Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
-
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic.
I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking.
I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code.
Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it?
All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance.
MB.
-
"in a case like this is it sensible to preemptively remove the links with the disavow tool?"
Once again, the Disavow tool was offered as a last resort by Google. Many webmasters seem frustrated the tool is not working as they expected, and the issue is typically they ignored Google's instructions for the tool's usage.
Prior to using the Disavow tool, you need to make an exhaustive effort to remove the links. Send a polite letter to the WHOIS address for the domain explaining the problem and identifying specific links from that domain which are pointing to your site. If there is no response within 3 days, send the same letter to an email address found on the site itself. If you still do not receive a response, check for a Contact Form on the site.
Try to learn what is going on with the site. Ask site owners how these links were created. It surely can be the result of negative SEO, but in the overwhelming majority of cases I have worked with, it is either the client or an agent acting on behalf of the client. Try digging a little deeper.
-
Hi again Ryan/Gordon,
Sorry to bring this one up again, but we could use some more input if possible. It turns out the number of referring URLs is way higher than we originally thought. I've also done some digging in OSE and have found a huge number of links from dubious sources. It's going to take some time to refine the list but we're probably looking in the thousands.
There's no doubt that this is malicious as we have never done anything to build links like these.
We've not yet noticed any penalty or received any warnings but in a case like this is it sensible to preemptively remove the links with the disavow tool?
One other thought: it seems suspicious that this has happened around the same time that the site itself was hacked with similar links inserted into the homepage.
My best guess is that the site hasn't been specifically targeted but has been caught up in some kind of automated spam attack. I've looked at some of the other offending sites and all the links are in odd places - hidden in the code or in strange anchor text. Is it possible that a robot has crawled all these sites and inserted spam links to create some kind of massive "link wheel"?
In this case what's the best preemptive solution before we get slapped with a penalty?
Thanks again...
-
There are not any general endorsements I can share. Your chosen expert may vary depending on your hosting environment, site software and budget.
-
I appreciate your time & help Ryan. I will pass all those suggestions on.
If they choose to bring in a security expert in to take a look, do you have any recommendations?
-
"As for the client's site hacking, as far as I'm aware their webmaster & in-house team dealt with that when it happened."
The webmaster and inhouse team likely had a gap which was exploited. It may be best to bring in an outside security consultant to review the matter.
"if our messages go unacknowledged, what else can we do about it?"
In my experience, 25 - 60% of removal requests are honored, depending on the site. If you are working with numerous site owners, either some of them will respond or you are likely doing something wrong. Ways to contact a webmaster:
-
use the WHOIS information to send an email
-
use information from the site. Before you say they don't have anywhere, check thoroughly.
-
use the site's Contact Us form
-
call the site with the number on the site or their WHOIS phone number
-
mail the site
-
check for social pages such as facebook and contact them via that method
You shared there are around 20 sites linking to your client's site. Some of them should respond.
-
-
That's good. Sorry, but I had missed the part where you said your clients site was compromised previously....
-
Thanks Gordon,
The links are no-follow so for the time being I'm not too worried about link spam penalties. We'll try to contact the site owners first and will then disavow the links if nothing else works...
Cheers, Matt
-
Thanks for your detailed reply Ralph As for the client's site hacking, as far as I'm aware their webmaster & in-house team dealt with that when it happened. I will pass your notes on to the team and check they are 100% confident that the security lapses are fixed. We are in the process of identifying & contacting the webmasters of the referring sites to requests the links be remove. However, if our messages go unacknowledged, what else can we do about it? The links are mostly no-follow which is a minor blessing and we haven't seen any link manipulation warnings in GWT yet. Still confused on their motives/reasons though.
-
"The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code."
Has the issue been fully resolved? What steps have you taken to ensure the site's code is clean and remains clean? Some examples:
- placing the code on a test server and having an expert examine the code
- crawling the site and examining all links
- upon completion of the code analysis, implement a system which detects any coding changes and notifies you of the change
- ensure you are using professional development services with professionally developed extensions
- check your hosting. At a minimum, VPS hosting should be used. Do you have a firewall in place? What type of precautions does the host take (i.e. are you with a major host such as Rackspace, HostDime, etc? Or a host no one has heard of?)
