Can bad traffic by association ever be a good thing?
-
Back in May, my client's website www.mfcomm.co.uk was hacked. Pages were added to the site which instantly received backlinks & traffic. The secuirty flaw was plugged & offending pages deleted within the following weeks. I also created 301 redirects for the most popular pages because the domain appeared to be affected by the increase in 404 errors.
Reviewing stats & Moz reports, I notice fresh backlinks - one from http://forum.kolodec.info/. By association to the spurious page that was created as part of the security breach, should I distance the domain with any traffic from all referring sites?
Reviewing http://forum.kolodec.info/ in Open Site Explorer it only gets spam score = 4
So my question is, should I count all traffic by association as bad traffic & blacklist the domain or be more lenient? More the point, what would Google think?
Regards, Terry
-
I think that you should check is this real visit or fake one. Check HTTP access logs about such referrer and see in Analytics (or other website analytics software that you used). Also visit URL where backlink should be. Then:
- In case of link to hacked pages - disavow ASAP. Bad guys make backlinks to hacked webpages to get higher position in SERP. But this could change your linking profile. And in some situation you may face Penguin algo filter.
- In case of link to other pages and source look shady - disavow ASAP. This could be even revenge for removed hack. Also can bring Penguin.
- In case of link to non-existing link i.e. bot traffic - leave. This is case when bot make "fake visit" tricking Analytics to count it. And webmasters go to inspect source. This is "curiosity driven visit", but messing your Analytics statistics.
- In case of regular link that is relevant - keep it. Example - i have link from Pakisanian forum about people discussing something like type X vs. type Y. And someone share link from mine site explaining "here is difference between them" in article that is exactly about their discussion.
So until you didn't see original source can be anything. Also please check question and answers here:
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/is-there-value-in-disavowing-links-if-you-there-is-no-google-penalty
so disavowing isn't tool that you only use in case of penalty. You can use it even w/o penalty to make link profile clean as possible.
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
-
Good Collaboration resources for link building
We have recently come across this site in our work on a website: https://collabosaurus.com We are wondering if there are any other collaborative tools or sites like this that may be effective for partnering or matching with people for link building purposes. If anyone is aware of anything similar, we'd love to hear about it. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Gavo1 -
Good idea? bad idea?
Hi guys there's a campaign (which I am very passionate about) to save our village pub from being developed. Now I have bought a domain name www dot SaveTheRoyalOak dot com I've forwarded this domain to sussexchef.com/save-the-royal-oak I'm using forward masking so the url remains save the royal oak, I will contain the few pages to do with the pub so that the navigation bars are hidden so the site will pretty much look be it's own entity to the user. this micro site will get hundreds of users and people linking to it, My question is will this hurt my site at all? I'm guessing that when I ask people to link to it I should get them to "no follow" it to be on the safe side? Thanks for your help All the best Ben
Link Building | | SussexChef830 -
How do i replace bad hits on Google?
When people search for our brand name on Google, the 4th and 5th hits are threads from open forum. The discussions can hurt our image very much and we have to do something to replace it. I need some tips for how i can replace the community and push it down the list.
Link Building | | DialectAB0 -
How good are PR for getting authority backlinks ?
I have heard that Press release is one of the best source for getting high authority backlinks. Can anyone tell me about benefits of paid and free services offered by PR websites like PRweb or PRLOG ?
Link Building | | 01Aditya0 -
Can I Boost Ranking Linking off Pages internallly?
My domain authority is relatively low, but my right now my homepage seems to have the highest rank. If I place a few internal page links on my homepage, would this boost ranking on internal pages? Or would it pull juice away from my homepage? Using the Seomoz OSE I see alot of my competitors using this type of strategy linking internally. Also would using breadcrumb links benefit me in anyway? Thanks very much!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
How can I Improve My Site Page Rank?
How can I improve my site page rank? We were a three now a two as of today. How can I get it back to three at least or more?
Link Building | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
How long does it typically take to see a boost in traffic after a strong increase in links?
Suppose you have had a great month of linkbuilding and significantly increased the number of linking domains (say by about 10%). How long does it typically take to see a noticeable uptick in traffic based on your experience?
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Blog Roll Links - A good or bad thing ?
I Use Blog roll links all the time but recently they seem to be having a lower effect on listings. Is there a limit on Blog roll links you place on a blog. Internal blog roll links and external blog roll links. Also do you rename your blog roll to something such as popular links like we do ?
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect1