Question about spammy links to 404 Pages we never created ...
-
FYI I'm a beginner within the company, so this might be a basic question, but ...I was going through open site explorer and checking www.partnermd.com for opportunities to reclaim links and I found a bunch of 404 pages that we never created that had nothing to do with the business. Out of curiousity, I plugged in one of the weird links like this one:http://www.partnermd.com/images/2015-best-space-heater-best-wers.html into open site explorer and found several bad spammy links pointing to it. When I clicked on one of them I got a notice that the site might have been hacked.I did some research and it looks like Google doesn't penalize you for spammy links to 404 pages, but how do we prevent this from occurring in the first place if possible?
-
Hi,
Although I agree with Andy Drinkwater, yet I would still go ahead and disavow these links in time. It's the right thing to do, you never know if the next Google update starts looking at these spammy links as well.
Always do the right thing first, don't wait for to react to the situation when it arrives.
I hope this helps, feel free to respond if you have further questions.
Best Regards,
Vijay
-
I agree with Andy.
This shouldn't be harmful to your website or your organic rankings. But, it will be extremely difficult to stop other websites from linking to you.
I would monitor your backlinks on a regular basis to see if anything seems very abnormal.
-
Hi,
This is quite common for sites that are hacked and you then end up with these really strange spam links pointing to you.
The good news is, this won't do any harm to you. The bad news is, it's virtually impossible to stop someone else linking to you - especially so if it's a hacked site.
I would advise just keeping an eye on them and if you think it's a problem, just disavow the sites that are linking to you.
-Andy
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
-
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Odd 404 pages
Evening all, I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s: http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists? Would you leave them as is? 410 them? Or do something else entirely? Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Kind regards, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
WebMaster Tools keeps showing old 404 error but doesn't show a "Linked From" url. Why is that?
Hello Moz Community. I have a question about 404 crawl errors in WebmasterTools, a while ago we had an internal linking problem regarding some links formed in a wrong way (a loop was making links on the fly), this error was identified and fixed back then but before it was fixed google got to index lots of those malformed pages. Recently we see in our WebMaster account that some of this links still appearing as 404 but we currently don't have that issue or any internal link pointing to any of those URLs and what confuses us even more is that WebMaster doesn't show anything in the "Linked From" tab where it usually does for this type of errors, so we are wondering what this means, could be that they still in google's cache or memory? we are not really sure. If anyone has an idea of what this errors showing up now means we would really appreciate the help. Thanks. jZVh7zt.png
Technical SEO | | revimedia1 -
Link juice and max number of links clarification
I understand roughly that "Link Juice" is passed by dividing PR by the number of links on a page. I also understand the juice available is reduced by some portion on each iteration. 50 PR page 10 links on page 5 * .9 = 4.5 PR goes to each link. Correct? If so and knowing Google stops counting links somewhere around 100, how would it impact the flow to have over 100 links? IE 50 PR page 150 links on the page .33 *.9 = .29PR to each link BUT only for 100 of them. After that, the juice is just lost? Also, I assume Google, to the best of its ability, organizes the links in order of importance such that content links are counted before footer links etc.
Technical SEO | | sprynewmedia0 -
Do web pages have to be linked to a menu?
I have a situation where people search for terms like, say 1978 one dollar bill. Even though there never was a 1978 one dollar bill. I want to make a page to capture these searches but since there wasn't such a thing as a one dollar bill I don't want it connected to the rest of my content which is reality based. Does that make sense? Anyway, my question is, can I publish pages that aren't linked to my menu structure but that will be searchable or, am I going to have to figure out a way to make these oddball pages accessible through my menu?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Too many on page links
Hi All, As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number). Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two? Thanks for your replies guys. Rich
Technical SEO | | Horlogeboetiek0 -
Page MozRank and MozTrust 0 for Home Page, Makes No Sense?
Hey Mozzers! I'm a bit confused by a site that is showing a 0 for home page MozRank and MozTrust, while its subdomain and root domain metrics look decent (relatively). I am posting images of the page metrics and subdomain metrics to show the disparity: http://i.imgur.com/3i0jq.png http://i.imgur.com/ydfme.png Is it normal to see this type of disparity? The home page has very little inbound links, but the big goose egg has me wondering if there is something else going on. Has anyone else experienced this? Or, does anyone have speculation as to why a home page would have a 0 MozRank while the subdomain metrics look much better? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ClarityVentures0 -
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