What to do with these toxic links?
-
Back in July I had posted here that I thought someone was doing negative SEO against us. We monitor our links on a daily basis, and a lot of toxic links came in quickly within a few days. So we were pro-active and ended up disavowing those links soon after we saw them. Shortly after that our ranking start to drop and we lost a good amount of traffic, though I do not know if its really connected since we only disavowed those toxic links and we weren't ranking FROM those links since they were disavowed so quickly.
Now, its happening again. 20 new inbound domains linking to us from complete crap websites with crap content and not done by us. I want to disavow them, but I am thinking that maybe the first time we disavowed the links, it hurt us, and maybe disavowing now will hurt us further? I think Google should be able to filter out this crap but who knows, too much depends on this being handled correctly.
Here are some of the crappy links:
http://optibike.com/?home.php=page/loans/student-loan-without-a-cosigner-2.html
http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?index.php=finance/loans/loan-for-you-3.html
http://www.nuvivaweightloss.com/?index.php=article/loans/300-loan-today.html
http://ecommercesalesmultipliersystem.com/?home.php=board/loans/fast-loan-with-monthly-payments-2.htmlThey are mostly duplicate content across a network of sites. How would you guys handle this?
-
Backlink profile isnt spammy at all actually, and June/July were our best months ever in terms of organic search so I do not think we were hit with payday loan update. We started losing organic traffic in August. Are you sure that penalization requires a manually review?
-
Getting penalized for bad links requires a manual review or an algorithm update. Considering the vertical, I would imagine the backlink profile was pretty spammy to begin with. The payday loan update happened in June.
I think that is more likely your answer.
-
Didnt think about this, but i think you are right. It does look like all these sites have been hacked
-
Didn't mean to imply that links to your site are crap, or that your site is - just that these ones are.
-
I don't know for sure, but it looks like some of those sites you've provided with the crap links on have been hacked. I would try and contact the site owner, because Nick the Geek site doesn't look the same on the homepage as it does on the page you provide. I expect Nick the Geek (and the rest) will probably be only too happy to hear from you given that you are telling them of a problem with their websites.
I guess if I'm wrong and Nick the Geek is also Nick the spammer then you could maybe try the hosting providers?
Best of luck,
Amelia
-
Always disavow to show you are being proactive and have good intentions. If you don't you might get a manual penalty that will wipe your site off the index completely.
The problem here is not really what to do with the links but how to stop them appearing as I would imagine every month there will be more of them appearing on similar sites. You have to find hosting companies of these sites and take it with them, reporting violation, asking to take these sites down, tracing the person/company who built them, threatening to sue...
Good luck
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
-
Are links on sites that require PAD files good or bad for SEO?
I want to list our product on a number of sites that require PAD files such as Software Informer and Softpedia. Is this a good idea from an SEO perspective to have links on these pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnapComms0 -
No cache still a good link for disavow?
Hi Yall, 2 scenarios: 1. I'm on the border line of disavowing some websites that link to me. If the page is N/A (not available) for the cache, does that mean i should disavow them? 2. What if the particular page was really good content and the webmaster just has the worse seo skills in not interlinking his old blogs, hence why the page that's linking to me is N/A for cache, should i still disavow it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn1240 -
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 -
It's not link buying, but...
Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying? Assume all links are do-follow. You're a local business. You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year. In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. One of your clients is a college bar. You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings. Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab. Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon."
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting1 -
How to Handle Sketchy Inbound Links to Forum Profile Pages
Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles. Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool? Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things. This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
White hat link technique to banned domain
The question is: I have branddomain A (manually penalization by google, one year ago and after 4 consideration requests and more than 3/4 of links removed, stills banned) authority 42 And and new branddomain B (with fresh content created after penalization in the case of no recovery as it happen) authority 26 There are no links from A to B, both are now with same traffic but i want people that find me on domain A (partial penalized) to come to my new web brand. Both domains have same name, different extensión. So the question: Can i link with photo domain A to domain B, if i place nofollow and no ancor text on those linked photos. I want to have my traffic unified and i dont want to go against google guidelines
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How to handle footer links after Penguin?
With the launch of Google's Penguin I know that footer links could possibly hurt rankings. Also too many links on a page are also bad. I have a client http://www.m-scribe.com That has footer links creating well over 100 links on many of their pages. How should I handle these footer links? Suggestions are greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Any recent discoveries or observations on the "Official Line" of incoming link penalization?
I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out). I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this? Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveOllington1