How do you deal with spammy backlinks?
-
One of the web designers I work with asked me to do a preliminary site assessment on a small business website.
The owner of the business had a falling out with his previous web designer and moved over to the one I work with earlier this year.
The site has been redesigned but when analyzing the back links I discovered that the previous designer had created directories to create backlinks to the page. The PR 0 links from the site number about 150 and are from unrelated topic pages.
So, it made me wonder, how much damage can spammy backlinks do?
What is the best practice to deal with spammy backlinks if you find them?
-
hi
i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet
i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites.
will that effect the sites i am about to link to?
i give you an example
i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good
I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them?
thx
-
hi
i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet
i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites.
will that effect the sites i am about to link to?
i give you an example
i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good
I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them?
thx
-
Since there are a few different opinions on this topic, I figured I would weigh in.
A bad backlink profile can effect a sites SERPS, but it depends on the site. If your site has a mostly White Hat, clean on-page strategy, and mostly good backlink history, you should be fine. If your site has a lot of authority, then the bad back links definitely won't hurt you, they might even help you (read this), but be careful, because you still don't want to get to careless.
I would say that you should remove as many links as you can, and then forget about the rest. If you move forward and build a strong link profile that is filled with editorial links, and legitimately acquired reviews, you'll be fine.
Best of luck
-Bryant Jaquez
-
Yes, I've been building back links and it is good to know that it isn't too much to worry about.
-
Thanks Ross, that makes sense. Great to hear.
-
Thanks for your opinion. Actually, there was one porn page that linked over from the designer. It was one of the reasons the concern arose.
-
To add too the comments above specific spammy backlinks can infact hurt your site,
For example if all of a sudden you see a number of links to your website with anchor text to adult terms pointing to your website with your url from adult based websites. I have seen targeted spam in this way affecting websites.
But from what you explain the links that have been built by the prior designer do not seem tat bad at all, I would not worry too much.
-
I second the comment from Ross. I had a similar issue in the recent past. I found it best and easiest to try and forget about the bad back links and move forward with building quality ones....... just my two cents.
-
Hi SEOWriter,
Backlinks cannot hurt your website. Google will devalue the links bu they will not penalise you for having them. If they did penalise you for having spammy backlinks the first thing everyone would do is load up their favourite blog commenting software and blast a bunch of spammy links to the competitor website.
However, if you are really worried about the backlinks because they are paid links or on a site with malware on it. Contact the website owner and ask for them to be removed. Failing this I would just start a quality link building campaign and keep everything ncie and varied.
In my experience crap links from directories dont harm your site, and if your keyword is VERY low competition they will actually help it.
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
-
Help! I need help with building a backlink campaign. Need best practices please.
Hello everyone. I am stuck. I need some good advice on how to build a whitehat backlinking campaign, and I need some advice regarding how to do this, and strategy. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RyanEly19860 -
How to stop google bot from crawling spammy injected pages by hacker?
Hello, Please help me. Our one of website is under attack by hacker once again. They have injected spammy URL and google is indexing, but we could not find these pages on our website. These all are 404 Pages. Our website is not secured. No HTTPS Our website is using wordpress CMS Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShahzadAhmed0 -
Lost backlinks following switch from http to https
I have a client who appears to have taken a big hit in a few areas recently: MOZ Domain Authority has dropped from 16 to 1 In ahrefs, their http version has 103 backlinks from 46 referring domains, but the https version shows 'no data' for backlinks or referring domains Their 'average position' in SERPs has fallen from around 32 to 43 in the last six weeks Ininitally, I thought this might be due to the MOZ indexing problems last month. However, I now suspect this is connected to their switch from http to https, which occured in mid December. Although all the http pages appear to be redirecting, it looks like the backlinks are not being associated to their https version. Anyone had experience of this and/or now how to remedy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Backlink an article thats already on the web
Hey Mozers, Just wondering I noticed a few sites show "this article first appeared on domain.com" if there has been an article published on another site and is now publsihed on ours, how do we create a backlink to say it had first appeared on "domain.com" Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Backlink, how to delete or find who is linking to me?
Hi there guys, Can someone tell me how I go about finding who is linking to my site or how to find backlinks to my site and if it is a spam site or a site I don't know or want linking to me, how to stop them from linking to me and also how to delete their link? Thanks appreciate the time Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Site dropping in rank even through there are more backlinks being added
Hello, One of my client's sites is ranking lower than he should. This happened when we took off backlinks (20 little blogs, several site-wide paid links. It really dropped the site, but it had to be done. Since then we've increased his # of root domains by 10% through white hat link building in his non-competitive niche, and rankings are still poor. I know that's not much in the way of added backlink value, but we're working on it. My question is, how have the recent (and coming) updates possibly effected us. We want to take the remaining problem areas off right away, but another drop in traffic is not a good idea. Even though the blogs (see below) have no backlinks of themselves, they cause drops when taken off) He still has -20 little blog backlinks w/ a quarter of them being exact match anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW
-1 sitewide paid link - an image, exact match alt tag anchor text
-1 non-site-wide paid links that is an image near the footer, exact match alt tag anchor text.
-3 links on a domain, this one looks fairly editorial, but there are a bunch of paid links on that page. Changing to non-exact-match anchor text
-2 links on two domains that look completely editorial with no other paid links on that page. non-exact-match anchor text -70 backlinks total with about 1/3 being problematic. How does this site look in regards to updates and when to take links off without tanking our site even more? Thanks.0 -
Is there a problem here - lots of backlinks from subdomains
Hi - just been looking at a clients backlinks and seeing a couple of hundred from this website - from different subdomains. http://www.wales.info/ is the main url then you have loads of subdomains: e.g. http://esplanade-hotel.wales.info/areasite_list.asp?Curpage=7&q_group=7 - all with follow backlinks pointing at the same bed and breakfast / hotel / hostel. I'm tempted to remove my listing or request nofollow links. Is that the right thing to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is the SORBS-SPAM list a big deal?
Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ayetti0