Negative SEO to inner page: remove page or disavow links?
-
Someone decided to run a negative-SEO campaign, hitting one of the inner pages on my blog I noticed the links started to pile up yesterday but I assume there will be more to come over the next few days.
The targeted page is of little value to my blog, so the question is: should I remove the affected page (hoping that the links won't affect the entire site) or to submit a disavow request?
I'm not concerned about what happens to the affected page, but I want to make sure the entire site doesn't get affected as a result of the negative-SEO.
Thanks in advance.
Howard
-
Thanks Marie. I went ahead and deleted that page and submitted a disavow request. Hopefully that will prevent any future issues.
-
If you're transferring the content then make sure that the old pages are out of the index before you get the new page up. I had a situation where I consulted with a client who was starting a new site because the old was hit severely by Penguin. He bought a new domain and we moved all the content to there. We did no 301 redirects from the old to the new and there were no links from the old to the new at all. Yet, a couple of weeks later, the WMT backlinks to the new content showed all of the same links as the old site! They all said, "Via...oldsite.com". It was like Google recognized a canonical here and attributed the links to the new page.
The old site was gone, but was still in the Google cache. We had to manually remove each old url using the url removal tool and then the problem resolved.
-
Thanks Chris and Marie! I was thinking of doing a 401 (page permanently moved) and transferring the content to a new page with a new url.
-
If this is a page that is not important to you then I'd definitely remove it. Removing the page is the same as removing the links in Google's eyes. Just be sure that you don't redirect that url to another on your site.
-
Howard, If the page isn't of importance to you, yes, you could just remove the page. You could also change the url of the page and let all of those links unresolved. If the links are not targeting a live page on your domain they won't have an impact on your domain.
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
-
What is the proper URL length? in seo
i learned that having 50 to 60 words in a url is ok and having less words is preferable by google. but i would like to know that as i am gonna include keywords in the urls and i am afraid it will increase the length. is it gonna slighlty gonna hurt me? my competitors have 8 characters domain url and keywords length of 13 and my site has 15 character domain url and keywords length of 13 which one will be prefered by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calvinkj0 -
A doorway-page vendor has made my SEO life a nightmare! Advice anyone!?
Hey Everyone, So I am the SEO at a mid-sized nationwide retailer and have been working there for almost a year and half. This retailer is an SEO nightmare. Imagine the worst possible SEO nightmare, and that is my unfortunate yet challenging everyday reality. In light of the new algorithm update that seems to be on the horizon from Google to further crack down on the usage of doorway pages, I am coming to the Moz community for some desperately needed help. Before I was employed here, the eCommerce director and SEM Manager connected with a vendor that told them basically that they can do a PPC version of SEO for long-tail keywords. This vendor sold them on the idea that they will never compete with our own organic content and can bring in incremental traffic and revenue due to all of this wonderful technology they have that is essentially just a scraper. So for the past three years, this vendor has been creating thousands of doorway pages that are hosted on their own server but our masked as our own pages. They do have a massive index / directory in HTML attached to our website and even upload their own XML site maps to our Google Web Master Tools. So even though they “own” the pages, they masquerade as our own organic pages. So what we have today is thousands upon thousands of product and category pages that are essentially built dynamically and regurgitated through their scraper / platform, whatever. ALL of these pages are incredibly thin in content and it’s beyond me how Panda has not exterminated them. ALL of these pages are built entirely for search engines, to the point that you would feel like the year was 1998. All of these pages are incredibly over- optimized with spam that really is equivalent to just stuffing in a ton of meta keywords. (like I said – 1998) Almost ALL of these scraped doorway pages cause an incredible amount of duplicate content issues even though the “account rep” swears up and down to the SEM Manager (who oversees all paid programs) that they do not. Many of the pages use other shady tactics such as meta refresh style bait and switching. For example: The page title in the SERP shows as: Personalized Watch Boxes When you click the SERP and land on the doorway page the title changes to: Personalized Wrist Watches. Not one actual watch box is listed. They are ALL simply the most god awful pages in terms of UX that you will ever come across BUT because of the sheer volume of this pages spammed deep within the site, they create revenue just playing the odds game. Executives LOVE revenue. Also, one of this vendor’s tactics when our budget spend is reduced for this program is to randomly pull a certain amount of their pages and return numerous 404 server errors until spend bumps back up. This causes a massive nightmare for me. I can go on and on but I think you get where I am going. I have spent a year and half campaigning to get rid of this black-hat vendor and I am finally right on the brink of making it happen. The only problem is, it will be almost impossible to not drop in revenue for quite some time when these pages are pulled. Even though I have helped create several organic pages and product categories that will pick-up the slack when these are pulled, it will still be awhile before the dust settles and stabilizes. I am going to stop here because I can write a novel and the millions of issues I have with this vendor and what they have done. I know this was a very long and open-ended essay of this problem I have presented to you guys in the Moz community and I apologize and would love to clarify anything I can. My actual questions would be: Has anyone gone through a similar situation as this or have experience dealing with a vendor that employs this type of black-hat tactic? Is there any advice at all that you can offer me or experiences that you can share that can help be as armed as I can when I eventually convince the higher-ups they need to pull the plug? How can I limit the bleeding and can I even remotely rely on Google LSI to serve my organic pages for the related terms of the pages that are now gone? Thank you guys so much in advance, -Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VBlue1 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Competitors Building Bad Back Links
Hi there, I recently checked the back links for my site using Open Site Explorer, and I noticed a huge number of bad back links which I believe a competitor might be building to help lower my ranking for a number of highly competitive keywords. Besides spending time disavowing these links, what else can be done? Has anyone else been faced with the same problem? Any help would be appreciated. cXT0lvd.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bamcreative0 -
Starting every page title with the keyword
I've read everywhere that it's vital to get your target keyword to the front of the title that you're writing up. Taking into account that Google likes things looking natural I wanted to check if my writing title's like this for example: "Photographers Miami- Find the right Equipment and Accessories" ..Repeated for every page (maybe a page on photography in miami, one on videography in Orlando etc) is a smart way to write titles or if by clearly stacking keywords at the front of every title won't be as beneficial as other ways of doing it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
How to Handle Sketchy Inbound Links to Forum Profile Pages
Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles. Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool? Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things. This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
SEO plan
Hello to all, I have done on page for my new seo project and now after all these google updates, i am thinking that how to start my off page work like what should be the off page strategy. What are the off page tasks which i do to improve my website serp? Pls guys suggest me so that i can start my off page for the website... I am totally blank that what are the off page tasks one should do by looking at the seo updates... Thanks & Regards KIRTi
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tinny0 -
Duplicate content showing on local pages
I have several pages which are showing duplicate content on my site for web design. As its a very competitive market I had create some local pages so I rank high if someone is searching locally i.e web design birmingham, web design tamworth etc.. http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/web-design.html http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/web-design-tamworth.html http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/web-design-lichfield.html I am trying to work out what is the best way reduce the duplicate content. What would be the best way to remove the duplicate content? 1. 301 redirect (will I lose the existing page) to my main web design page with the geographic areas mentioned. 2. Re write the wording on each page and make it unique? Any assistance is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0