Black linking exploitation
-
Hi all
After watching our ranking for some primary keywords drop on Google from page 1 to 20 and then totally off the charts in relatively short period I've recently discovered through moz tools that our website along with other competitor sites are victims to black linking (may have the terminology wrong).
Two primary words are anchor linked to our domain (www.solargain.com.au) being sex & b$tch through over 4000 compromised sites - mostly Wordpress - many which are high profile sites.
Searching through the source code through half a dozen compromised sites I noticed that competitors are also linked using other derogatory terms, but the patterns indicate batch or clustered processing. The hacker has left some evidence as to whom they are representing as I can see some credible discussion forums which contain negative feedback on one particular supplier also among the links.
Although this is pretty good evidence to why our ranking has dropped there are some interesting questions:
A) is there any way to rectify the 4000 or so black links, mass removal or other. (Doesn't sound feasible)
B) some competitors who dominate organic ranking through better optimization don't seem to be affected or apparently affected as much as our site at least. Which questions how much we are affected as a direct result from this hack.
C) is there action or support for industrial espionage?
D) can you request from google to ignore the inbound links and would they not have a duty of care to do so?I'm fairly new to this ugly side of the Internet and would like to know how to approach recovery and moving forward. Thoughts ideas very welcome.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hello again,
From what I know, If there is no manual action, then you don't have to worry about reconsideration request. You have to clean up the backlink profile by the next Penguin update.
Try to contact each webmaster first. If they don't answer in a decent time span then use the disavow tool. If there are too many links, then disavow the their whole domain. This should simplify your work. Don't worry about nofollow links, they hurt only in some very extreme cases -> watch this video from Matt Cutts about nofollowed links.
Good luck!
-
Thank you Remus for your repsonse.
There are no manual actions in webmaster tools.
Open Site Explorer picks up the bad links, and google only lists a small amount. There are approx 4000, so its not realistic to approach every webmaster - saying this we have approached some.
Ive seen that Penguin changes released at the end of May 2013 have targetted "unnatural linking" and this incident happened over a few weeks around April/May 2013. So it is likely we were affected.
Like you said if they were followed at some stage and as a result we were indeed affected, then surely we have a case for Google to fairly reposition us?
There is no doubting this attack was deliberate as I've found source code on some of the affected sites which lists not only our website but other compititors in the industry. In fact every major player except for one, which is highly suspicious in itself. Also among the affected links are links to forums and discussion boards to bad reviews of the company which does not have unnatural links.
Its a tough one I know, my first priority is to restore our SEO ranking with Google. Ive researched Googles recommended actions to request reconsideration, but there are no manual actions so Im not sure how to submit that request.
Its seems extremely unfair that someone elses deliberate actions to effectively sabotage your ranking gets great positioning where you get penalised.
-
Hi again Michael,
Yes, strange things with those nofollows. However. In the current setup, if they are nofollowed, they should not have a dirrect effect on your website's ranking, so this is a good thing. But it they were followed and nofollowed at a point in time, you should know that it takes a while until your website recovers the ranking (if only them were the problem).
To identify better what happend you can do the following:
-
Check Webmaster Tools for messages - if you got anything related to manual actions on your website, then you should read more about "reconsideration reqests".
-
If there are no messages in Webmaster Tools section, then it was probably an algorithmic update that affected your website. If it's related to inbound links than there is a big change it's a "Penguin" update. You can search more about Penguin update on Moz or Search Engine Journal. SEJ has a pretty good article about how to identify which update affected your site.
Then use Google Analytics and Mozcast and see exactly what algorithmic change happened when your website lost it's rankings.
- It could be the case that this was some kind of attack against your website. Then removing those links should be enough to get your website's ranking back. If this happens keep an eye regularly on the link profile. If something bad pops up, write fast to those people and use disavow tool if they don't answer fast.
Hopes this helps, send more questions if you have!
-
-
Thanks for your tips Remus - yes the links are inbound links.
There are no follows on the offending links according to open site explorer, which is possibly why Google doesnt list them in Webmaster tools.
I'm yet to work out if Google has been affected by the hack - even if it doesnt list them, I'd think at some point however before the no follows were applied there would have been some impact.
How and who applies these no follows? If it wasnt the webmasters of the compromised site you would expect that these links would have been removed from the web pages by them?
-
Hello,
Yes, it looks like you might be the victim of some kind of attack.
I just have one question, are these links:
-
linking to your website
-
posted on your website.
If they are just links to your website, then there is an answer to all your following questions:
The Google Disavow Links Tool - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
You can read more about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
First contact them to remove the links, if it does not work, use this tool.
If the links are posted on your website just clean everything up, then remove backdors and stuff
-
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
-
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BBT-Digital0 -
Low quality links
Hi I have found a lot of links from a majestic report (not found on moz open site explorer). inwhich I have found lots of links from 2010 and possibly earlier which either I can't get hold of the webmaster. Is a disavow the right way to go if I can't get them removed myself? Also I have noticed that there are a lot of free directories listing new pages from our site and I am concerned Google are going to find these. I surpose there is nothing I can do about this, does anyone have any recommendations.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
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 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Black Hat Link Building Ethics Question
I have taken on the SEO/Inbound duties for my company and have been monitoring some of our competitors in the market space. In June one of them began a black hat link building campaign that took them from 154 linking root domains to about 7500 today. All of the links target either /header or /permalink/index and all have anchor text along the lines of "Windows 7 activation code." They are using forgotten forums and odd pages, but seem to be finding high DA sources to place the links. This has skyrocketed their DA (40 to 73), and raised their mozRank, mozTrust, and SERP positions. Originally I thought to report it to Google, but I wanted to wait a few weeks and see what the campaign did for them and if Google would catch on. I figured adding 81K links in 2 months would trigger something (honestly, if I was able to find out they were doing it then it's got to be obvious). But they have grown every week and no drop in rankings. So my question is would you report it? Or continue to wait and see? Technically they are not a "competitor" in the strictest sense of the word (we actually do sell some of their products as OEM), but I find the tactic despicable and it makes my efforts to raise our rankings and DA seem ineffective to people not in the know about SEO. Interested to see everyone's responses! Taylor
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anneoaks0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
Links to partner sites
I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Is using twiends.com to get twitter followers considered black hatting?
Hi, I've been struggling to get followers on Google Plus and Twitter, and recently stumbled upon twiends.com. It offers an easy service that allows you to get twitter followers very quickly. Is this considered black hating? Even if Google doesn't consider the followers as valid, am I likely to be punished if using their service? Even if it doesn't help rankings, it is nice to have lots of followers so that they will see my tweets which has the potential to drive more traffic to my site, and give awareness to my business. What are your thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eugenecomputergeeks0