What do I do with these back links?
-
In the last two weeks, I've got 10 pingbacks from this http://caraccidentlawyer.cc/coroner-ids-berkeley-bodies-who-were-killed-in-recent-car-accident/ and sites like it. The featured attorney is a competitor of ours and, since the links aren't sex/drugs/rock&roll related, (and he's linked too) I doubt this is a negative SEO campaign, but I want it to stop. These blogs are basically pure spam. Any suggestions?
-
Any time! It's definitely wise to err on the side of caution. If you ever want to chew the fat on SEO/digital stuff I'd be happy to help.
-
Thank you very much. I'm still new, so I get nervous. I really appreciate you taking the effort to explain this in such detail.
-
Great answer, Tom.
-
Hi Ruben
This looks to me to be an auto-scraper and trackback tool. It's pretty primitive and useless, by all accounts.
The bad news is that there's very little you can do to prevent it, other than contacting the person themselves and asking them to look into the issue.
The good news is that I'm very confident that this will be having no negative effect on your site. As is the case in the web, blogs and tools exist like this and work away on literally millions of sites. I have no doubt that the algorithm takes this into account and simply devalues/ignores any of these kind of links. With the pingbacks being so little, it certainly won't be having an affect.
If it was nearing the hundreds of thousands, it may become an issue - and so my advice to you would be to make a weekly note of these kind of links and if/when they appear. Save the URLs away in a spreadsheet and should they become very large in numbers, add them to a disavow file and submit that to Google. Just this week we've had Matt Cutts encourage the use of pre-empting bad links and negative SEO attacks by submitting a disavow file, even if you haven't received a warning/penalty or any ill-effects.
I don't think this is anywhere near the stage where you need to concern yourself with that, but in order to be future-proof, make a note now and weekly as you go along. Only if the links started being really big in numbers (10,000+) would I look at submitting a disavow file. But I'd be pretty confident that you won't have the need to do this.
Hope this helps ease your concerns a bit.
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
-
Multilingual Sitewide Links
Multilingual links in the footer section is being counted as backlink and we are getting tons of backlinks from all the 7 lingual websites. Is there a solution where we eliminate these links and still having the option to navigate to other lingual pages? vr24NAv
Technical SEO | | comfortclick0 -
"non-WWW" vs "WWW" in Google SERPS and Lost Back Link Connection
A Screaming Frog report indicates that Google is indexing a client's site for both: www and non-www URLs. To me this means that Google is seeing both URLs as different even though the page content is identical. The client has not set up a preferred URL in GWMTs. Google says to do a 301 redirect from the non-preferred domain to the preferred version but I believe there is a way to do this in HTTP Access and an easier solution than canonical.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en GWMTs also shows that over the past few months this client has lost more than half of their backlinks. (But there are no penalties and the client swears they haven't done anything to be blacklisted in this regard. I'm curious as to whether Google figured out that the entire site was in their index under both "www" and "non-www" and therefore discounted half of the links. Has anyone seen evidence of Google discounting links (both external and internal) due to duplicate content? Thanks for your feedback. Rosemary0 -
Persistent Unnatural Links in Webmaster tools
We recently were notified about unnatural links from two websites (totalling a few thousands links each). We went to the websites and asked them to remove the links, which they apparently did. After this we applied for reconsideration to Google, explaining the situation, however they came back and said we still have links. We noticed there were still links, however there were less than before, and so we once again asked the sites to remove all the links. Now we are sure all the links are gone as when we click a random link and view the page source there is no reference to our site, however WebMaster tools is not updating the link list, claiming we still have thousands of links. Do we have to apply for another reconsideration request to get them to re-crawl the sites to get rid of the links, or should it happen automatically?
Technical SEO | | eXia0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300 -
Affiliate links
Is there a best practice for linking out to affiliates URLs post panda? I know some believe it can be a factor.
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Is link cloaking bad?
I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites. In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links. Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
Which version of pages should I build links to?
I'm working on the site www.qualityauditor.co.uk which is built in Moonfruit. Moonfruit renders pages in Flash. Not ideal, I know, but it also automatically produces an HTML version of every page for those without Flash, Javascript and search engines. This HTML version is fairly well optimised for search engines, but sits on different URLs. For example, the page you're likely to see if browsing the site is at http://www.qualityauditor.co.uk/#/iso-9001-lead-auditor-course/4528742734 However, if you turn Javascript off you can see the HTML version of the page here <cite>http://www.qualityauditor.co.uk/page/4528742734</cite> Mostly, it's the last version of the URL which appears in the Google search results for a relevant query. But not always. Plus, in Google Webmaster Tools fetching as Googlebot only shows page content for the first version of the URL. For the second version it returns HTTP status code and a 302 redirect to the first version. I have two questions, really: Will these two versions of the page cause my duplicate content issues? I suspect not as the first version renders only in Flash. But will Google think the 302 redirect for people is cloaking? Which version of the URL should I be pointing new links to (bearing in mind the 302 redirect which doesn't pass link juice). The URL's which I see in my browser and which Google likes the look at when I 'fetch as Googlebot'. Or those Google shows in the search results? Thanks folks, much appreciated! Eamon
Technical SEO | | driftnetmedia0 -
Good links pratice for listing pages?
Hello, I'm wondering which is the best way to handle this kindle of page... You can have a look at my screen capture, or see directly my page here. I've in my case, for the same "ski resort", 3 differents anchor link type (title, image and more info…), all of them are going on the same page. I know it's not that good, my idea, it to keep only the more info like, but with a better anchor link, something like : more information about this ski resort... Thanks in advance 🙂 Best regards links.jpg
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0