- Use a service such as Symantec or McAfee SSL which offers daily site malware scanning
Every time I have worked with a compromised site, there have been major gaps or a complete lack of site security.
With respect to the links, the Disavow Tool can be used as a means of last resort. Google is very clear the tool should not be used until all other methods have been exhausted.
Have you tried contacting any of the webmasters to inquire about the links? That would be a start. You stated they are from independently owned sites. If that is true, then some of those webmasters will likely be cooperative and help you understand why they are linking to you.
We are happy to help Matthew. There is a lot more detailed information required which is missing from your question. There are dozens of possible causes and solutions.
-
Hi Matthew,
Sorry to hear this, and it's not good news. As to how/why it's happened, I can only guess one of two resaons. Either someone who knows nothing about SEO has decided s/he would "help" the whole SEO process and buy some links in. Or, and possibly more likely it may be a competitor who is doing a negative SEO campaign with the desire to lower your organic rankings, ensuring you will be penalised by Google.
You can now use the Google Webmaster tools and use the disavow tool to tell Google to ignore those links.
Hope that helps and all the best.
Gordon
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
-
Want to remove a large amount of links from spam sites. SEO company says we will lose a lot of link juice?
Hi, We have a lot of links that have a spam score above 30% and 60%. I don't know if someone has spammed our website. However our SEO company has said we should remove these carefully over a period of 3 months while they add new good links. I don't quite trust this advice. Are they trying to get more business?? They have put doubt in our mind. Can anyone please shed any light on this?? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YvonneDupree0 -
Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots
We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links. Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Footer images links, good or bad?
Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pompero990 -
Someone has built low quality links to my site - what should I do?
Hey guys, I was wondering whether you could offer me some help on something. One of the site's I'm working on has a blog attached to it and we sometimes accept guest posts from authors. A month or so back we published a blog that has been attracting a number of low-quality backlinks. Having looked into the matter further, it turned out that the client who had created the guest post was doing something called "tiered link building" and was building crappy links to their guest post content on other websites. I have subsequently deleted the blog post in question - will this devalue/cancel out the inbound links pointing to the original URL? Or do I need to do something extra? Disavow even? Comments appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
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 -
How to stop links from sites that have plagurized my blogs
I have been hit hard by Penguin 2.0. My webmaster explains that I have many links to my articles (a medical website with quality content) from "bad sites." These sites publish my articles with my name and link to my site and it appears I have posted my articles on their site although I have not posted them-theses sites have copied and pasted my articles. Is there a way to prevent sites from posting my content on their site with links to my site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wianno1681 -
Google penalty having bad sites maybe and working on 1 good site ?!!!
I have a list of websites that are not spam.. there are ok sites... just that I need to work on the conent again as the sites content might not be useful for users at 100%. There are not bad sites with spammy content... just that I want to rewrite some of the content to really make great websites... the goal would be to have great content to get natual links and a great user experience.. I have 40 sites... all travel sites related to different destinations around the world. I also have other sites that I haven't worked on for some time.. here are some sites: www.simplyparis.org
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sandyallain
www.simplymadrid.org
www.simplyrome.org etc... Again there are not spam sites but not as useful as they coul become... I want to work on few sites only to see how it goes.... will this penalise my sites that I am working on if I have other sites with average content or not as good ? I want to make great content good for link bait 🙂0 -
Unnatural Link Profile
Hi All, We are about to take on a new client whose site has been penalised for having a very unnatural link profile. They have over 1k links, which have 5 differing anchor texts, though the majority leans towards one particular phrase. Their previous SEO company had done this for them and the strategy worked, keeping them in the top 3 for most phrases, until Penguin. Now they reside in the 70-100 ranks. My initial though is we need to get rid of a lot of these links, however its going to be labour intensive and as we all know, labour is expensive. The website is nicely designed and has lots of great unique content. Its just the link profile letting it down. My question is; If this were your client, what would you recommend? A link removal program which could take a long time and be very expensive or would you recommend that they start again and build a new site, also expensive and time consuming. or would you suggest something different? If anyone knows of any Link removal people who have done a good job in the past I'd love to get some contact details. Thanks Aran
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chiefblob0