301 redirect from an unwanted non-affiliated domain
-
Hey everyone,
Our site was hit with an unnatural link penalty a few weeks ago, and it looks very much like a malicious link attack.
We've never participated in any link schemes or anything resembling black hat link building. In fact, we've barely even done any link building.
Reviewing our backlink profile, there are hundreds of links from just a few (very dodgy) domains that we have no control over, and we've have had no luck when contacting webmasters to get them removed.
More importantly, we've seen several domains which 301 redirect straight to our domain. We don't know who they are and they're not contactable. I believe that the redirect means they're passing link value from all of their terrible links to us?
How can we get the redirects removed, as at worst they're really harming us, and at best, they're adding no value.
Thanks
-
Blocking the links in .htaccess won't work, as that's not how Google crawls. If you have the webmaster information, you could maybe send a cease and desist order. I'd also submit a reinclusion request and show them the domains that are redirecting to your site and show them that you do not own these sites. I would also show them the drop that has occurred because of it.
Be totally transparent with the reinclusion team.
-
I can't say if this will work (hopefully someone else can), but i guess you could try blocking ALL requests coming from those malicious links (even google). Hopefully google would pick up 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
-
Changing Links to Spans with Robots.txt Blocked Redirects using Linkify/jQuery
Hi, I was recently penalized most likely because Google started following javascript links to bad neighborhoods that were not no-followed. The first thing I did was remove the Linkify plugin from my site so that all those links would disappear, but now I think I have a solution that works with Linkify without creating crawlable links. I did the following: I blocked access to the Linkify scripts using robots.txt so that Google won't execute the scripts that create the links. This has worked for me in the past with banner ads linking to other sites of mine. At least it appears to work because those sites did not get links from pages running those banners in search console. I created a /redirect/ directory that redirects all offsite URLs. I put a robots.txt block on this directory. I configured the Linkify plugin to parse URLs into span elements instead of a elements and add no follow attributes. They still have an href attribute, but the URLs in the href now point to the redirect directory and the span onclick event redirects the user. I have implemented this solution on another site of mine and I am hoping this will make it impossible for Google to categorize my pages as liking to any neighborhoods good or bad. Most of the content is UGC, so this should discourage link spam while giving users clickable URLs and still letting people post complaints about people that have profiles on adult websites. Here is a page where the solution has been implemented https://cyberbullyingreport.com/bully/predators-watch-owner-scott-breitenstein-of-dayton-ohio-5463.aspx, the Linkify plugin can be found at https://soapbox.github.io/linkifyjs/, and the custom jQuery is as follows: jQuery(document).ready(function ($) { 2 $('p').linkify({ tagName: 'span', attributes: { rel: 'nofollow' }, formatHref: function (href) { href = 'https://cyberbullyingreport.com/redirect/?url=' + href; return href; }, events:{ click: function (e) { var href = $(this).attr('href'); window.location.href = href; } } }); 3 });
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | STDCarriers0 -
Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain
I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update. You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%. There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created. There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime. I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain. **More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? ** The website is in the travel vertical. 90BJKyc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Do any sub-domains act as Private Blog Networks?
Hi All, We can see now that Google rolled 2 unconfirmed algo updates this month and they are penalising spam links and sites which use Private blog networks; as said by some SEO experts. Do any sub-domains act as PBNs because of too much linking...like linking website pages from every page of sub-domains?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Add a non www binding.
Hello, I will ask something that is probably been asked before, but I cannot find the answer, so excuse me. I have a website, www.example.com, and I want to add a binding to my server so when someone also hits example.com (without www in front) to be landed normally to my site. The question is if this will affect the seo of the site in any way - duplicate content etc? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
301 domain name URL variants for canonicalization question in htaccess?
#1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xyz.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L,R=301] What I want to do here is to redirect URLs that have omitted the “www.” prefix to the full “www.xyz.com” home page URL. That means the home page URL http://xyz.com will not resolve on its own, but instead will redirect to http://www.xyz.com (without trailing slash). #2 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*(default|index).(html|php|htm)\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)(default|main|index).(html|php|htm)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L,R=301] What I want to do here is to ensure that any home page URL that includes several versions of explicit page name references, such as default.htm or index.html, will be redirected to the canonical home page URL, http://www.xyz.com (without trailing slash). Are the rewrite rules correct? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Branded Anchor Text, Exact vs. Non-exact Match Domain
Hello, For NLPCA.com, when you search for "NLP California" in Google,the letters "nlp" are bolded in the SERP URL and so is "ca". See here. This is because "ca" is an abbreviation for "California" Thus, this is not an exact match domain but it is close. What should our branded anchor text be? I want to change the anchor text profile to 98% branded anchor text. The 3 names our company goes by are NLP California NLP Institute of California NLP and Coaching Institute Let me know if we should not use one or more of these names for branded anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Ways to find private - non-indexed forums in a niche
I would wondering if there were ways to find non-indexed content in private forums/discussion boards. Is there a scalable 'foot-print' that suggests the forum has a private section?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0