Clear out Spammy Links

[AmandaJ]

I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck)

I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating.

Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop.

We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you!

[irvingw]

that's bad. are they all pointing to the homepage? What sort of number are we talking about and what is the ratio to links you already have?

If this is just starting I would get vigilant and try to track down the source of the poster which is often quite difficult.

The more established the site the harder it is to take a site down, but new sites that aren't trusted well can definitely be sabotaged.

[AmandaJ]

Yes all to the homepage. It says we have 1,052 linking domains and most of them are the spam it looks like. I'm not sure how many we had before all this.

Our site is pretty established, but I'm worried this could really affect us.

Thanks for your response

[Klarke]

Wow ...this is bad.

From your profile, I'd say you had about 75 to 100 root linking domains before the attack.

I'd fill a preemptive reconsideration request now, detailing all this.  You'll probably get a "no manual actions found" message, but it will be on record.   Second, I'd also post it on the Google Webmaster Forums as employees sometimes answer cases like this with assurances that these links aren't going to you.

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

Firstly, don't worry too much I highly doubt that the drop you've seen in ranking has anything to do with this spam attack. Have you received a warning in Google Webmaster Tools?

The vast majority of links appear to be nofollowed - you can pretty much ignore these entirely, as they shouldn't have any impact on you. You'll also note that many of the linking pages have a PR of 0 on sites where that should be higher, indicating that Google knows these pages are being used for link spam. You're going to have a hard time getting them to stop or remove the links. If you really feel the need (and I wouldn't) you can contact the site owners and ask them to make UGC content like blog comments nofollow.

Ultimately it's out of your control, but I think Google understands what's happening here. You may have lost some rankings when the bad links your former employee built stopped counting. What I'd do is continue on doing legitimate link building.  If you receive a warning in Google WMT, you have a harder deicision to make over whether to submit a reconsideration request explaining the situation to Google.

[AmandaJ]

Ok great. Thank you.