Linking Profile Gone Bad?!
-
Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links.
It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam.
Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed!
Thanks
-
Thank you Barry. I took your advice and went to the Google Webmaster forum.
If anyone would like to track this question further, please check it out here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=47ea8f99d39f510d&hl=en
Thanks
-
First thing to do is head over to the webmaster central forums (though I'm not sure which is best; malware and hacked sites? A mod should help you) - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en - as being pre-emptive is about your only option here.
For the short term you'll probably see a decent boost in SEO traffic, but if you decide just to roll with it then if you do get penalised, you've little comeback. Although an old post, points one and two here should be of interest - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/learning-in-london-some-fantastic-material - specifically "Unless you can remove those external links (by whatever means neccessary) or become a major brand in your space (such that Google will overlook any past indisgressions), you're basically up a creek."
Now this generally refers to a site after it's penalised in some form, but realistically once you're caught it's going to be a bitch to remedy unless (even if?) you can prove you were trying to fix it.
You could try reporting all the sites for spam - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html - but I'm not sure if that would end up harming you as well. You could try contacting the webmasters that the links are on and asking them to remove ir (and any others on their network). You could try setting a redirect based on incoming referrer to state that this site is not authorised to link to you (shows you're actively trying to combat it at least).
But definitely try to get in touch with somebody on the official help forums for more advice.
-
I would imagine the best way to proceed is to find all the spammy links and contact the owners of those blogs to remove those links. I can't imagine penalties being applied to your site as I would think Google would just stop those links having any effect at all, though I am no expert on this.
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 -
Value / Risk of links in comments (nofollow)
Recently I noticed a couple of comments on our blog that seemed nice and relevant so I approved them. The site is wordpress and comments are configured nofollow. We don't get many comments so I thought "why not?". Today I got one and noticed they are all coming from the same IP. They all include urls to sites in the same industry as us, relevant sites and all different. Looks like an SEO is doing it for various clients. My question is what is the value of these nofollow links for the poster? Are these seen as "mentions" and add value to Google? And am I better off trashing them so my site is not associated? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chris6610 -
I have 4012 links from one blog - will Google penalise?
My website (http://www.gardenbeet.com) has 4012 links from http://cocomale.com/blog/ to my home page -a banner advert links from the blog - I also have 3,776 from another website to 6 pages of my website 1,832 from pinterest to 183 pages etc etc overall there are 627 domains linking to my website I have been advised by a SEO company that I was penalised in about may to july 2012 due to a large number of links coming from one domain or two domains is that true? should I ask the blog owner to remove my link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?
I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat? I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links? Please share your thoughts on the topic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zorsto0 -
Can you disavow a spamy link that is not pointing to your website?
We have submitted several really spammy websites to the Google spam team. We noticed they take a very long time to react to submissions. Do you know if it is possible to disavow a link that is not pointing to your website but rather to a very spammy website? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Need advice on best strategy for removing these bad links.
Heres the scenario... We recently took on a new client who's previous seo company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics. They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly. The situation we are now in is this: We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous seo company submitted a disavow request, theres a message in webmaster tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence. I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus im not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keyword on the internal page. Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that google doesnt know about yet from 800+ websites. Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation? Any advice is much appreciated, Thanks, Hayley.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Silkstream0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0 -
Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Townpages0