Competitor's 'hidden' links harming my site?

[Sandy_M]

Hi everyone, I'm new to both Moz & seo, and am attempting to tackle our site's issues after being hit by panda / penguin, so would be grateful for any advice offered.

I bought a website 3 years ago after the previous company that ran it went into administration.  Having bought the website, it became apparent that the employees of the previous company had copied the entire site content, and relaunched it with a new look / brand.  Over the last 3 years they've rewritten much of the content, but there remains a lot of links from their site back to ours which have had the anchor text stripped out, and point to images on our site which have since been removed, example below...

<a href="http://www.MyCompany.com/catalog/images/filename.pdf" target="<a class="attribute-value">_blank</a>"><strong>strong>a>

What I'm trying to understand is whether the 404 errors being returned by the broken links, and the presence of 'hidden' links on their site, is likely to reflect badly on our site or theirs?

I'm not interested in outing anyone here, and I realise the standard recommendation for these kinds of situations is to write to the company telling them to remove the offending content, but if at all possible I'd prefer to fix our site by improving content & links etc, rather than 'force' them to take action and inadvertently improve their own site's content / rankings.

As I say, all advice gratefully received

[matbennett]

Hi Sandy & welcome to the wonderful world of SEO!

Sounds like an annoying situation. It smacks a little of either dishonesty or bad sales agreements too, but that is another issue entirely.

Luckily Google has recently made this very very easy to deal with. They have introduced a tools to "disavow links" - literally tell them which links you don't want them to take in to account when dealing with your website.  You can do this on a per website basis, so if you disavow all links from the competitor site it will stop any of those taking effect.

(Note - one idea might be to do this on a link by link basis so that you can keep one or two that might be helping you! However that is getting a little more in depth)

In order to do this you need to first get your site registered on google webmaster tools if you have not done so already. See here : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ 

You then want to disavow the links : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

[Sandy_M]

Many thanks for the response Mat.  I'm in the middle of preparing a disavow file, having spent the last month trying to get rubbishy links removed from suspect directories....a whole other world of pain

I guess what I'm trying to understand is whether our competitor's links are likely to be harming or helping us?

If the 404's and hidden links are either de-valuing their site, or benefiting ours by passing link juice, then I see that as good news for us.

If however, the 404's / hidden links reflect badly on our site, then I'd certainly want to get them disavowed quick smart.

[MikeRoberts]

DO NOT just blindly Disavow Links. The tool is really only intended for use when you have received an Unnatural Links warning or you have a massively spammy link profile that you're preemptively taking care of. Disavowing Links improperly can wind up hurting you.

If another site is linking to pages on your site that don't exist then the correct course of action is the 404. You could always try contacting them to tell them about the broken links pointing to your site and ask if they can be fixed or removed them as needed. Ultimately the 404s on your site are not harming you and they are also not benefiting you via any link equity because your page does not exist so there is nothing to pass the equity on to.

If you actually receive a decent level of traffic via those links or if a large number of valuable links are pointing to the 404'd pages, THEN you may want to consider redirecting somewhere else. If the other site is a spammy mess or you have 1000s of crap links pointing to you, then I'd say you might need to do a Disavow. But currently it would seem to me that you could let the pages 404 and get on with your day.

[Sandy_M]

Thanks Mike, much appreciated!