Black Hat Attack! Seeking Help
-
Hello,
For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack
I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently.
Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself. So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site.
Questions:
1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack?
2. Should I worry about this?
3. If so, what is the best way to go about this?
Would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Thanks in advance!
Howard
-
Thanks so much! I'll have a look at issues with respect to the Panda update and I'll see if I find anything there.
-
Oh, and I wanted to add info on my other traffic drop audit client who had the mystery nofollowed anchor texted links pointing to their site. Their traffic drop ended up being because of abuse of the local listing. At this point I don't think that the mystery links were significant. But, if anyone else knows why these would appear, I'd love to hear it.
-
The blog comment links on the page you mentioned are nofollowed so these really shouldn't harm your site.
I had a client recently that had a pile of mystery nofollowed links that had their keyword as anchor text and I really couldn't figure out where they came from. When I looked at the links to their site sorted by only followed links there were no unusual ones there. I never did figure out where they came from.
The way I understand it, if someone was trying to negative SEO you then any possible penalty would not affect your site until either Penguin refreshes or until Google does a manual review of the site. In your case, Penguin has not refreshed since October so this is not the issue. You would know if you had a manual penalty because you would have a warning in WMT. btw...there's no point filing for reconsideration if you don't have a manual warning in WMT.
If your drop happened at that time in March I would have a very close look for Panda issues on your site as this is more likely in my mind.
I suppose there is probably no harm in disavowing the links as long as you are comfortable with what you are doing with the disavow tool. But I would be surprised if it would make any difference.
-
Thanks for your suggestion. The site owners could probably care less about removing those links but I'll definitely use the disavow tool followed by a reconsideration request.
-
Care to share any of the nasty links? In my experience the vast majority of the time when someone thinks they have been negatively SEO'd they are either seeing just regular normal scraper type sites that link to EVERYONE such as SEO profile sites or domain info sites, or they are seeing links that are the result of previous spammy linkbuilding tactics. An example of this could be if you submitted your site to a spammy directory and then all of a sudden that directory gets scraped by several other directories and boom...you've got a pile of links that you didn't personally create.
I would think that it's unlikely that a drop from top 3 to top 20 at this point would be because of a negative SEO campaign because in order for you to be penalized for bad links there would have had to have been a Penguin refresh (which there wasn't) or you would have received a manual spam warning in WMT.
If the drop happened around Mar 13-15 then there was a Panda refresh around that time, so that could be it.
-
Hi Howard, I think the best thing is to prioritize and contact all the sites in bulk to have those comments removed. If they don't answer disavow those urls, Then write arecon request to google to ask them to remove any penalty they put upon you because you were victim of some kind of negative seo attack. After having your rankings fixed try to understand from where that attack may be arrived although I don't think you'll find anything since the attack wasn't on your site
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
-
Buying domains for the backlink profile: Still a white hat strategy?
There's a DR 51 domain we'd like to buy, with a quality backlink profile. We'd like to 301 redirect this domain to our DR 46 domain, and possibly setup something to make the user experience smooth for people expecting the old domain. Is this still a white hat strategy? How would you calculate the value/what kind of offer to make?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | catbur0 -
Image redirection: Will it helps or hurts?
Hi all, There are some old images (non-existing now) from our website which have backlinks. We would like to redirect them to some live images to reclaim the backlinks. Is this Okay or sounds suspicious to Google? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Help with a Link Building Audit
A customer wants to have a better position with a keyword (he has already a great position, but he wants more...). So he need a bit of extra link building to have better position in serp(this niche is very competitive so on page is not sufficient).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Maximilian21
He asked me to do a Link Building Analysis to find good link opportunities.
