Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links

[WeBuyCars.com]

I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc...

So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I have seen this before where it was trackbacks causing issues and injecting spammy keywords in to them. I have also seen RSS feeds carrying spammy backlinks.

It is also worth remembering that lots of the bad links like these will now be dead / removed / changed.

Have you done a disavow of these spam sites yet?

-Andy

[MarieHaynes]

Hi. I remember speaking with you last year some time about link issues. How certain are you that your link profile is clean aside from these pharma links? Usually Google is pretty good at just discounting these, but if you've got your own unnatural links I think that sometimes spam like this can possibly hurt.

Have you seen this?

https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo

Also, what are you trying to rank for? Your title tag is optimized for your url and brand.

[MattRoney]

Hi there WeBuyCars.com!

Are Andy's and Marie's answers helpful? Can you provide any more information?

Thanks!

[Joe.Robison]

I would definitely disavow all of the pharma links, but make sure your code really is clean on your site. I've worked with 3 sites so far that had the same thing happen, and although they were on WP like you mentioned you don't have, it's possible your site was still infiltrated.

Sign up for Sucuri.net or Wordfence premium and have them look at your site - definitely worth the cost of those subscriptions.

[CleverPhD]

This could be an outlier, but easy to check.  Use a browser plugin and set the useragent to Googlebot. Browse your site.  See if it is displaying anything funky.  I have seen sites hacked so that when Googlebot is the agent, they show links to viagra type sites.  I would otherwise agree that you need to become friends with the disavow tool asap.