Links into website that are unnatural - a paid article
-
I prepared an article for another related website and posted it on my website -
I was paid to write an article and provided a link to the related website at the end of the article - I declared the payment
a good 10 months later the page where the article sits has become the 2nd most linked to page on my website - SEOmoz is giving it a Page Authority of 48 and all the links are coming from a wide variety of forums using one anchor text link phrase
in the latest google update my homepage PR dropped by 1 - I am assuming the penalty came because of this article
is it worth changing the URL to remove these spammy links to my website?
-
At some point, someone has hired one of these worthless 'link building' packages online that pays for however many forum profile backlinks. Whilst many of them have been deployed incorrectly (thankfully for you) - You can tell this by the fact BBCode was used on the forums when some of the forums in questions don't accept this and use an HTML editor instead.
This kind of artificially generated link profiling was targeted in the Google Penguin algorithm updates, this could largely prove the outcome of any recent deterioration in your domain's performance as it is blindingly obvious most of the backlinks are from link spam.
Perhaps the company you wrote the article for, once published, then buy useless packages online to build lots of links to their content which then links to their own website...?
If it were me, I would take down the article and request a URL removal from the index in Google Webmaster Tools. It may even be worthwhile creating a 301 redirect to point to somewhere else so that lots of 404 errors aren't triggered on your site (if there is any worthwhile traffic coming via any of the links pointing to the article).
You can view the link profile for this URL here.
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
-
Massive Influx of Total Links - But External Links are Dropping?
Hey Moz Community, I was checking out the Links on one of my client's sites, as they were hit with spammy external links about a year ago, and noticed a large influx of Total Links to the site. According to Moz, external links have actually dropped over the last few months, so I can only assume they are internal links. But, I don't see how my client could add so many internal links over the past 5 months, as they don't do much besides upload new products (they're an ecommerce clothing retailer) via Shopify. They haven't added much over the past half year either. Total links were about 130K in Oct 2019; today, the site has almost 1 million. I've attached some screenshots for reference via Moz to better illustrate the issue. Appreciate any insights into this. Thank you in advance! hhCCUsk lyGltZD
Technical SEO | | EdenPrez0 -
Internal link structure for my loan website
Hi folks. I own a Norwegian consumer loan/financing website, which has been monetized with links. I've created various silos for my content, according to what I believe is most relevant to the user.
Technical SEO | | llevy
However, as a result each article now has a sidebar list, which in turn links to all other articles within the same category (silo). As you can see here, it has about 30 links in the sidebar: forbrukslån.no/beste-lån. With 30 articles in a silo, that corresponds to over 900 internal links, in just one silo alone. I wonder if this could be hurting me SEO wise? I know G cares a lot about relevance and user experience. So I have a feeling it could be interpreted as spammy. Reason I did this in the first place, is that the header links are also being repeated on all pages, without any issue. T4FHxHw0 -
Wrong titles for site links of my website.
Hello, everyone. As you can see from the images attached, the site link of the About page has a Weird title " About About about". I have add proper meta description, but it still appears like this. This problem is killing me. What else i can do to solve this problem? Thanks Jason UJcRov1
Technical SEO | | jasonyeyeye0 -
Site Link Issues
For several search terms I get site links for the page http://www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/kolea-condos/ It makes sense that that page be a site link as it is one of my most used pages, but the problem is google gave it the site link "Kolea 10A". I am having 0 luck making any sense of why that was chosen. It should be something like "Kolea Condos" or something of that nature. Does anyone have any thoughts on where google is coming up with this?
Technical SEO | | RobDalton0 -
HUGE decrease in links since website redesign
We recently added several new pages pages to our website. These new pages were constructed on a dev site, and then pushed live. Since the new site has gone live I have seen a huge decline in links. My external followed links have dropped from 3000 to 500 and my total website links have fallen from 35,000 to 4,500. I have done some research, and I think there is a server side issue. Where multiple versions of my URL may be running. The majority of the links built were pointing to the homepage. That being said I do not have access to our in-house dev person this week, so I am trying to identify the problem myself. I have used screaming frog to crawl my site and did not see any errors which stand out. I realize I probably need to use 301 redirects to solve this problem, I just need some guidance on how to identify what I need to 301 redirect. Second question. If I move a landing page out of the global navigation but it can still be reached through other pages on the website , will this cause issues?
Technical SEO | | GladdySEO0 -
Should I no follow all external links?
I have worked with a few different SEO firms lately and a lot of them have recommended on the sites I was working on to "no-follow" all external links on the site. On one hand this traps all the link equity/Pagerank. On the other I would think this practice is frowned upon by Google. What are some opinions on this?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Is Over use of Twitter to link back to your website affect google rankings
Having a debate here that needs to be settled. A friend is using twitter to link back to his site but is falling down the google rankings. I think that he is over using and creating double content which looks like a robot . Can any body elsse explain this Better Please Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | Feily0 -
Is link cloaking bad?
I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites. In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links. Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0