Linking Profile Gone Bad?!

[tqinet]

Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links.

It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam.

Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed!

Thanks

[PUnitt]

I would imagine the best way to proceed is to find all the spammy links and contact the owners of those blogs to remove those links. I can't imagine penalties being applied to your site as I would think Google would just stop those links having any effect at all, though I am no expert on this.

[StalkerB]

First thing to do is head over to the webmaster central forums (though I'm not sure which is best; malware and hacked sites? A mod should help you) - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en - as being pre-emptive is about your only option here.

For the short term you'll probably see a decent boost in SEO traffic, but if you decide just to roll with it then if you do get penalised, you've little comeback. Although an old post, points one and two here should be of interest - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/learning-in-london-some-fantastic-material - specifically "Unless you can remove those external links (by whatever means neccessary) or become a major brand in your space (such that Google will overlook any past indisgressions), you're basically up a creek."

Now this generally refers to a site after it's penalised in some form, but realistically once you're caught it's going to be a bitch to remedy unless (even if?) you can prove you were trying to fix it.

You could try reporting all the sites for spam - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html - but I'm not sure if that would end up harming you as well. You could try contacting the webmasters that the links are on and asking them to remove ir (and any others on their network). You could try setting a redirect based on incoming referrer to state that this site is not authorised to link to you (shows you're actively trying to combat it at least).

But definitely try to get in touch with somebody on the official help forums for more advice.

[tqinet]

Thank you Barry. I took your advice and went to the Google Webmaster forum.

If anyone would like to track this question further, please check it out here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=47ea8f99d39f510d&hl=en

Thanks