Inbound Spam Links

[capekeysgal]

We've held Local listings at "A" for over a year.

2 weeks ago we dropped down to below the fold.

I ran several reports and our backlink report shows roughly over 10,000

and it's growing every day along with new domain referrals with

inbound spam links all using  the same core anchor text term.

One domain is responsible for over 2,000.  These sites

have Nothing to do with our industry and several in foreign

languages.

All these links are "NoFollow".

My question is.  Although "nofollow" is known to protect you, I'm wondering with over 10,000 of them coming from 345 sites, ALL using our one core term as an anchor text has red flagged us?  If so,I'm planning on using Google disavow at the "domain" level.

We are a local resort and until this happened we only had around 15 referral sites that are industry related. Hotels.com type sites and local tourist related sites.

These new inbound spam links are so blatant and yes they're "nofollow", but I'm starting to wonder IF this off the wall inbound spam link pattern IS  indeed affecting us?

Any thoughts?

[jws8118]

I think it may be hurting you b/c even though the links aren't passing link juice they are likely still messing up your anchor text distribution.  This sounds like a case of negative SEO by a competitor.

What is your plan of action?

[capekeysgal]

Don't think that - that thought hasn't cross my mind, but the "nofollow" doesn't make sense for negative SEO, useless, if this IS the case, they didn't get what they paid for to really crush us with "follow" links.

This started this past Dec and caught up to us 2 weeks ago.

I"m amazed we're not banished with this off the wall link/domain/anchor text ratio. Maybe the "nofollow" is saving us so far.

As mentioned, my plan is to do a Google disavow at the domain level.

We got 6 New domains since yesterday, so this is going to be an ongoing task, since it started 2 1/2 months ago, I don't see it stopping anytime soon

Forgot to mention.  When I go to these links I can't find us ANYWHERE. Not for our term that's listed in report nor our domain

[MarieHaynes]

I'm going to respectfully disagree about this being a negative SEO campaign.  If someone was going to go to the trouble to negative SEO you, why would they build 10,000 nofollow links?

When you disavow a link, what Google essentially does is add a nofollow to it in their algorithm.

Unnatural links issues and Penguin issues happen to sites that have built links in order to manipulate pagerank.  That's not going to happen with nofollowed links.

But hey, you did lose rankings, so perhaps I could be wrong?  Did your rankings start to drop on a Penguin day (last one was Oct 5)?  Did you have a manual warning of unnatural links in WMT?  If not, then I really guess that this is not any sort of negative SEO campaign.

So why do you have so many anchor texted links pointing to you?  Have you ever used a backlinking service?  Sometimes these can keep populating links.  Have you ever used an auto directory submitter?

There's no harm in using the disavow tool on these new links just to be sure, but my guess is that it won't make a huge difference.

[MarieHaynes]

I'm curious about these links.  Can you p.m. me your url?  I'd love to have a look.

[capekeysgal]

According to the report, these links started slowly this past Nov.

No problems with Panda or Penguin.  We dropped 2 weeks ago.

Links aren't coming from directories, they'll all websites.

The only thing I've done as far as backlinks go was back in

2007 or 8 I published some articles and a couple of press releases and

yes it did use our core term as the anchor text

No email warning from Google in WMT, but from what I understand the only time

you get one is when the site is manually reviewed by a human as to an automatic algorithm adjustment.  Don't know if this is actually true or not.

[capekeysgal]

I sent PM.

Looks like Google slowly started "discovering" these in Nov and started to peak in Dec

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks for sending me the url and the links.  I don't have an answer as to what is going on, but I have a couple of theories.

I looked at a few of the spammy pages linking to you and they all seem to be nofollowed comment links.  They are hidden by css.  And they are there along with hundreds of other sites who have anchor texted links.

Are you absolutely sure you never purchased a "build x number of links for $100" type of package?  That could populate links like that.

I wondered if it was some type of a malware thing where hackers place a script on your site and then link to it several times, but your site is clean according to sucuri and I don't see any strange script.  Plus, it doesn't make sense that the hacker would link to you with anchor text.  I see links for a couple of anchor texted terms.

If I were you I would disavow these links.  I would use the domain: operator and hopefully you can get the majority of them.  I personally wouldn't file for reconsideration given that you haven't been dealt a manual penalty.  If you have suffered algorithmically because of the number of anchor texted links (which would surprise me because they are nofollowed) then this will resolve itself without you filing for reconsideration.  It's not Penguin because you would have seen a dramatic drop October 5.

If the drop is indeed because of the links, then over the next couple of weeks as Google disavows them you should see a rise again. I'll be interested to hear if that happens.

[irvingw]

Listening to Matt Cutts, I would approach this by putting together a disavow file:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HWJUU-g5U_I#!

You can also reach out to the Google Webmaster team:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

But, I wouldn't draw their attention if some of the spam links were self inflicted.

[capekeysgal]

Back in 08 or 09 I purchased 2 link wheels, a couple of months apart, but how would that keep producing forever backlinks? They're not backlink generators. The were for anchor text links.

I got reports back for each assignment and they were all English websites
with an article post for us with our anchor text

I've been aware of backlink generators for years, but didn't go there.

So to answer your question build X number of links for $$...Nope

[capekeysgal]

I've been looking around the web and a couple of places it says that when google

disavows they apply a "nofollow".  If indeed this is the case, we're already  "nofollowed" up the yen yang.

Do they apply a "nofollow"?

[MarieHaynes]

Hmmm.  I don't know.  Hopefully someone else can figure out why you would have so many nofollowed links from iffy domains.  I'll be watching this thread.

[Dr-Pete]

My gut reaction is the same as Marie's - it doesn't sound like a typical negative SEO approach. It seems more likely that a past SEO attempt by a 3rd party went farther then you thought or got spread/duplicated somehow. Unfortunately, there's virtually no way to tell who created a link (let alone why).

If many of these are coming from just a few domains, I'd also recommend using the disavow tool. I do agree with James that these links could potentially harm you, even no-followed.

I'd look for any common clues as to who might be leaving these comments, though. I'd just want to make absolutely sure it's not someone operating on your behalf. I've seen that way too many times in the past.