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
-
Will these pages harm the SEO of my blog?
Hi there, If I put download pages and thank you pages on my blog, will it harm the SEO rankings? As these pages will be pretty thin and will have no links to them internally for obvious reasons, it has me concerned about the effect it could have on my blog. I want to build my blog up to drive traffic, so it's not just a case of throwing the pages up. What is the best solution? No index the pages -- will that be enough? Warm regards Colin
Link Building | | username670 -
SEO value of 301 redirects from non-existent sites.
I have a question about an SEO tactic. There is this site that has purchased three domain names, and has redirected them to their main site. The three domains are: Spokaneduilawyer org, Spokaneduilaw com, and Spokaneduilawfirm com and the website has all three domains redirecting to their main site. What is the SEO value with this? I looked at those three domains on Majestic and they have no backlinks that I could find, and when I looked on archive.org I didn't see any history of those domains being actual sites that might bring traffic. What is the webmaster trying to do, and what is this tactic called?
Link Building | | RandyHT0 -
Category pages ecommerce - SEO best practises
Hi there, I run an ecommerce company, www.footdistrict.com and we are trying to improve our rankings on head terms so we are optimizing our brand pages (ie http://footdistrict.com/marcas/nike.html) Note: a brand page is a category page on my store. We are adding descriptions of each category. This is great as we are adding value. On top of that, we want to add sub-categories just below the description. A sub-category is a family of items. The structure that we are trying to implement is: http://footdistrict.com/marcas/nike.html Nike History/Info of the brand Link Nike family of items A | Link Nike family of items B | Link Nike family of items C | Link Nike family of items C When you click on the first link of the left, you go to a page with all the products of that family and a title that matches the anchor of the category page. What do you think of this structure from a SEO perspective? How would you improve it? I see other ecommerce stores that use tabs or the internal search engine for these purposes. What are the benefits of each choice? Thanks and regards
Link Building | | footd0 -
Seo Site Structure
I manage a shoe shop, and the site structre for a shoe category is: www.example.com/casual-shoes/ and for a product is: www.example.com/product/320/casual-shoes/ Would be better for SEO and for my casual shoes category, to rewrite the product page to: www.example.com/casual-shoes/product-320/ Thank you! Regards
Link Building | | raul_hutu0 -
What's the best seo link building company after May 2013?
Which is the best and most trustworthy seo company if I want to outsource my link building after being severely hit by the google penguin 4 update?
Link Building | | naimelhajj0 -
What should I look for when choosing a good article directory for SEO purposes?
I have been writing SEO content for blogs for the past year or so, but I am fairly new to article directories. With SEO in mind, what makes a particular article directory valuable? Currently I'm using EzineArticles and Squidoo; I liked Ezine in particular because of their thorough review process. I saw that recently Squidoo also amped up their checks for original content as a result of Google's stricter policies. I was interested in using HubPages also since they are good about reviewing content. I'm just curious how much factors like this reflect on an article directory SEO-wise. Are there any additional factors that set a a good article directory apart?
Link Building | | Madlena0 -
Are Dealer Reciprocal Links Hurting My SEO?
We are a manufacturer of fireplaces that sells our product through a series of nationwide distributors. We have a link to each of our distributors, who also have links to us, on our website under a "Where to Buy" tab. If we were to remove these links and instead provide contact information, would this significantly help our SEO?
Link Building | | JBell0 -
SEO baklink tracking
Is there an easy way, through passing variables in a URL, to track the links from a specific blog post? I am looking into using a query on the Google search that would return a list of the site that have been indexed that link using that specific query. Thanks!
Link Building | | insitegoogle0