Competitor's 'hidden' links harming my site?
-
Hi everyone, I'm new to both Moz & seo, and am attempting to tackle our site's issues after being hit by panda / penguin, so would be grateful for any advice offered.
I bought a website 3 years ago after the previous company that ran it went into administration. Having bought the website, it became apparent that the employees of the previous company had copied the entire site content, and relaunched it with a new look / brand. Over the last 3 years they've rewritten much of the content, but there remains a lot of links from their site back to ours which have had the anchor text stripped out, and point to images on our site which have since been removed, example below...
<a href="http://www.MyCompany.com/catalog/images/filename.pdf" target="<a class="attribute-value">_blank</a>"><strong>strong>a>
What I'm trying to understand is whether the 404 errors being returned by the broken links, and the presence of 'hidden' links on their site, is likely to reflect badly on our site or theirs?
I'm not interested in outing anyone here, and I realise the standard recommendation for these kinds of situations is to write to the company telling them to remove the offending content, but if at all possible I'd prefer to fix our site by improving content & links etc, rather than 'force' them to take action and inadvertently improve their own site's content / rankings.
As I say, all advice gratefully received
-
Thanks Mike, much appreciated!
-
DO NOT just blindly Disavow Links. The tool is really only intended for use when you have received an Unnatural Links warning or you have a massively spammy link profile that you're preemptively taking care of. Disavowing Links improperly can wind up hurting you.
If another site is linking to pages on your site that don't exist then the correct course of action is the 404. You could always try contacting them to tell them about the broken links pointing to your site and ask if they can be fixed or removed them as needed. Ultimately the 404s on your site are not harming you and they are also not benefiting you via any link equity because your page does not exist so there is nothing to pass the equity on to.
If you actually receive a decent level of traffic via those links or if a large number of valuable links are pointing to the 404'd pages, THEN you may want to consider redirecting somewhere else. If the other site is a spammy mess or you have 1000s of crap links pointing to you, then I'd say you might need to do a Disavow. But currently it would seem to me that you could let the pages 404 and get on with your day.
-
Many thanks for the response Mat. I'm in the middle of preparing a disavow file, having spent the last month trying to get rubbishy links removed from suspect directories....a whole other world of pain
I guess what I'm trying to understand is whether our competitor's links are likely to be harming or helping us?
If the 404's and hidden links are either de-valuing their site, or benefiting ours by passing link juice, then I see that as good news for us.
If however, the 404's / hidden links reflect badly on our site, then I'd certainly want to get them disavowed quick smart.
-
Hi Sandy & welcome to the wonderful world of SEO!
Sounds like an annoying situation. It smacks a little of either dishonesty or bad sales agreements too, but that is another issue entirely.
Luckily Google has recently made this very very easy to deal with. They have introduced a tools to "disavow links" - literally tell them which links you don't want them to take in to account when dealing with your website. You can do this on a per website basis, so if you disavow all links from the competitor site it will stop any of those taking effect.
(Note - one idea might be to do this on a link by link basis so that you can keep one or two that might be helping you! However that is getting a little more in depth)
In order to do this you need to first get your site registered on google webmaster tools if you have not done so already. See here : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
You then want to disavow the links : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
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
-
Responsive site.com vs m.site.com
Hi All, My client's website have two urls like: site.com/a.html and **m.site.com/a.html. ** Will it hurt google rankings for this website because there are version of a website? Please help!
On-Page Optimization | | binhlai1 -
When trying to sculpt an internal link structure, is there any point in placing text links to top level pages that are already in the main menu?
Does Google recognise a link in the content if there is already a link in the menu? My understanding is that Google only counts the first link it finds.
On-Page Optimization | | bittristo0 -
Use External Links
Hey 🙂 I noticed when analysing my pages that Moz gives the following advice about adding external links to my articles; "On any page specifically targeting a keyword, link externally to at least one (and possibly more than one) relevant, trusted resources as a best practice." As a small business I work pretty damn hard to get visitors to my website, so why on earth would I want to go to all that trouble just to send them away again to a trusted resouce? Secondly, what exactly is a "trusted resource"? Can I simply use search and use the top competitor, for example Moz or Wikipedia and does the anchor need to be an exact match or will a partial suffice. I say this because I already have the top spot for my longtail, so an exact match would be pointless. And lastly, I notice that pretty much all quality sites use external links to open in the same window i.e. not target=_blank, I never thought of it before today, but now that I'm considering using external linking in my articles I guess it's important to know the answer - i.e. Is this a best practice and does this give any seo benefit? Cheers, Lee :)
On-Page Optimization | | LeeC0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Ok so I am very new to MOZ, and we have just set up our PRO account and campaign. When we got our crawl results we had 4 pages with "too many on-page links". All of these pages correspond with our blog, which is a wordpress hosted blog that is integrated into our site. Our site is www.moxicopy.com and the blog is www.moxicopy.com/blog I am confused on how we have over 100 on page links on these pages, as we have very few links on our blog.
On-Page Optimization | | Moxicopy.com0 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Anyone know of a tool to monitor site for outgoing links?
Is there any type of tool that can monitor a large website's outgoing links? I'm dealing with a huge site and was hoping there was something available that could check outgoing links without having to go through each page manually. (I'm looking to remove anything that links to a bad neighborhood). Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | cakelady0 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Too many on page links
I'm having trouble interpreting this data. It says several of my blog pages have too many on page links, some as high as 140 and there is no example of a blog post that they are referring to. What am I missing? I never post more than a handful (5-7) in our 600-1000wd blogs. When I drill down, it doesn't give me very much information except "Found over 41 years ago" off to the right. When I click on the "too many on page links" URL, it provides a long list of website pages that are renamed with the blog name. huh? A lot of this stuff isn't very intuitive, SEOMoz.
On-Page Optimization | | amandahx20