Any ideas on how to stop a massive spam link building attack?
-
I have a client that got penalized back in April, 2015, after doing a lot of research around what it might be, we finally narrowed it down to bad link building. It looks like the site started getting attacked by some sort of automated spam link building attack back in 2013. Examples of the bad links are listed below.
- Thousands of links coming from Pinterest - all different boards. The links come from pinterest.se and pinterest.com.
- Thousands from footer links from a website template. Some of the links make it looks like this client build the website (which they did not) and some of the links are in black lettering on a black background (hidden from the naked eye).
New links come in every day and range from 10 - 150 new spam links, and the majority of the pages the links are on are foreign. I know I can disvow some of the links (like the ones in the footer of the website template), but I wouldn't want to disvow Pinterest, right?
With all of this info, does anyone have any ideas on what action we should take next? Thanks ahead of time!
-
Good answer. I didn't think about looking at top pages or fetch and render. Interesting finds there, for sure. The top 10 pages according to OSE are:
- http://mywebsite.com/
- http://mywebsite.com/?id=P8426&shouldPaginate=true&categoryId=3865
- http://mywebsite.com/?cbg_tz=360
- http://mywebsite.com/ISES-Wedding2008_Ritz/index.html
- http://mywebsite.com/about/40_0_916.html
- http://mywebsite.com/all-dolled-up/15_8_585.html
- http://mywebsite.com/beautifully-human/21_17_487.html
- http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_13_371.html
- http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_15_373.html
- http://mywebsite.com/belly-and-baby/20_28_409.html
#1 is the homepage, it's fine. #2-#4 are duplicates of the homepage... have no idea how/when those were created. The remainder are all very odd 404 URLs. When put into fetch and render, #1 and #5-#10 show what is expected. #2-#4 show as a redirect to the homepage (yet, I get a 404). When I check #2-#4 in a response header tool, like SEOBook, it shows redirects to some other odd page (http://www.mywebsite.com/xmlrpc.php).
That I know of, there hasn't been a penalty message in GWT. I say that because there is no message in GWT, and the client hasn't reported seeing any message prior to this happening.
Thanks for the feedback Carson, I appreciate it. I like the story about the IP address being tracked back to a competitor - sneaky!
-
Penalties from third-party spam are rare, but it happens. Just to make sure we're on the right path, I'd first take some top pages and fetch/render them. Submit 4-5 of the top pages to the index. If everything looks fine in the render and submitting them to the index works, we eliminate 99% of technical issues.
If you're seeing spam links coming in you should definitely start with the disavow. Do you have a manual penalty notice in Webmaster tools? If so, I'd submit a reconsideration request explaining that your client is not doing this link building AFTER the disavow is in.
Beyond keeping the disavow updated and trying to get Google to care about your reconsideration request, there's not a lot you can do. In one case I was able to get an IP address from a legitimate site that had spam comments and trace that back to a competitor's office. In most cases you just have to try keeping up with the garbage.
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
-
Service Location links in footer and on the service page - spamming or good practice?
We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas. We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it. Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference. Would appreciate the feedback
Local Website Optimization | | AndyL93
Thanks
Andy0 -
Applying NAP Local Schema Markup to a Virtual Location: spamming or not?
I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services. These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state. However there is no address (this is just a service area). We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages. Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc. However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION. This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool. Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming? This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user. However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google. Any insight would be very helpful. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
Should I use Rel-Canonicals links for a News site with similar articles each year
Our small town news site provides coverage in a lot of seasonal areas, and we're struggling with the current year's content ranking above previous years. For instance, every year we cover the local high school football team, and create 2-3 articles per game. We'll also have some articles preseason with upcoming schedule and general team "talk". We've seen where articles from past seasons will rank higher than the current season, presumably because the older articles have more links to them from other sources (among other factors). We don't want to delete these old articles and 301 them to the newer article, since most articles include information/stories about specific players...and their families don't want the article to ever come down. Should we rel-canonical the older articles to the newer one, or perhaps to the "high school football" category page? If to the category page, should we rel-canonical even the new articles to that main category page? Thanks for the help.
Local Website Optimization | | YourMark.com0 -
Is Having Broken Outbound Links on old blogs posts an issue?
Please note that these old posts hardly get any traffic. Ive heard both sides on this. thanks, Chris
Local Website Optimization | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Massive drop in traffic, recently.
We have been focusing on Local SEO and quality, original content and social media. Over the past 4 weeks we have seen sharp declines in our impressions and overall traffic to the site. Crawler does not reveal any new massive issues, index is growing and there are no penalties. Where do we begin to troubleshoot?
Local Website Optimization | | GreenStone0 -
Can a Find Us Link suffice as the NAP in footer of site?
I understand the need for NAP in the website for citation sourcing / local ranking purposes, etc. Is it possible to use a linking anchor text such as "Find Us" that can link to the Contact Page of the site that does list the street address? Or should it link to the google places listing? The client basically wants to "hide" the NAP, but keep the power of the local listing. Can this be done? Any suggestions? Or an example of website that does this successfully?
Local Website Optimization | | cschwartzel1 -
Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?
HI,rategy. So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords. I was curious about this type of strategy. Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc. I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile? Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google. But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start. Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it? Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0 -
Do more page links work against a Google SEO ranking when there is only 1 url that other sites will link to?
Say I have a coupon site in a major city and assume there are 20 main locations regions (suburb cities) in that city. Assume that all external links to my site will be to only the home page. www.site.com Assume also that my website business has no physical location. Which scenario is better? 1. One home page that serves up dynamic results based on the user cookie location, but mentions all 20 locations in the content. Google indexes 1 page only, and all external links are to it. 2. One home page that redirects to the user region (one of 20 pages), and therefore will have 20 pages--one for each region that is optimized for that region. Google indexes 20 pages and there will be internal links to the other 19 pages, BUT all external links are still only to the main home page. Thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | couponguy0