Strange new links being picked up in Webmaster tools affecting SERPs

[Dynamis]

Hi,

I have a question regarding new links being found by Google, and showing in our latest links file from Webmaster tools.

I run this site: http://www.propertysales.com it's a fairly new website with a small (ish) link profile but over the last 3 months I've seen a lot of links being found in Google like this: http://www.financecourier.com/news/story/523316/foreign-carmakers-milk-chinas-cash-cow/full_story.html

it's clearly a scrap of a webpage from the FT.com, who we partner with, that has a link to PropertySales.com but the number of links Webmaster tools is seeing is much bigger than we would normally get in any given month.

As a rule I would normally ignore scrapper sites as I’ve always assumed Google is smart enough to know which site these are and thus wouldn't affect your SERPs but I’ve also seen a drop in our SERPs over the same month so now I’m thinking these are effecting the sites SEO.

Does anybody have any insight into this or advice on the best way to handle this, I looking at going through these site and adding them to our disavow file but this can take a few month to take effect so are they any better options or way to handle this?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Rufus

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Rufus,

You are correct that a disavow can take some time to start making a difference, but even so, you need to either continue with this, or contact the poor link sites and ask for links to be removed.

What you can always do, is some positive link-building and outreach to help counter this. I would never really advocate just removing lots of links without doing something positive as well, and this does work well.

You could also look to create a strong internal link strategy to key pages throughout the site. This can often help push specific phrases back up that might have seen a bit of a drop.

Additionally, see if there is some value-added content that can be written for the site to help Google again see that positive measures are being taken.

-Andy

[BruceA]

Unless Google has issued a warning penalty, they either know about the site and ignore it anyway or have not found these links.

Therefore yes build better content to drive traffic, but I wouldn't worry too much about the problem now you have done the disavow.

Hope that helps

Bruce

[Patrick_G]

If you've seen a drop in ranking but have no penalty, ideally you would be adding more links, but you're not the first person to talk about noticing this issue, and we had a similar issue on our website. I'd keep an eye on it and when you run across particularly bad instances, ask the webmaster to remove the link. That sometimes works. And when it doesn't, I would consider adding it to a disavow file.

We ignored this issue too long, and got penalized for not doing something about it. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that Google can always tell the difference between bad linking practices, and junk websites linking to your website.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi Rufus,

If it's a minor drop, then it might just be temporary. Are you still building links to your site now?

Like you, I normally ignore scraper sites. They sometimes give me a lot of good links lol

ill gauge it again after 3 months. If it's effect is questionable, then I end up disavowing them right there if it's a really bad looking site. Some scraper sites are really structurally sound and have unique content so I leave those out.