How can i structure a good report? I need something like a Seo Audit for link building. That's my idea:
Identify what are the business objectives
Identify the brand strenghts and weakness
Find the strongest competitors and understand their tactics
See what are the top links that they have
Copy their best strategies
Find new strategies not used by the competitors
What else i can do for my link building audit?0 -
New Domain Name or Keep going - Help not Recovering after Penguin
Hi Moz Friends I wonder if you can help me , a while ago we had a Penguin Penalty and lost our Rankings. After Months of work Disavow and Reconsiderations , Google sent me a message in Webmaster Tools to confirm the Penalty had been uplifted. Since then we havent recovered. I have been working with Bloggers to build relevant safe links, each having a DA of between 10-30. We have developed a Mobile Friendly Website and ios and Android Apps. We have improved Site Speed and moved to a Server within the same Country. We add lots of content and believe we have ticked all the boxes for onpage optimisation. However our DA and PA seems to have dropped slightly after Moz update today. We seem to be jumping in the serps, one day page 4 for "fancy dress" the next day nowhere to be found. I'm not sure what to do next. I'm not expecting to jump back to page 1 for the main keywords but some positive movement would be nice, especially as there are Lower DA Website, not mobile friendly or as fast above us in the serps. What I am looking for I guess is any ideas from you and also what you think about this idea A few people have mentioned that we might stand more of a chance using our domain name example.com instead of example.co.uk. example.com has never been used and is totaly clean (no penaltys ect..) Do we use example.com and move the website and content away from example.co.uk ? if so do we use redirects or would that just pass any hold thats on example.co.uk to the .com version Ideas Welcome Thanks Adam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMG1000 -
Please Help- Confusion about how to Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization and Keyword Stuffing
I am pretty much a rookie when it comes to the SEO game and to be completely honest SEO is really confusing. I just recently started using MOZ and I was looking at my On-Page report and I saw that I needed to correct some “Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization” errors. So I looked at the error and the fix. Here is what MOZ gave me. Cannibalizing link "How to make a fake diploma", "How to get a fake diploma", "Making a Fake High School Diploma", "Fake Diploma Template", and "Framing your fake diploma" Explanation It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine). Recommendation Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match. This error is for my Hompage(http://www.fake-diploma.com) for the keyword Fake Diploma. My understanding is that for Self-Cannibalization to occur I would have to have a link on this page pointing to another page using "Fake Diploma" as my anchor text since I want this page to rank for Fake Diploma. I do have the right hand sidebar which contains my most recent posts and some of my titles do include Fake Diploma. How to make a Fake Diploma
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diplomajim
Fake Diploma Template
Framing your Fake Diploma
To me theses are separate longtail keywords. While they do include Fake Diploma in them I thought theses were fine because they are not an Exact Match to each other nor are they an Exact Match to “Fake Diploma”. Am I wrong about this? Secondly I reached out on another Forum trying to get a better understanding of this and just got even more confused. I was told that I am also Keyword Stuffing and could be penalized. They said because I have Fake Diploma in most of my article titles that I am Stuffing Fake Diploma. I am in a Niche Market and of course most of my titles include Fake Diploma because that is what my entire site is about. I used the Google Keyword Tool and searched Fake Diploma and it gave me a list of about 79 related keywords like: Make a Fake Diploma Online
Create a Fake Diploma
Fake Diploma Software This is just a few of the many that I have. I thought the best way to rank for a keyword was to actually write a post about that Keyword and use it as the title of the article. I am not over using the Keyword in the actual article and I maybe have a Keyword density of about 2-5%. I thought Keyword Stuffing was where you actually used the Keyword like 50 times and also just added random Keywords to the article that did not belong. Please help me with any insights you can offer. I feel like I am doing all of this completely wrong.0 -
Help with E-Commerce Product Pages
Hi, I need to find the best way to put my products on our e-commerce website. I have researched and researched but I thought I'd gather a range of ideas in here. Basically I have the following fields: Product Title
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YNWA
Product Description
Product Short Description SEO Title
Focus Keyword(s) (this is a feature of our CMS)
Meta Description The problem we have is we have a lot of duplicate content eg. 10 Armani Polos but then each one will be a different colour (but the model number is the same). I don't want to miss out on rankings because of this. What would you say is the best way to do this? My idea is this: Product Title: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt Blue
Product Description: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt in Blue Made from 100% cotton Armani Jeans Polo with Short Sleeves, Pique Collar and Button Up Collar. Designer Boutique Menswear are official stockists of Armani Jeans Polos.
Short Description: Blue Armani Jeans Polo SEO Title: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt Blue MA001 | Designer Boutique Menswear
Focus Keywords: Armani Jeans Polo Shirt
Meta Description: Blue Armani Jeans Polo Shirt. Made from 100% cotton. Designer Boutique Menswear are official stockists of Armani Polos. What are peoples thoughts on this? I would then run the same format across each of the different colours. Another question is on the product title and seo title, should these be exactly the same? And does it matter if I put the colour at the beginning or end of the title? Any help would be great.0 -
Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?
For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | devoted2vintage0 -
How is this obvious black hat technique working in Google?
Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0