Opinion regarding SEO Sabotage
-
Hello Mozcommunity,
I would like opinions regarding potential spammy inbound links from others .
In theory you would want excellent useful content on your site that other web properties would link to in a natural way..link bait.
But what if links were pointing to your site with malicious intent. For example a competitor bombs yours site with spammy/black hat links.
This is clearly a dilemma for search engines since anyone can link to your site...even though you can block incoming with .access I don't believe many smaller in-house seo teams (or do it yourself small business owners) use Google analytics to routinely monitor referring sources.
-
Hey Will,
Very cool to see you dropping by on the Q&A
Sha
-
Will thanks I was trying to give you the "good answer" tag but I guess i can only use three.
Can you name examples of "sadly, often it was the company itself"...just kidding.
-
Sha, great article thanks for posting...
-
There's been a lot of controversy back and forth on this. I have definitely seen sites get hurt by link profiles that competitors could have built (sadly, often it was the company itself). However - I have only seen this for pretty weak sites (as others have said). I have not yet seen a case where a strong site with a natural link profile got hurt by competitors. I wouldn't spend an awful lot of time worrying about it.
-
The less quality natural links you have the easier it is for a competitor to sabotage you. Brand new sites can definitely be sabotaged, but well established sites are almost impossible to take down because it's a good to bad incoming link ratio. Good SEO's always keep an eye on who is linking to them for this reason and vet their incoming links on a monthly or so basis.
-
Hi John,
I would suggest reading this recent post from Justin Briggs to understand how Search engines identify spammy links and why they will not hurt you if your site has a strong natural link profile. Better Understanding Link-Based Spam Analysis Techniques.
Sha
-
In this case you may want to shoot Google a note with some examples and see what they say. At the very least you'll have some documentation that it was something you were worried about.
-
It can't be that easy, otherwise everyone (well maybe not everyone) would be doing it. Google's official line on this has always been that inbound links from bad sites can't hurt you. I'd like to believe that, we all would. But this is still a grey area and there's enough contradictory evidence out there. Take this for example :
http://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-notifications-for-bad-links-pointing-at-your-site-84265
Near the end of the Google notification it says "If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request".
How does Google know which of your inbound links you were "unable to control" ?
-
I wondered about this too, we have noticed tragic coming from some very spammy websites, and have no idea why they linked to us.
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
-
Examination of Anchor Text Ratios for SEO
A new article on Search Engine Journal asks even though anchor Text Ratios are considered important by many SEOs for ranking in Google, are they really something to worry about?
Link Building | | akhter87610 -
Can affiliate links benefit or hurt my seo?
I have just signed up with a company to do affiliate marketing for my site. I am now in the process of reaching out to publishers and seeing who will publish my link on their site. Is there any benefit in terms of seo for having these links, and can there be any potential downside to these links as well?
Link Building | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Creating A Scholarship For SEO
My client is a Law Firm just outside of Tampa, and I am trying to get her keyword phrase: "Tampa Car Accident Attorney" in the top 3. One of the strategies I want to use is to create a scholarship for "Tampa Area Students and how a car accident impacted their life" or "Tampa Area Students and how they think they can decrease car accidents." (that's still be worked on). Once the scholarship is created, I want to put it on our Tampa Car Accident Attorney page, and get other companies to link to that page. My question is what links should we go after? Because that will tailor it to who we give the scholarship to. We could give it to a University of South Florida student, and get one .edu link. We could do the same thing for the University of Tampa, or Stetson Law School, but we'd only be getting one link from each of them. If we set it up for high schoolers, we can get more links from the community and schools, but I'm not sure high school .edu links matter all that much. Is 10 high school .edu links as important as 1 college .edu link? I don't know. If anyone has had an experience with this or any insights, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
Link Building | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Few questions regarding onsite content?
1. How important is having the keywords you are targeting on the page? Lets say you rank position 10 for 'Plumbing Services London' but you don't actually use the word 'London' at all in the page copy, what kind of effect could you expect if you added the word in the content? Bit of a silly question really, I know it would have some effect but how important is it really? 2. What kind of effect would adding a blog with lets say 500 words of great content twice a week have on rankings? If you anchor text linked out of the copy would this alone help with ranking or is the reason for adding a blog to just use it as link bait to pull in more links, thus rankings are only effected when the blog starts to gain links?
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Should we fire our SEO Vendor?
Dear SeoMozers, We are working on ranking towards some hyper competitive keywords (each query has millions of searches a month) and working with an external SEO Vendor. We were not satisfied with the progress, therefore we asked them to send a revised SEO Plan. Here's what they proposed: 1. On Page Optimization (standard techniques) Off Page Optimization 1. Directory Submissions (100) 2. Article Marketing (Two unique 300 word articles to be submitted to 300 directories) 3. Press Release (Two Press Releases to 100 PR Sites) 4. Classified Ads Submissions 5. Business Listings 6. Link Reinforcement (Create wheel to circulate traffic) 7. Blog Submissions, Commenting, Forum Posting 8. Web 2.0 Link Building (Squidoo Lens, Hub Page, Link Wheel etc) 9. One Way Links (Not Specified how many) Our concern is that this sounds like low quality link building. We've given them 19 top keywords to achieve rankings for and will be paying $20-25K to achieve Top 3-5 rankings for the targeted terms. Do you think this strategy would work or should we change the SEO Vendor?
Link Building | | globaleyeglasses1 -
What are the benefits of SEO?
If a client asks "why should I spend time and money on SEO?", how would you answer? Is "to be found in search engines" the answer? If so, wouldn't it be more cost effective to use PPC instead of SEO? Is link building a waste of time and money? Is it better to just concentrate on quality content?
Link Building | | SharpKiwi0 -
An SEO companies position
One worrying thought following a meeting with a friend in the Poker industry was when he told me he heard some rival companies tried to spam other sites with paid listings a few years ago ? Does this happen all the time ? Also could it happen in other industries ? I was worried when hearing this news and then thought about an SEO companies position in all of this. Could an SEO company be falsely blamed for this sort of behaviour ? Is it is better to cover these things in contracts with customers.
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect1 -
Is there a way to leverage paid advertisements placed in industry specific publications to get SEO benefits?
Is there a way to leverage paid advertisements placed in industry specific publications to get SEO benefits? I am looking to advertise in publications like trade journals or magazines, but want to also reap SEO benefits by getting a link. So I am avoiding buying banner ads, but instead trying to find opportunities for links from editorial mentions, quality article or editorial submissions, etc. Advice on the link proposition, or best way to approach editors, please? Many of these publications are traditional print publications, and their sites are really seo'd. Thanks.
Link Building | | larahill0