Someone's been spamming my client...
-
Hi all
Bit of a strange one....doing a backlink analysis for my client's website (a handmade oak furniture supplier) and noticed there are about 13,000 spam backlinks to the domain from dozens of websites for keywords related to replica watches. Odd! Obviously neither us nor them have made these backlinks.
Would a disavow be enough action to take in this case? I would rather the client not see a penalty in WMT for spam backlinks for this. Not sure how, or why, we have acquired this links. I can only think someone has been trying to do a spot of negative seo against the site
Thanks
Carl
-
Thanks, Michael.
have put in the disavow so hopefully that's fine. One would hope that Google could tell that a furniture site wouldn't intentionally spam for jewellery related terms!
-
Hi Carl,
I do a ton of penalty recovery work, so I've got some experience here. I would disavow those, whether there appears to be a penalty or not. What's probably happening is that your client has a Penguin penalty for specific keywords...but, you don't really care, since you don't ever care to rank for those terms anyway. But what you want to prevent is that mass of backlinks causing a manual review and then getting a penalty that takes time and effort and loss of traffic to get past.
What might have happened, by the way, is that the client's site might have been hacked at one point to do a redirect to a site that actually is selling replica watches. The technique there is to take a site with a decent backlink profile and redirect a page on the site by injecting Javascript or a meta refresh into the source. Then, building a mass of spammy links to get that page to rank because of anchor text and drive traffic through the victim site to the site that's selling whatever. I've seen this done to WP sites (including one of mine...sigh) before. Typically it's a short-run strategy, as pretty quickly the site owner realizes their site is compromised, and fixes it. In the case of my site, there was a server in China that reran its hacking script to reinstall the redirect crap every 30 minutes or so. So I'd fix it, and half an hour later, it'd be back. Took me a long time to figure out how to block the vulnerability they were exploiting.
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
-
Question about reciprocal link building. I'm not an SEO professional, just a local service business owner.
I did a link page on my website 13 years ago and never took it down. Should we scratch that page all together? Is it ok with Google to do a page on Recommended local service providers. Maybe I can keep some of those reciprocal links if that's the case...
Link Building | | FVLMS0 -
How can I get my wesbite on Dmoz if it isn't accepting? Am I S.O.L.?
Each of the categories I would certainly fall under aren't accepting sites at this time because of it isn't showing the icon you need next to it to submit a website. I have been checking this for months, but it isn't changing. Is there another way in or am I just out of luck here? See step 3: http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html
Link Building | | pmull0 -
Grr SEO linking.. I am not understanding why I wouldn't have lots more links.. Please help. Thanks
I have done the whole moz open exploer and I am not understanding why my site wouldn’t have more links registering to my website.. I have lots of sites(directorys and 3rd party) with my website domain in them. The only one that is linking to my site is BBB.com and my advertsing with saint paul press. www.somerersetautodealer.com But if I have links with all kinds of automotive directories why wouldn’t they register? I am sure this a simply answer or that I am not understanding something. Thanks for your help! Scott
Link Building | | Scott12340 -
Spam Link Building Discovered - What would you do?
Hi Mozers, After investigating our no 1 competitor we have discovered their 87k back links comparing to ours 1k. After dipper investigations we discovered that all the back links are gained by the websites created by themselves. So what they did is - they had purchased 10+ domains and created 10+ new websites that are identical as their original .com version. EVERY SINGLE LINK on these 'new' websites link to their .com version. The 'New' websites are not indexed. Literally each of us can do the same and gain thousands of back links, but isn't it violating google's policy? What are your thought on it? (What is the best practice to report the violation of google's policy to Google?) Best regards, Lana
Link Building | | Chemometec0 -
'Powered by...' anchor text links
Hi Mozzers! We're a web design and dev agency in Kent, UK who don't really provide SEO services (tend to outsource and focus on our core competencies!) Have never really bothered putting 'Powered by...' or 'built by...' anchor text links at the foot of our client sites that link back to ours. Obvs we have a huge back catalogue of opportunities to add this to various sites which, if clients agree of course, would push our backlinks above our key competitors overnight (according to OSE). Good idea or Spammy/back hattie??? Cheers guys.
Link Building | | mjs_adr0 -
Why don't some external links "count"?
A car-dealer client advertises through DexKnows, and the entry includes a link to the client's website. That link is not listed as a linking domain through OpenSite Explorer for the client's site. A competing car dealer also advertises through DexKnows, but that link is counted as a linking domain for the competitor. Why the difference? (I'm new and still learning -- linkbuilding appears to be my weakness.) Thank you!
Link Building | | TheOptimizer690 -
Linkbuilding for Clients? Do I create new email account for outreach?
Hey Guys, So in the past when I would build links for a client I would create a new email account or have them create a new email account for their website which I can use for email outreach for building links. Also I would try to use their twitter user accounts to get in contact with other niche bloggers for a potential link back or a social mention. Is this how you guys suggest I should continue going about building links for a client? Or do you suggest using my email (agency email) or a random gmail account for email outreach? Thanks
Link Building | | asimahme0 -
I don't know if i should post my articles to other forums or sharing sites to create back links?
All the articles on my blog are written on my own. I write about 5 ones per month. I don't know if i should post my articles to other forums or sharing sites to create back links? I have heard that it may cause adverse effect because my blog will be crawled more slowly than those forums, so Google will consider the articles on my blog (as) copies. Is that right?
Link Building | | tranduchieu0