Help I have spam backlinks on my site and I am trying to remove them. Can someone please help me.

[Snell]

The site is www.jans.com  I have identified the offending site as http://newbieontheblock.blogspot.com/  IT is loading me with bad anchor text...

[Mike.Goracke]

Contact the webmaster and request that they remove your links from their site.

If this does not work and you have documented proof that they will not remove your links from your site, you can consider using the Google Webmaster Tool - Disavow Link tool. But be very cautions in doing so.

Google recommends you contact the site owner first and make a good faith attempt at doing everything in your power to get links removed prior to using the disavow tool.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[TextMarketing]

In my experience, many webmasters don't take the time to remove all of the bad links.

I suggest you just used Google Webmaster Tool's Disavow Link Tool right off the bat. This will address the issues as quickly as possible. The longer you wait, the more potential there is for harm!

• Matt

[Mike.Goracke]

Hi Matt,

Matt Cutts actually suggests that you should use the disavow link tool with caution and only in certain circumstances.

Also, there is an article on Search Engine Land regarding things to think about prior to using the disavow tool, which states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

Google Webmaster Tools calls out the following, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

I am not saying that you shouldn't use the disavow tool - simply suggesting that you use caution.

Mike

[Snell]

I cant find the offending website in my tools.....Any idea how I find it... I combed through 875 links and I could not find it...any thoughts?

[Mike.Goracke]

Using OpenSiteExplorer.org, newbieontheblock.blogspot.com/ is listed under the 3rd linking root domain - under *.blogspot.com/.

You have 3,000+ links coming from that website. It appears that each page on the blog is linking to your website via the anchor text treats me well.

Does this help?

Mike

[MarieHaynes]

If you've got one bad site like this linking to you, and especially if you didn't make this link yourself just ignore it.  You won't get a penalty even if it was a sitewide.

I have a fair sized information site for which I do no linkbuilding and I regularly get whacked out spammy looking links pointing to it.  I don't have any idea why they come but I'm not going to spend any effort getting rid of them.

[Snell]

Thanks so much Mike,  I looked at WMT  to see it.  I saw that and didn't realize it was the one....I think we will disavow and be better off.  How long does it take to remove in your experience?

Thanks again

[Mike.Goracke]

I (knock on wood) have not had to use it yet.

Google states, "We need to recrawl and reindex the URLs you disavowed before your disavowals go into effect, which can take multiple weeks."

And again, I would reread this article which I posted previously regarding when to use the disavow tool, ""This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

And again like I said above, Google recommends you contact the site owner first and make a good faith attempt at doing everything in your power to get links removed prior to using the disavow tool.

Good luck.

Mike

[MarieHaynes]

I just wanted to point out that if you do choose to use the disavow tool you will not see them removed from your WMT.  Google essentially adds an invisible nofollow to the link, but the links don't disappear from WMT.

It will take anywhere from a couple of days to 3 weeks for the invisible nofollow to be applied.

[Snell]

Thanks Mike,

I think we found it is a local person linking to us because she lies our store.  Not realizing the effect she is having on us.  We are trying to get her to take it down...Whew..

Thanks for your help!!!

[MarieHaynes]

It's me again, sticking my nose in.  

If someone linked to you because they liked your store, this is a natural link.  KEEP IT!

Don't worry about the fact that it is sitewide and contains anchor text.  As far as sitewide goes, Google is pretty good at figuring out that a sitewide link is really just one vote for a site not hundreds or thousands.  Even though it might look bad in WMT to have that many links, it's not a bad thing.

As far as having anchor text goes, there is nothing dangerous about a site linking to you with anchor text.  But, if it were a pattern then I'd be concerned.  What I mean by that is that if Google detected that you were purposely building a pile of anchor texted site wide links on a large number of sites then you're heading for either a Penguin issue or an unnatural links warning.

Google does not penalize site wide links.  They do not even penalize anchor texted links.  They penalize widespread attempts at manipulation.

[Mike.Goracke]

Hi Marie!

I think you are correct in saying, "If someone linked to you because they liked your store, this is a natural link. KEEP IT!" is very true.

However, wouldn't Google consider this type of linking a link scheme of sorts?

