Being Link Attacked - Should I worry?

[JonathanRolande]

Hey,

Hope everyone is well.

Just a quick question. I hope to get an answer from Google officially (I've asked in their webmaster forums area) but any experience or opinions from the community here would be great.

I noticed recently that our site started to get thousands of links from comments in random blogs from all across the web. This is nothing to do with us as we don't "build links".

I can only assume it is a competitor trying to get our site hit by the algorithm for a particular search term, as all the anchor text (I estimate about 1,800 links with this anchor text) point to one page on our site that is ranking for that term.

I recently removed the website from webmaster tools and re added, due to an unrelated issue about the a video rich snippet not updating, and all the links have just popped up today on there.

Is this something I need to worry about? and should I start collecting all these domains and using the disavow tool to block the whole domain of these sites with the comments (some of them seem like genuine sites).

There seem to be new ones everyday and it looks to be an ongoing attack as well.

Thanks in advance!

[jesse-landry]

Yes I would worry about this.

Geez this is like the third thread this week about this. I can't believe it's happening so much.

I have a few ideas on how to track down who is doing this and put a stop to it.. I think maybe I'll write a YouMoz blog on it. But really it is all about figuring out how they are doing this.. the answer will most likely by that they are buying links from a mass link purchasing site. When you do this, these link builders usually own about 20% of the domains you're seeing links coming from. (especially if there are article submissions included.. are there?) If so, you can usually find out who the owner is through some sleuth work and some who.is searching, then once you figure out the link-submission company you can contact them to report the fraud...

Getting them to respond becomes the tricky part.

[JonathanRolande]

Thanks for the response Jesse!

Ok damn, there goes my Friday morning

I didn't see any article submissions, just comments, and a lot of them were not even followed. I haven't looked into it too much though.

This is a real shame, I hope I don't keep asking loads of companies to do it, could start getting quite boring.

Thanks again for the information, I'll start digging around tomorrow.

P.S. Any tips on getting these guys to respond to me? Legal letters perhaps?

[jesse-landry]

My tips for the letters involve politeness and humanity. Be human and explain what has happened in a professional and concise manner. I wouldn't start with threats. Nobody responds well to that.

But if need be you can weave in something about reporting the situation to Google and referencing the site where it was built.

The problem is those comments are damn-near impossible to remove... But at least it will stop the bleeding and shut down the campaign. If you can find the source, of course...

I'm more and more interested in this and want to research more to see if writing an article about it is an option. Would you mind sharing your domain with me and a few examples of the poison links? If you'd like to do so privately you can email me at seojesseo at gmail dot com

or tweet me @seojesseo

or respond here.

And of course if I find anything I'll let you know. (no promises!) And I won't use any of your domain info for any sort of public presentations. Thanks

[JonathanRolande]

Just sent you that email, hope you like what you read

[jesse-landry]

This is so crazy. Let's keep working on it. I hope that together we can come up with a way to handle this for people in the future.

Thanks for reaching out to me. Very interesting stuff.