Unwanted spam pharmacy links

[AdamThompson]

Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure.

However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts.

Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?

[brianspatterson]

Rand recently talked about this in the latest SEOmoz email newsletter where someone asked a question about negative SEO.  Rand had an idea that I liked and hadn't heard before.  He suggested submitting a pre-emptive reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, letting them know that someone is building those links and that you all are not responsible for them.  Be as detailed as possible.

I guess the caveat there is that everything else you are doing is whitehat, since you are potentially inviting a reviewer to look at all of your backlinks.

[NakulGoyal]

Honestly, think kind of problem exists industry wide and if your regular link profile is good, natural enough, you should be good. However, if a relatively high percentage of links exist compared to the rest of your profile and / or if you received the un-natural link profile notice from Google, I would lay out some of those examples and tell Google exactly what happened. If you think about it, anybody could buy spammy links for their competition and hurt them. The links are essentially supposed to be discounted so that they are not helping you and definitely not hurting you. Just file a re-inclusion request if you received a notice or if you are seeing a considerable drop in rankings.

[brianspatterson]

You should also checkout this Whiteboard Friday video, which covers that preemptive reconsideration request I mentioned along with a bunch of other tactics:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday

[AdamThompson]

Hmmm. Their situation is further complicated by a less than clean link profile (not counting the spam links). They have very few high quality links. Makes me think that a new domain is a possibility to consider.