Thought FRED penalty - Now see new spammy image backlinks what to do?

[plahpoy]

Hi,

So starting about March 9 I started seeing huge losses in ranking for a client. These rankings continue to drop every week since and we changed nothing on the site.

At first I thought it must be the FRED update, so we have started rewriting and adding product descriptions to our pages (which is a good thing regardless). I also checked our backlink profile using OSE on MOZ and still saw the few linking root domains we had. Another Odd thing on this is that webmasters tools showed many more domains.

So today I bought a subscriptions to ahrefs and instantly saw that on the same timeline (starting March 1 2017) until now, we have literally doubled in inbound links from very spammy type sites. BUT the incoming links are not to content, people seem to be ripping off our images.

So my question is, do spammy inbound image links count against us the same as if someone linked actual written content or non image urls? Is FRED something I should still be looking into? Should i disavow a list of inbound image links?

Thanks in advance!

[NickW816]

Hi Zach, this is a tough one to give a straight answer or solution to, from what I'm reading it looks like it was more than likely Fred Update related. The spammy backlinks are concerning though as well, in theory those links should just be ignored by Google now, instead of having a negative impact on your rankings, I would check that the website also did not lose any good links in the last couple months as well (ahrefs should show this). Not sure what kind of website this is for, but make sure the product pages and homepage are not too "ad-heavy" or "affilate-heavy" (Amazon etc.) as well, as penalizing these types of websites was part of the Google Fred Update also.

If I were in your shoes, I would use the disavow tool from Google with the really spammy, low quality links, just to be safe (as well as try to regain any good backlinks that have been last the past few months). Also, continue doing your product pages updates and optimizing potential landing pages for the website with unique titles and meta descriptions, remove some ads (if your client's website has them) and then use the Fetch and Render tool in Google Search Console and request re-indexing of the website.

[plahpoy]

Thanks for the quick response. I actually already disavowed the spammy image links 'just in case' haha.

The whole thing is weird, the spam links literally start at the exact same timeframe as FRED. However only people using our images on super spammy pages.

We have no ad heavy pages, no good links lost.

I'll keep updating this as time goes on.

[seoman10]

Definitely check the Lost & Broken links in ahrefs.

Interested to know the outcome, I have the same question myself.

Keep us posted.

[plahpoy]

will do

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Zach,

Just to quickly add to what Nicholas has said, I have seen instances where links to a site via hotlinked images can cause ranking problems. It sounds like you're on top of it with the disavow file, so just keep an eye on things and update that as you find new links.

If you've been hit by the Fred update, that does seem like something different, but again it sounds like you're doing the right things that would help with SEO anyway. It could be worth comparing your site and it's features to other sites that seem to have been affected and see if you can spot any similarities. Here is a list from Search Engine Roundtable.

Cheers.

Paddy

[plahpoy]

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