Ping Backs From Low Quality Sites

[SEOperson-CA]

This post is deleted!

[SEOperson-CA]

I think I figured it out. The post all these websites are linking to is a guest article. I believe the writter of the guest article is creating a "link wheel", linking to us from all direction. (Although I don't understand the nofollow attributes). Ironically it's a link building agency.

Should I let this be or delete the guest article all together?

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks for adding some additional info, I was just looking through things.

Do you mean the author wrote the article http://www.guardianpoolfence.com/simple-ways-home-safe/ and is now building links to it to try and boost its rankings?

I would ask the guest author to stop doing that!

I don't think much harm done this one time - the two pages you included above aren't even indexed in Google (yet).

Just focus on continuing to build "high quality" links as much as possible - branded anchor text is great - and keep doing things to boost your social signals. And your site healthy (minimize 404s, duplicate titles etc) and you should be fine.

Worst case, if you do notice something slip in rankings, you could just try 404-ing the page.

If you "spam" the ping-backs, this will prevent you from linking back to the external sites via ping-back. Unfortunately their links are still pointing at you. But definitely a good idea to not allow pingbacks.

Also, one other unrelated things of note, since I was looking;

• The Guardian Pool Fence Site is visually loading awfully slow for me. Google page speed online showed it was getting 74/100 but I'd look at webmaster tools and analytics for actual page load times and see if it can be improved.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

[blacey]

If the links are nofollow then it should be fine to leave it published, after all its still content on your site that's been added and as long as its relevant to your site or industry then there's no point in deleting it.

Its a shame the links are nofollow because your site isn't benefiting from link juice passed through those backlinks, so you could argue that the pingbacks themselves are useless anyway (from an SEO point of view in getting you further up the rankings).

That being said, the pingbacks could bring you more traffic, which may allow you to convert those visits into potential sales, so it might be worth spending some time ensuring that page is as good as it can be with a clean call to action.

I'm curious, what plugin are you using for the WordPress Facebook comments at the bottom, I've been looking into Discus as a comment enhancement have you used it before?

[SEOperson-CA]

Dan, what I meant was that I accepted a guest post which is linking to this Fire Protection website. I believe who are behind this website are the ones creating these growing number of nofollow ping backs with the same Home Safety article all over the web. I believe they are creating a link wheel. If this is the case I don't understand why they use "nofollow attributes".

I contacted the guest post source - which is a link building agency - and they deny having anything to do with this. Maybe their client, the Fire Protection company is directly behind it. I am not sure.

Ben my concern is that these are from low quality sites. It might be matter where your links are coming from. It might hurt us in the long run. If, like you are saying, these links are worthless then why have them at all? It will still count towards our overall links but it will increase the number of nofollow vs. follow links. How can we be sure that this will be ok?

I understand that I can't control all the inbound links but I don't know where this will end. I am still getting the ping back requests, I am not sure how many more places they will post the same article linking to us. So far we have 20 since yesterday.

[SEOperson-CA]

I am simply using the Facebook's widget. I am not using any WP plugin for the comments.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Thanks for clarifying! I get the whole picture now

• I did check, and the links back to you are followed, as are the links going out to the fire company.
• Its the pingbacks (if you were to allow them) that would be nofollowed - this is by default in wordpress.
• So, I do think they are trying to do some form of linkwheel to boost the value of their links on your page.

So, you're first step is to of course not allow the pingbacks.

Secondly, you have asked them to stop and they have denied being involved, which is too bad because they likely are.

As mentioned, these links are unlikely to harm you so long as you're doing other things right and they stop being added.

I would wait a few days, see if they stop, and if so just move on and you've learned a good lesson about guest posting.

If they keep doing it or if you get any warnings in webmaster tools etc, remove the page.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

[SEOperson-CA]

Thank you Dan for the advice. I will do that and see what is happening by Monday. Have a good weekend.