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
-
Is hiring bloggers to review my products while back linking to my website bad for SEO?
For many months I have been following this strategy of hiring high domain authority bloggers to review my products and link back to my website. For a month or two my rankings improved but now I suddenly lost rankings. Can Google penalize me for hiring bloggers to review my products? Bloggers do mention in the blog that the product was requested for editorial review. Any tips will be helpful. Regards
Link Building | | DebashishB
Deb0 -
Empty href damages SEO? (href="#")
Hello, I'm analyzing a website with thousands of pages.
Link Building | | prozis
I realized that on many of them they have empty links such href="#". I wonder if that will cause any SEO damage, or if Google will just ignore it as there isn't any link? I was reading about it and people seems to not be sure, although they recommend on forums to user the CSS pointer clickable instead of empty link. Let me know your opinion on this please! Thank you in advance!0 -
★Does syndication of a news features from high Profile site like TechCrunch have a negative SEO impact?
As a co-founder of a startup that is weekly featured on high page rank news sites such as TechCrunch, The Next Web, TreeHugger , Yahoo News etc. These types of write ups are "SEO Gold" as they are high page rank sites with high relevancy to our sector and with unique good quality anchor text and copy. However... Within hours of each post going live the content and links are syndicated either via RSS or scraped and appear as duplicate content on in some cases 100's of very low quality and low relevancy content aggregation sites. To give you an example here are just two of the sites that are now appearing as linking domains due to this syndicated content and the links included in the article. Examples : Eco Market, The “Etsy For Eco,” Rebrands, Revamps, Raises & Prepares A U.S. Launch Sarah Perez | Technology | Page 4 The above are just a couple of examples amongst 100's that result from each feature. I would like to hear you opinion on if these links would be considered natural and you feel I should not take action or if you think these need removing by contacting the webmasters or disavowing the links? I am sure I cant be alone in having this problem and look forward to hearing you advice and tips
Link Building | | LiamPatterson0 -
SEO Value Of Non-Indexed Links
I have a link built to a site, but it's not showing up in Open Site Explorer and doesn't appear to be indexed currently by Google. Does anyone know of any research done on SEO value if any on non-indexed links? Thanks
Link Building | | EmarketedTeam0 -
Question Regarding Inbound Links
Hi, I have someone who asked me for some advice on his website and I want to make sure I don't give him the wrong advice. Basically he runs a mortgage company and is linked to from a popular estate agent. Now he has over 11,000 links coming from this agent because his link appears on each listing. Someone said that the link should be made nofollow which i understand, but it has been like this for over a year and he is ranking highly for a search term that he cannot afford to lose. Should he just leave it as is or should he change it from dofollow to nofollow. Looking at open site explorer it says he only has 25 inbound links but lists the thousands, but If i remember rightly it only counts links from the same domain once. Hopefully someone can help me with this as I want to make sure what I tell his is correct. Thanks Paul
Link Building | | propertyhunter0 -
Does using "pring2web" hurt SEO?
I've never really seen this before but one of my clients has 4000+ links from Print2Web. Their rankings are falling back a bit but I'm wondering if this is part of the problem. They don't seem to say their service is about SEO so I'm not so sure this is counted as spam or not. The main concern is that the next closest number of links from one site is only 97. Has anyone heard of this service? Can someone tell me from experience if using this service has hurt SEO efforts? Thanks!
Link Building | | BenRWoodard1 -
Best SEO Link Building Company (textlinkbrokers.com or thinkbigsites.com) ?
We are looking into outsourcing the bulk of our link building. And, so far, I am looking at two different SEO Agencies. textlinkbrokers.com and thinkbigsites.com Has anyone had any experience in working with either of these companies? Has anyone had any great results with a different SEO Link Building Company? Thanks!
Link Building | | FSS0 -
Question to SEO experts about backlink tracking
Hi, could you recommend the best tool that you use to keep track of all the backlinks you have. I'd imaging there is a good software or website which lists all your backlinks with all relevant info for each link (PR of the linking site, authority level etc) thanks in advance for sharing.
Link Building | | limens0