How to Handle Sketchy Inbound Links to Forum Profile Pages

[M_D_Golden_Peak]

Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles.

Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool?

Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things.

This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!

[Chris.Menke]

Interesting question.  It seems to me that hundreds or even thousands of spammy links from one domain pointing to 404 URLs on another domain isn't the the kind of situation Google would be penalizing the receiving domain for.  I think you're in a far better situation than those who have such a back link profile pointing to their homepage because they don't have the option of deleting the page being linked to.

I would say that you don't need to disavow those links--just delete the profiles.

[AlanMosley]

If I understand you, you have spam links pointing to profile pages, from there you link to your site.

then noindex,nofollow or removing the intermediate page will solve the issue.

[M_D_Golden_Peak]

Chris, the spam links are coming from multiple domains to multiple spam-created forum profile pages on our site's forum. We are deleting the profiles and agree that this is probably all we need to do...but we can always use a tool like Link Detox or Link Risk to further assess our link profile if we get penalized by Penguin for some reason.

Alan, the spam-created forum profile pages are already set to noindex,follow (as are all forum profile pages). They previously weren't (decided by someone before my time), but I had our Developers change that setting 6 months ago for reasons like this. I just didn't discover all of this spam until now. Anyways, the concern with keeping the pages live but set to noindex,follow is that the link juice coming from the spam-sites to the spam profile pages on our site could be passed through to all the other pages linked from the nav menu/sidebar/footer. I believe this is how link equity flows through pages set to "noindex,follow." If the pages are deleted, then I believe the link equity evaporates (which supports why SEOs do "link reclamation" by fixing broken links).

If anyone has any further clarification...I'm all ears!

Thanks again, guys. -Dan

[AlanMosley]

If you read my post you will see I said noindex,nofollow not follow, if you would like to remove them then that will do the same job. A>B>C take out B and problem solved either way