Never ending new links and our rank continues to plumet
-
HI everyone,
I've been having an issue with a severe drop in rankings (#2 to #36ish). All of my technicals seem to be ok, however I seem to be getting my images hotlinked (which I have killed in nginx) from these spam like pages that pull and link to an image on my site, then link again with a " . " for the anchor. Even more strange is that these pages are titled and marked up with the same titles and target key words as my site. For example, I just got a link yesterday from a site leadoptimiser - d o tt- me which is IMO a junk site. The title of the page is the same as one of my pages, the page is pulling in images relevant to my page, however the image sources are repos EXCEPT for 2 images from my site which are hotlinked to my pages image and then an additional <a>.</a> link is placed to my website.
I have gotten over 1500 of these links in the past few months from all different domains but the website (layout etc) is always the same. I have been slowly disavowing some of them, but do not want to screw up anything in case these links are already being discounted by G as spam and not affecting my rank. The community seems to be really split on the necessity of disavowing links like these. Because of these links, according to Ahrefs, my backlink profile is 38% anchor text of "." .
Everything else checks out in my own review as well as Moz tools and Ahrefs with very high quality scores etc. Webmasters is fine, indexing is fine, pagespeed insights is in the 90's, ssl is A+.
I've never had to deal with what seems to be an attack of this size.
Thanks.
-
Hi Nikki Thanks for the response.
I too am under the impression that with penguin being live that big G had figured out how to diminish value from spam links and it was no longer an issue. On the flip side The only real thing that's changed over the past 6 months for us is a massive increase in these spam links.
I will try to just bullet out a response so I don't write a novel
- Yes I have checked if it's hacked and it is not.
- I have no manual actions listed
- I did just look for weird traffic sources, and out of the 48 that I do have, the only weird ones are from urls with the spammy links.
- Also to note, our ranking has not dropped in any other search engines, only google. In fact we have improved in Bing and Yahoo.
- Another note. I have disavowed a few porn backlinks we have gotten from sites like gay.interracialsexcinema among others.
- In the past 7 days I have gotten 33 new links from sites like zenlaser.c0oo - thefreestates.commm prowp.neeet and lilucia02.coooommmm slash cantilever-coffee-table dot html.
- Many of the domains that are linking to us are literally created (whois lookup) 15 - 30 days before we get a link. All domains are registered private (except one that i caught just before going private and it was in china) and 90% of them are hiding behind cloudflare.
- An annoying thing is that over 90% of these links are on pages that the url path is the actual same url path or title tag that we are using on our page as well as the h1's and h2's with a "." anchor or the actual path anchor linking back to either our page or an image on our site.
I updated the disavow a few weeks ago but have not added all domains to it as I wanted to knock it down little by little. I have been hesitant to do a one shot one kill approach as I want to be cautious in the event that I make a mistake and cause an even larger issue.
Any further thoughts?
Thanks again!
-
Hello there, according to this article by Rand - https://moz.com/blog/what-if-my-competitors-point-spammy-links-to-my-site Google is pretty good at determining spammy links and if you have such pointing to your site, they should be able to discount these links. However, your site is clearly being affected by this as shown by your rankings drop.
Have you checked that your site isn't hacked? http://www.isithacked.com/
Have you checked that you don't have any manual actions on your search console?
Have you checked whether you have some traffic coming from weird locations? I ask because there was a time when a site we're working on published a harmless blog on children and the use of snapchat and there was a spike of visitors searching for explicit materials landing on that page. As a result, we suddenly had a ton of backlinks with explicit anchors that go to that page. Their rankings went down. The page was deleted though and all went back to normal.
This article might also help you: https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo
The author, however, said that for an attack with the same scale as yours, it is a good idea to audit your links regularly and submit a disavow file. Hope this helps.
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
-
Inbound Links - Redirect, Leave Alone, etc
Hi, I recently download the inbound links report for my client to look for some opportunities. When they switched to our platform a couple years ago, the format of some of their webpages change, so a number of these inbound links are going to an error page and should be redirected. However, some of these are spammy. In that case, someone recommended to me to disavow them but still redirect anyway. In other cases, some were "last seen" a year or two ago, so when I try to go to the URL the link is coming from, I also get an error page. Should I bother to redirect in these cases? Should I disavow in both cases? Or leave them alone? Thanks for any input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
High ranking nationally but not locally via google
A website I am working on is ranked very well in all tracked keywords at a national level, but not from a local standpoint via google. I find it weird that the site is on the first page if you search from many other states/towns/locations but not locally. Looked on Google Search Console and couldn't see any link to why this is happening. Figured we would clear out the htaccess for any redirect issues and hope it fixes it. Suggestions please? Never seen google do this. It is strange.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SeobyKP1 -
Tiered back links
Playing catch up with latest SEO techniques and wanted to ask the community what opinion is with generated tiered back links. For example, in one month having - 50 tier one links, 250 tier two links and 1000 tier three links generated within articles forums, social networks, guestbooks etc. In my view this is blackhat, my question is - is this still acceptable? or will it be damaging my domain? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | w4rdy0 -
Footer images links, good or bad?
Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pompero990 -
Website Hacked now it's not Ranking
One of my domains was hacked right before I took over managing it. The hacker created around 100 links for simply grotesque things. After I took over I erased the entire site, rebuilt from scratch, new server (inmotion), rewrote every page, robots.txt every offending page, and even 301 just in case 404s were hurting me. I am now almost a month in and I have seen zero movement on anything rankings based. This is not a bad domain it was registered in 2008 and has a few decent citations because of the Doc's medical license. They registered for BBB in November and have a 30 year old listing citation from them based on business establishment. I must be going crazy but it's not ranking for anything except the homepage. I didn't know Google could hold a grudge for so long. The only ranking I can sometimes achieve is through Google Places which still has to compete with tough domains. I've already put in a reconsideration request and received a response stating the following: We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Just check it for yourself I know it's a work in progress but I'm not even considered relevant on page 50! And the crap links are still indexed!! A search for a keyword I'm aiming for with my client's name followed after gives me no results. I am currently using wordpress, yoast xml, and single keyword focusses. My market is tough but no way I can not rank for the keyword and my name.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | allenrocks0 -
Link Quality and Anchor Text
ok I was wondering how to determine the quality of a link and if there is a way to tell that the site linking to you could be passing on penalized link juice to your site. Also i would like to know some of yalls opinion on using anchor text links in articles and blogs. Now that google seems to have taken some of its "importance" away
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | daugherty0 -
Can someone explain how a site with no DA, links or MozTrust, MozRank can rank #1 in the SERPs?
I do SEO for a legal site in the UK and one of the keywords I'm targeting is 'Criminal Defence Solicitors'. If you search this term in Google.co.uk this site comes top www.cdsolicitors.co.uk, yet in my mozbar it has 0 links, 0 DA etc, I noticed it top a few weeks ago and thought something spammy was going on; I thought if I was patient, Google would remove it, however it still hasn't. Can someone explain how it is top in the SERPs? I've never seen this before. thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TobiasM0 -
What is the difference between advertizing and a paid link?
I have been told that google frowns on paid links yet I see many site charging for advertizing and the advertizing consists of an anchor text link. What is the difference between a paid link and this type of advertizing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | casper4340