Has your site ever been targeted by malicious link building executed by a competitor?
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I'm pretty sure one of my client's sites has been targeted by malicious black hat link building tactics employed by a competitor site. Over the last few weeks we've gotten 100s of super low quality spammy backlinks. No one has been doing link building, so the only thing I can think of is that competitor entered our URL into some spammy backlink building sites.
Has anyone else experienced this?
It's the real estate industry, so I wouldn't be surprised considering how competitive it is, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
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Hi Justin!
Yes, I have seen this with multiple clients before. One of my older clients (about 4 years ago now) actually received a manual action as a result. We were working with product reviewers at the time that would include a disclaimer and occasionally leave a link dofollow but we decided to focus on the low quality spam links first. Let the Web Spam team know that these were not our work and that we had no way to contact the webmasters to have them removed. The manual action was lifted a few days later.
I have a client now that also gets links such as these, someone is building thousands of spam links to their site using generic prescription 'pill' anchor text ("buy hydrocodone online", "generic viagra" etc). I have no idea who is doing it. I don't think it is having an impact and frankly shouldn't according to Google's claims with Penguin 4.0 being able to devalue such links. I do still add them to the disavow file to cover all bases though.
Do you feel this is impacting your organic performance?
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I too have seen many clients, unfortunately.
They are targeted by competitors (most likely) sending both fake links for instance in one case a client has a travel site many of the backlinks that were clearly targeted to hurt the site, for instance, the competition / spammers would use the name of an authoritative travel site all they would do is change the TLD so example.com becomes example.co, even though they were tracking their backlinks they were simply looking at the URLs, not the authority of the URL or domain sadly, this is spam, was not detected immediately by the client until they were hit with a manual penalty.
That is when I was brought on and ran a check using Link Research Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic & Moz OSE. Checking for hacks sitecheck.sucuri.net is great & https://sucuri.net/website-security-platform/ to clean and protect.
The worse thing in their case they were not getting a lot of the clear spam that as Joe states above Google does not think anybody is crazy enough to include help their site. mainly Viagra/pornography URLs which I agree with him take Google devalues quickly however you should disavow them. in my experience, Viagra-style spam attacks are the work of a combination of both competitors & black hat SEO spam/hacks in the form of Link injection on hack's, database hack's, content injections and BlackHat SEO that spread the pornography URLs. Like if you look Fiverr at https://www.fiverr.com/gopo2k/provide-you-1-unregistered-domain-for-pbn-with-link-from-nytimes
In cases where the site is seemingly hit over and over again or use a tool like deepcrawl.com or screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider and find out that your database is full of URLs that have been created to spread for promote the spammers site. I always suggest using a web application firewall incapsula.com or sucuri.net ( CloudFare is really not as good until you hit the Pro plan)
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/08/cleaning-hijacked-google-seo-spam-results.html
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2011/04/link-injection-on-hacked-wordpress-sites-blackhat-seo-spam.html
- https://digwp.com/2009/06/spam-link-injection-hacked/
if you're on WordPress you can also save money by having a faster site on a managed wordpress host monitor and you will not have to pay to the fix hacks.
Hope this helps,
Tom
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Hi Joe -
Thanks for the insight. I agree that disavow is the best course forward, even if Google is devaluing them. A manual penalty is what I'm worried about. How do you directly let the Web Spam team know? I can monitor and continue to disavow, but this could continue to go on indefinitely.
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Hi Tom -
Thanks so much for your insight - and the tools you've recommended. I also experienced a hacked site in the past where new URLs were created on the client site for nike shoes and what not.
I will disavow for now, but agree - I need to add a crawl with the intention of uncovering those spam URLs in my technical audit process moving forward.
I detected the "attack" simply by monitoring backlinks via Ahrefs. I will disavow using same tool.
Again - your insight is appreciated!
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Hi Justin,
I wouldn't be very concerned about a manual action tbh. If these links do fall under manual review, I am confident that the Webspam team will be able to identify these as a spam tactic against your website. I believe the manual action my old client experienced was more of an uncommon occurrence.
Normally, you would respond to the Webspam team via a reconsideration request after they have applied a manual action penalty (will receive message through Google Search Console). In terms of proactive options, you can report these as webspam to the Webspam Team through Google Search Console here. Unfortunately, doing so will not prevent new links such as these from being created.
Hope this helps!
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Thanks!
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Hi Justin,
Happy I could be of help. My personal favorite crawling tool is https://www.deepcrawl.com/ I know you can try it for free right now.
Screaming Frog is also an excellent tool I personally prefer the interface and capabilities on deepcrawl.
Monitoring backlinks via Ahrefs is a very comprehensive and good way to detect spam. Majestic is really the only one with the same reach but the most important is Google search console/Google Webmaster tools which is surprisingly very close to Moz OSE.
Ahrefs will definitely do the job.
One tool I should have also included is https://www.distilnetworks.com/ ( unparalleled bot detection) & https://www.stackpath.com/ a new WAF that starts at only $19 and offers MaxCDN's enterprise features like edge rules its price will probably go up but right now it's a steal.
I agree reading the disavow using Ahrefs is never a bad way to go however I've always submitted using Webmaster tools.
All the best,
Tom
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As I understand it Penguin is no longer penalizing sites for bad links but just devalues them/don't count them. So I imagine getting targeted by such methods by a competitor, or even acquiring questionable links from PBNs can't hurt you anymore, but just return 0 value?
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