Unwanted spam pharmacy links
-
Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure.
However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts.
Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?
-
Hmmm. Their situation is further complicated by a less than clean link profile (not counting the spam links). They have very few high quality links. Makes me think that a new domain is a possibility to consider.
-
You should also checkout this Whiteboard Friday video, which covers that preemptive reconsideration request I mentioned along with a bunch of other tactics:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday
-
Honestly, think kind of problem exists industry wide and if your regular link profile is good, natural enough, you should be good. However, if a relatively high percentage of links exist compared to the rest of your profile and / or if you received the un-natural link profile notice from Google, I would lay out some of those examples and tell Google exactly what happened. If you think about it, anybody could buy spammy links for their competition and hurt them. The links are essentially supposed to be discounted so that they are not helping you and definitely not hurting you. Just file a re-inclusion request if you received a notice or if you are seeing a considerable drop in rankings.
-
Rand recently talked about this in the latest SEOmoz email newsletter where someone asked a question about negative SEO. Rand had an idea that I liked and hadn't heard before. He suggested submitting a pre-emptive reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, letting them know that someone is building those links and that you all are not responsible for them. Be as detailed as possible.
I guess the caveat there is that everything else you are doing is whitehat, since you are potentially inviting a reviewer to look at all of your backlinks.
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
-
Correct Internal Linking Strategy
Hello. So my website currently has 8 pages in total. (Homepage, 5 Service Pages, Contact, About). I currently have about 80 quality RD and my Homepage already ranks #8 for my main keyword, while all Service Pages (P1, P2, P3, P4, P5) are stuck somewhere at #30-60 positions for their target keywords. My internal linking scheme looks like this https://i.imgur.com/2cA529v.png. The Homepage has a sidebar with links to all Service Pages, and each Service Page has the same sidebar that links to each Service Page, but doesn't link back to my Homepage. Contact and About pages can be accessed only via the links in the menu. I don't have any contextual links on my website, so all pages that are important for SEO are linked only via this same very sidebar. All these Service Pages are equally valuable to me, but they don't seem to grow much in Google. The Onpage Score of these pages is better than those of TOP10 competitors, and my content provides more value (I used the Skyscraper Technique). Taking all that into consideration, can you please tell me what might be wrong? Why Should I build more quality backlinks to these service pages instead of the homepage? Should I add contextual links to all my service pages from the homepage? Does my internal linking strategy look good to you? If not, what should I change? Can I hit top #10 with my internal pages for their target keywords if I mainly build links only to my homepage? All keywords that I'm after have low to medium competition. My website has 90 RD in total, and my website's DA is 27. Thank you. 2cA529v.png
Technical SEO | | NathalieBr3 -
Advice - Remova/ Disavowl of Inbound Spam Links
We have a fair few of inbound spam links in the 1000s with a spam score going all the way up to 90. What would be the best thing to deal with this, i'm thinking to disavow anything about 40. But we are fearful of any issues which could come of this. Any advice would be really helpful.
Technical SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Should I worry that thousands of spam sites are linking to me?
I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and discovered there are 117,301 links to my site— mostly from very low-quality, spammy websites. I definitely did not solicit these links. I'm worried they are from a competitor trying to get me penalized by Google. Should I be worried about this? spam-websites.png?1505218483
Technical SEO | | steve_benjamins0 -
302 redirected links not found
There are so many 302 redirected links you found among which most are for the pages which needs users to login to view the pages so redirection to login page is unavoidable. For example: https://www.stopwobble.com/wishlist/index/add/product/98199/form_key/QE0kEzOF2yO3DTtt/ Also we don't have product compare functionlity, but still there are so many links from compare page which redirects to respective category page. For exammple: http://www.stopwobble.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/98199/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zdG9wd29iYmxlLmNvbS93b2JibGUtd2VkZ2Vz/form_key/QE0kEzOF2yO3DTtt/ We need to know from where Moz crawler is detecting these links so that we can supress them from being crawled. I already tries to review overall site and confirmed these links nowhere exists in page source or in sitemap.xml
Technical SEO | | torbett0 -
Nofollow links if you have more than one link on a page to the same destination.
Hi, I am wondering if someone can confirm that its best practice to have nofollow on secondary links on a page. For instance the contact page may have a link in the navigation and in the the blurb down the page have another link to the contact page saying contact us here etc.. So in this instance i would put a nofollow on the secondary link in the blurb would this be the best way to impliment this. Many thanks Chris
Technical SEO | | InteractiveRed670 -
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>0 -
Number of links in new nav bar
Hi We've just had a spanky new design implemented on Hypnosis Downloads.com My concern is over the top nav. While it's nice for users to get those handy dropdowns, it adds a lot of links to every page, and spreads link weight out equally over all sorts of pages. The place I really want the link weight is under the Downloads link - in those categories and so I am thinking about removing dropdowns for everything but this category. Does that sound like a sensible move to you? Is it likely to actually make a difference? Cheers Roger
Technical SEO | | RogerElliott0 -
Do links transfer after a 301? Please advise.
We own 2 websites. Website "A" has 100 external followed links pointing to it. I put a 301 on that domain and pointed it to Website "B". Shouldn't Website "B" now get credit for the followed links originally pointing to Website "A"? I'm hoping my external followed link count for Website "B" increases. Please advise... Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | WhiteCap0