How is my competition causing bad crawl errors and links on my site
-
We have a compeditor who we are in a legal dispute at the moment, and they are using under hand tactics to cause us to have bad links and crawl errors and i do not know how they are doing it or how to stop it.
The crawl errors we are getting is the site having two urls together, for example www.testsite.com/www.testsite.com and other errors are pages that we do not even have or pages that are spelt wrong or have a dot after the page name.
We have been told off a number of people in our field that this has also happened to them and i would like to know how they are doing it so we can have this stopped
Since they have been doing this our traffic has gone down by half
-
Hi no there is only me who deals with the site. I have put copyright notice on the site but i will read about authorship accorss the site.
-
Hi Diane,
I like the way Ryan thinks!
...but I am hoping we won't have to go to the length of having to resort to a content bomb.
The lesson in a situation like this is to realize that being a good white hat SEO unfortunately means needing an understanding of some of the tactics used by black hats
or maybe just a little help from some friends
Since there is obviously an issue with your content being copied, the first thing I would do is to implement Authorship markup across your entire site. By doing this you ensure that any content that is "borrowed" is immediately "outed" to the search engines because it doesn't have an external link from your Google profile page, which acts as verification that you are in fact the author of the content. Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson have given a really easy rundown on implementation in this Google Webmaster Help video
For the moment though, it would be better if you can avoid making any changes to the site until we can identify all of the issues in play.
BTW ... I think I have an inkling of what might be going on here ... is there a programmer or designer who is or has been involved in the development of the site besides yourself?
In the meantime, I'm continuing with a diagnostic based on the information we have and will let you know as soon as I have confirmed my suspicions or otherwise.
Hang in there,
Sha
-
May I suggest planting a "bomb" in your content?
Most thieves are lazy. Rather then create content themselves they steal from others. Their laziness is dependable.
Take a look at their copies and determine what content is and is not being stolen. If they are copying everything including the HTML code and meta tags, you can add canonical tags to your site and other helpful code.
If they are not copying the meta tags, you can add fake content and use the noindex, nofollow tag to protect your site, but provide content which otherwise would cause a site to be removed from Google's index. When they steal the content, it wont have the noindex tag and the site would get nailed.
There are many other possibilities but I am confident you can outsmart them if you try. In addition, be sure to report the site(s) to Google: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905
Another idea is to copyright your work, thereby protecting it and giving you legal proof the content is yours.
-
thanks for this, will send private message. we have had to redo the site so many times with new content because the content keeps on being stolen by a franchise group who then pass it on to their franchisees.
-
Hi Diane,
Ryan's response is spot on and his suggestions are excellent.
If you can provide the URL(s), then we can take a look and see exactly what is going on with the referring page(s).
If you don't want to share the information publicly in the Q&A, you can private message each of us through your SEOmoz profile page.
If you ever think that someone has access to edit pages on your site without your permission, the first thing to do is to check with your service provider whether there are any active ftp accounts that you are unaware of. I have seen situations before where people have managed to get a "back door" set up and then it is as simple as logging in and changing pages without your knowledge.
Given that this involves a legal dispute, if we can do a proper diagnosis and trace the source of the errors (or if there happens to be a back door in place), then you would be able to:
- issue a cease and desist
- better secure the server against unauthorized access
- Ban any ip addresses identified as malicious
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
You mentioned these are crawl errors. Are you using the SEOmoz crawl report? If so, please look at the "referrer" field. It will offer the page on your site which is providing the bad URL.
If you are willing to share the referring page, we can take a look and possibly provide more detail.
Anyone can create bad links to your site which can appear in Google or Bing WMT. Only someone with the ability to add content on your site can create crawl errors. Either your site is open to user generated content and someone created a bad link, or someone with access to your web server created the content.
-
will do thanks
-
If iit is happniong to many, then maybe its a reason not to suspect them, but like i say go to Bing WMT and have a look at where the links ae comming from.
-
the reason why i know they are behind it, is because other companies in the field of the website have had the same problems and after doing research for our legal team over this matter, we spent time speaking to over 40 people in the field of the website and found it happened to them aswell.
These people are cowboys but hopefully it will all be sorted out soon.
-
I would look in Bing WMT to see where the links are comming from for a start.
i must say also, If you dont know how they are doing it, then maybe you dont know if they are doing it., it may be somthing quite inocent.
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
-
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
GWT giving me 404 errors based on old and deleted site map
I'm getting a bunch of 404 crawl errors in my Google Webmaster Tools because we just moved our site to a new platform with new URL structure. We 301 redirected all the relevant pages. We submitted a new site map and then deleted all the site maps to the old website url structure. However, google keeps crawling the OLD urls and reporting back the 404 errors. It says that the website is linking to these 404 pages via an old outdated sitemap (which if you goto shows a 404 as well, so it's not as if Google is reading these old site maps now). Instead it's as if Google has cached the old sitemap but continues to use it to crawl these non-existent pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Site wide links from another domain - could these cause a problem?
Hi I manage the SEO in house for the site http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/ A new add on to our services has been launched in the form of an online store allowing us to sell, for example, expedition clothing that is relevant to the trips we offer. The store is managed elsewhere and sits on a subdomain of the company who are providing this service for us. There are sitewide links throughout this site back to our homepage: http://naturalworld.newheadings.com/index.php I'm just a bit concerned about these links from an SEO perspective and was wondering if we should request these are set up as no follow. Would appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KateWaite0 -
Wordpress categories causing too many links/duplicate content?
I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?
Technical SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
Ratio of linking C-blocks to Linking domains
Hi, Our linkbuilding efforts have resulted in acquiring a high number of backlinks from domains within a C-block. We all know Google issues penalties whenever someone's link profile looks unnatural. A high number of backlinks but a low number of linking C-blocks would seem to be one of reasons to get penalized. Example: we have 6,000 links from 200 linking root domains coming in from 100 C-blocks. At what point should we start to worry about being penalized/giving off an unnatural look to mr G?
Technical SEO | | waidohuy0 -
Could multiple languagues on one site be bad for SEO???
Our site is has content in English and in Spanish. The spanish side was translated by me, Spanish is my first language, so i know that the translations are good and its original content. We were Pandalized/Penguinnized pretty bad earlier this year. We have completely cleaned our site of anything that could be considered thin content or grey hat techniques. An associate is telling me that we need to put the spanish version of the site on its own domain, does this make sense to anyone? The spanish side of the site gets only about 5% of the visitors, bu i still don't see the logic in taking all those pages and putting them on a different domain. Would this help recover from Panda/Penguin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Way to find how many sites within a given set link to a specific site?
Hi, Does anyone have an idea on how to determine how many sites within a list of 50 sites link to a specific site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SparkplugDigital0