Someone's been spamming my client...

[carl_daedricdigital]

Hi all

Bit of a strange one....doing a backlink analysis for my client's website (a handmade oak furniture supplier) and noticed there are about 13,000 spam backlinks to the domain from dozens of websites for keywords related to replica watches. Odd! Obviously neither us nor them have made these backlinks.

Would a disavow be enough action to take in this case? I would rather the client not see a penalty in WMT for spam backlinks for this. Not sure how, or why, we have acquired this links. I can only think someone has been trying to do a spot of negative seo against the site

Thanks

Carl

[carl_daedricdigital]

Thanks, Michael.

have put in the disavow so hopefully that's fine. One would hope that Google could tell that a furniture site wouldn't intentionally spam for jewellery related terms!

[MichaelC-15022]

Hi Carl,

I do a ton of penalty recovery work, so I've got some experience here.  I would disavow those, whether there appears to be a penalty or not.  What's probably happening is that your client has a Penguin penalty for specific keywords...but, you don't really care, since you don't ever care to rank for those terms anyway.  But what you want to prevent is that mass of backlinks causing a manual review and then getting a penalty that takes time and effort and loss of traffic to get past.

What might have happened, by the way, is that the client's site might have been hacked at one point to do a redirect to a site that actually is selling replica watches.  The technique there is to take a site with a decent backlink profile and redirect a page on the site by injecting Javascript or a meta refresh into the source.  Then, building a mass of spammy links to get that page to rank because of anchor text and drive traffic through the victim site to the site that's selling whatever.  I've seen this done to WP sites (including one of mine...sigh) before.  Typically it's a short-run strategy, as pretty quickly the site owner realizes their site is compromised, and fixes it.  In the case of my site, there was a server in China that reran its hacking script to reinstall the redirect crap every 30 minutes or so.  So I'd fix it, and half an hour later, it'd be back. Took me a long time to figure out how to block the vulnerability they were exploiting.