having any effect at all, though I am no expert on this.
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
-
Disappearing Links Black Hat ?
I have seen reports of Black hat spamming with dodgy links but we have another issue with a clients site. The site had a small number of solid following links about 60 which had been in place for years and in the past few weeks all but those directly under their control have ceased to link. At the same time a very aggressive competitor has entered their market which is owned by the officers of an SEO company. Could it be that they have somehow disavowed the links to the site to damage it how do we find out? there are now just 10 following links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Is there any reason to Nofollow Internal Links or XML Sitemap?
I am viewing a new client's site and they have the following nofollow(S) on their site homepage. Is there a reason for this? Also, they people who originally built their site have a footer link on every page to their company (I guess to promote their work). They didn't "nofollow" that link lol... What are the thoughts on footer links? About Us Privacy Policy Customer Service Shipping & Returns Blog Contact Us Site Map Thanks James Chronicle
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Still Battling On With Link Profile Audit
I'm getting there, I can see the light! 🙂 I have covered one complete audit of the link profile and I am now going back over it looking at the links I had 'question marked' - I should have this completed by the end of this week and I will then focus on using DISAVOW for the links that I am really struggling with, the foreign sites that are in Chinese or Russian, the sites that have absolutely no 'contact us' information and have been privately registered (in WhoIs) I have come across this domain which links to our site about 8 times and although I cannot find any contact info I can't quite make my mind up, to be honest I would rather get rid of it BUT I'm trying to avoid taking the easy option of disavowing where I can; http://www.askives.com/ Fo anyone who has gone through what I am currently going through, please help me just this once and tell me 'should it stay or should it go'?! 🙂 Many thanks! Andy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomKing0 -
Link "Building" or "Earning" Which one are you doing? Both?
I'm curious to see how SEO's interpret this section of the Google Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes: The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en) I'm not asking what you "should" do, but rather what do YOU do... Do you interpret this as: Create awesome content and the links will come? Create Awesome Content and Outreach a bit? Perhaps you don't follow it all and concentrate on building links over content? What do you do and why? Discuss!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrettDixon0 -
Can you disavow a spamy link that is not pointing to your website?
We have submitted several really spammy websites to the Google spam team. We noticed they take a very long time to react to submissions. Do you know if it is possible to disavow a link that is not pointing to your website but rather to a very spammy website? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Ask Bloggers/Users To Link To Website
I have a web service that help bloggers to do certain tasks and find different partners. We have a couple of thousand bloggers using the service and ofcourse this is a great resource for us to build links from. The bloggers are all from different platforms and domains. Currently when a blogger login to the service we tell the blogger that if they write a blog post about us with their own words, and tell their readers what they think of our service. We will then give them a certain benifit within the service. This is clearly encouraging a dofollow-link from the bloggers, and therefore it's not natural link building. The strategy is however working quite good with about 150 new blog posts about our service per month, which both gives us a lot of new visitors and users, but also give us link power to increase our rankings within the SERP. Now to my questions: This is not a natural way of building links, but what is your opinion of this? Is this total black hat and should we be scared of a severe punishment from Google? We are not leaving any footprints more than we are asking the users for a link, and all blogposts are created with their own unique words and honest opinions. Since this viral marketing method is working great, we have no plans of changing our strategy. But what should we avoid and what steps should we take to ensure that we won't get in any trouble in the future for encouraging our users to linking back to us in this manner?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marcuslind0 -
Will Google perceive these as paid links? Thoughts?
Here's the challenge. I am doing some SEO triage work for a site which offers a legitimate business for sale listing service, which has a number of FOLLOWED link placements on news / newspaper sites - like this: http://www.spencercountyjournal.com/business-for-sale. (The "Business Broker" links & business search box are theirs.) The site has already been penalized heavily by Google, and just got pushed down again on May 8th, significantly (from what we see so far). Here's the question - is this the type of link that Google would perceive of as paid / passing page rank since it's followed vs. nofollowed? What would you advise if it were your site / client? From everything I've read, these backlinks, although perfectly legit, would likely be classified as paid / passing pagerank. But please tell me if I'm missing something. My advice has been to request that these links be nofollowed, but I am getting pretty strong resistance / lack of belief that these links in their current state (followed) could be harming them in any way. Would appreciate the input of the Moz community - if they won't believe me, and the majority here agrees about nofollowing, maybe they'll believe you. Thanks! BMT
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CliXelerate1 -
Should I 301 Redirect a Site with an 'Unnatural Link' Warning?
Hey Fellow Mozzers, I have recently been approached by a new client that has been issued with an 'Unnatural Link' warning and lost almost all of their rankings. Open Site Explorer shows a ton of spammy links all using main keyword anchor text and there are way too many of them to even consider manually getting them removed. There are two glimmers of hope for the client; The first is that the spammy links are dropping off at a rate of about 25 per week; The second is that they own both the .com and the .co.uk domain for their business. I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to handle this, should I :- Wait it out for some of the spammy links to drop off whilst at the same time pushing social media and build some good clean links using the URL and brand as anchor text? Then submit a recosideration request? Switch the website over from the .com domain to the .co.uk domain and carry out a 301 redirect? Switch the website over from the .com to the .co.uk without doing a redirect and start again for the client with a clean slate? I would still register an address change via Webmaster Tools. Add a duplicate site on the .co.uk domain. Leave the .com site in place but rel="canonical" the entire domain over to the .co.uk Any advice would be very much apprecited. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0