Matt Cutts even says the following on WebProNews.com - “But then there’s also on the manual side,” he continues. “So, imagine that you have a Polish website, and then you see a site-wide link in English talking about, ‘Rent cheap apartments,’ you know. To a regular person, that looks pretty bad. So, certainly it does happen that you have site-wide links – maybe you have a blogroll or something like that, but if I were a manual webspam analyst, sort of doing an investigation, and we got a spam report, you’re an English site, and you’ve got a site-wide Polish link or something like that or vice versa, it looks commercial or it looks off-topic, low-quality or spammy, then that can affect the assessment on whether you want to trust the out-going links from that site.”

The site in question has 3,000+ links coming from that blog website. It appears that each page on the blog is linking to your website via the anchor text treats me well.

I looked at some of the content and the other links on the blog website and they don't seem to correspond with the content or type of site www.jans.com is. I guess if it were me, I would ask the blogger to write a blog about my company and link to it once or twice in the blog article, instead of 3,000+ times in the sidebar navigation.

I am interested in why if you, "... have a fair sized information site for which I do no link building and I regularly get whacked out spammy looking links pointing to it." That you don't try to clean these, "spammy looking" links up?

I understand and completely agree with the mentality of, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" But from a good SEO standpoint does it not make sense to clean these links up by requesting the webmaster to remove them?

Also, I hope you don't think I am coming off as being hostile or anything. I really like your responses to questions as I know you are extremely knowledgeable in SEO. I am just trying to better myself and become more knowledgeable on the topic.

Thanks for any additional information you can provide!

Mike

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Mike,

I appreciate the good discussion here.  It's definitely not hostile and it's good to dialogue about things like this.  I certainly don't have all the answers so it's good to bounce things around amongst other SEOs!

The reason why I wouldn't bother about this link is that I think it is very unlikely that Google would look at a site's backlinks in such a granular way.  I believe that what Matt was describing when he said that a sitewide anchor texted link from a non related Polish blog would be unnatural is that is potentially a sign that a site could be building unnatural links.

I've done a lot of unnatural links cleanup jobs and once you've looked at a few spammy backlink profiles you can get pretty good at recognizing when a site is madly trying to game the serps.  That site that Matt was talking about may have one sitewide from the Polish site, but it likely also had hundreds of other sitewides from sites that were totally unrelated as well.

Google is not out to punish a site for each and every potentially bad backlink they have.  But they are trying to take care of sites that are really being manipulative.

So, let's look at the OP's site which I am assuming is j***.com.  I had a quick look at the backlinks and it doesn't look like a typical GET ALL THE SPAMMY LINKS type of backlink profile that Google is trying to penalize.  And the anchor text of "treats me well" is just weird.  But, it's not a keyword for the site, so it's not going to look like the site is trying to manipulate the search results.

Also, Matt mentioned in a video recently that Google treats sitewide links as one link generally.  (Sorry, I don't have time to find the video right now.)

I think that people are getting so fearful about each and every link that points to their site and this fear can drive you crazy.  My point about mentioning my site is that I know it's a site where I have done no linkbuilding (all link attracting) and yet I still get really odd links sometimes with weird anchor text.  I don't know why they point to me but I see the same thing with other sites that I review.  Even the sites with unnatural links will have odd links that don't fit the pattern that the SEO made.  My main reason for not worrying about these is I know that they're not manipulative and I really can't see them hurting me.

Again, I don't believe that penalties are meant to be that granular.  If I see the odd unusual looking link then I don't worry about it.

[Mike.Goracke]

Here is Matt Cutts quote I think you were looking for, "...if we see a link from a domain, we might count it once, but if we see 50 links from a domain, we still might choose to only count it once. So on an algorithmic side, we do a pretty good job of compressing those links together.”

Thanks for the explanation on your experiences Marie. That definitely helped me understand your previous posts.

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks Mike!

[Dr-Pete]

Good discussion here. I tend to lean a bit toward Marie in that, even if these are low-relevance site-wide links, one site isn't generally going to tip the balance. You could request removal and disavow, but I don't think I'd lose sleep over it unless I saw a pattern.

It may be moot, because I'm now showing that this blog has been removed. So, others may have had an issue as well. Once Google re-indexes, these links will be dead.