When looking at my site in open site explorer the top results are very dodgy spam and porn sites backlinking to us. Is this having a negative impact on our site?
-
When using open site explorer to check out who is linking to us I was surprised that the top results are spam and porn sites. These are completely irrelevant links. Does this have a negative impact on our site? What can we do to combat this?
-
Thanks for the tips Lewis it's much appreciated. I will be keeping a close eye on this and hopefully it will clear up. If you are interested here is a link to one of the hacked sites containing our link that is still active http://johnwakefield.co.uk/ifapj/ebods.php?ti=130037
All the bad links I have found seem to be in this format domain.com/something/something.php?=number So i assume they were all made by the same person. Again thanks for the tips.
-
If you haven't enagaged anyone to undertake link building for you and these links have been created then it does seem suspicious.
You suggest that some of the links are going but obviously it may be worth monitoring this. As suggested below contacting the relevant sites may be worthwhile but if they are spammy sites of porn sites they may not be worried about your concerns.
I would use open site explorer to see if this has happened to any of my competitors or to see if any of them are obviously using a link building agency as this may have originated from an attempted stitch up by an overzealous rival.
-
You're very welcome
Well, it wont hurt to keep an eye on your site and do make contact with these other sites and try and get links removed.
Good luck,
Andy
-
I will try and be patient, it just raised some red flags when I discovered them. Thanks for the tips Andy. It is a consumer electronics site, so I do believe some competitors deploy black hat SEO tactics.
-
I don't know about OSE, but if they are being removed then I would just wait it out.
However, a friendly mail to the webmaster of the site won't hurt either. And do you think a competitor would go to such extremes in order to try to damage your site reputation?
Regards,
Andy
-
It looks like these sites back linking us were hacked, and the links have now been deleted on a majority of them. Traffic is slowing down but nothing significant. Could this be a competitor trying to get our site penalized? How long will these links stick around in my open site explorer data? Thanks!
-
Google is smart enough to know that not every link is something you have added, or indeed can do anything about, so don't worry too much.
Can you see your link on those sites or pages? Do you feel your traffic is suffering? You could try and ask them to take down your link, but I wouldn't hold up a lot of hope for getting an answer - but never say never
Regards,
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
-
Spam Links
Hi everyone, I've just joined the Moz community and after completing our first site crawl I've discovered that we have approximately 200 links with a spam score of over 50%. Should I just disavow all these links or is their a formula to deciding which links to disavow? Thanks in Advance Steve
Link Building | | StevenWalley0 -
Backlink Help - Contact Site Owners or 301 Redirect?
Hi, I am performing some backlink updates for a client and would like to know if I can speed the process up. Currently I am contact site owners and asking them to update the links that appear on their website of my clients. As this is tedious work, can I just setup 301 redirects for these products instead of contacting site owners and asking them to change the URL? Is there any benefit to having the proper URL on other websites? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | KarenNelson0 -
Looking for a small list of sites I can gain backlinks from
Is there or does anyone have a list of backlinks I can guest post etc from in order to gain some good strong backlinks?
Link Building | | infinety0 -
.edu backlinks.. where to point them for a scholarship
Hello, My company offers an annual college scholarship to Women in Business. I have numerous colleges that have agreed to post our scholarship on their college websites. I want to make sure I get the full value of the .edu backlink and need some advice. I have a brand new scholarship page with no authority and that's basically orphaned from the rest of the website. This page details the application process for the scholarship. If I were to link out to my home page, and say 3-4 other top landing pages, would this be the best way to flow some of that link juice into my site? Or is there a better way to do this? Another thought I had was this.... I could take one of my top landing pages, www.example.com/example, and place the scholarship information on that page at the bottom, and have the school link to this: www.example.com/example#scholarship (so the scholarship info appears on top when applicants click it)-- My question here is this... becase the second URL includes an anchor, does google treat that as a different page? Or would the pagerank flow to www.example.com/example ? Recovering from unnatural link warnings and algorthmic penalties and trying to get the best benefit out of the new, quality links I'm building. Any advise would be appreciated! THANKS!
Link Building | | ktrout0 -
Open Site Explorer Question
Ok, so Open Site Explorer question: Say you enter a link and filter as follows - Followed + 301, only external, this page, ungroup. Now lets say 50 links appear from the same domain, when you visit the domain one of those Go Daddy type parked domain pages appear with lots of adsense as they usually do. Link back... No where to be seen. What's the score here? Is this domain showing up because OSE is yet to update for this domain?
Link Building | | Bondara0 -
What benefit does a site with a low DA get from someone guest posting who links to a site with a high DA?
I'm relatively new to link building and although this may be an obvious question I can't seem to find an answer anywhere even after searching Google.
Link Building | | JoshED0 -
Targeting high Page Authority sites vs high Pagerank sites for backlinks?
For many years I've been working on seo/backlinks for my website. When doing analysis in opensiteexplorer I notice that the highest listed backlinks for my site are sites with high page authority and domain authority, rather than pagerank. For example one of the highest backlinks for my website has page authority/domain authority of 72/96 but the site itself is only a PR2, while my other backlinks have PR4, 5, or 6 with lower page authority. For a while I've been trying to partner with websites for backlinks from high pagerank sites, as I've always believed this is the #1 metric in relaying link juice. But OSE's metrics seem to not follow that train of thought -- it believes page authority/domain authority is a more important measure. Is it? Should I change my strategy to try to partner with websites that have high page authority rather than focusing so much on pagerank?
Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
Observation on Linking to other sites
Hello, I have a blog for one year now and in the overwall is going great. In all this time it was an awesome way to discovery some SEO mysterious and learn with experience wich in my point of view is the best way to do it. Now my observation is about links to other sites and what does that do. At the present I have about 35 keywords in the 3 first places in Google, bing e Yahoo. All good. I notice that the posts that I have links (dofolow) to other sites are performing better then those ones that only have internal-links. And Its curious that this change as starting to surface in Dezember of 2011. Now the confusion is about the SEOmoz observation towards external links. "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page." Now hell with this observation I say. Its working for me and for now on I will actually apply this SEO strategy when Im talking about a subject in a post:) What do you guys think? Whats your experince on this? Regards, Pedro M Pereira
Link Building | | PedroM0