How to block/notify google that your domain has been added to sites with very low trustworthiness?

[Kajmany]

Hey Guys,

I am writing to SEOmoz community because a problem occurred which I do not know how to solve:

My domain (xyz.com) occured on very strange sites with very low trustworthiness (even blocked by google). Checking the site, I found out that all of the pictures were ALT=xyz.com.

Could this hurt my position of my site on google rankings? How to prevent such actions, what should I do?

Thanks for you help in advance!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Dominik

There is not a great deal you can do here but if the sites have been nuked then the links wont count for much. If you employed a link builder and this is on the back of that then you could contact the link builder and ask them to remove the links. Equally, you could contact the sites in question and do the same if you are worried.

One other point - if these clearly dodgy links are pointing to your site, I would double check to see if you have been hacked and become part of a link network that they are promoting with links into your site.

If it is just the alt tags that have your URL and they are not actual links then... god knows what this is all about but the best advice here is to stop worrying about it and just concentrate on your site.

Hope it helps

Marcus

[Kajmany]

Hey Marcus,

thanks gor your help. We do all of our link building in-house, so we exactly know where we put our links.

COming back to the problem: There are several sites with the same trustworthiness level (very low) and all of them have the same pattern: Several pictures (ours by the way)  are placed on the given pages with ALT "nameofmyurl" (most of the pictures are taken from our server with the help of hotlinks). The pictures are not linked.

As I understand, this will not harm my site's google rank?

[Marcus_Miller]

Yeah, this is just scraping by the sounds of it. At least they are referencing you. Don't worry about this at all. If you are still concerned you could always submit a DMCA request to google for the offending pages: http://www.google.co.uk/dmca.html

Cheers
Marcus

[Kajmany]

Thanks Marcus!

But I am still a litlle worried, because it seems to me that these sites where set up with ALT=nameofmyurl in order to somehow harm the my site's google rank (especially looking at the fact that all of the sites are blocked by google due to potential harmful software they have).

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, that is really unlikely but if you want more comprehensive feedback can you provide some details:

1. Your site + pages in question

2. example of the scraper sites

If it was that easy to kill your competition, SEO would be all about nuking the opposition rather than building up your own relevance.

here is some feedback from Matt Cutts:~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CosWAVLCZg&feature=player_embedded

Most of the time though, this content is not malicious, these sites are not indexed and they are not even linking, they are just using your domain (the scraped site as the alt text for the image).

Matt suggests DMCA & Spam reports which you can do if you are worried but I promise you, you are wasting time worrying about something when you could be working on your site.

Marcus

[Kajmany]

Thanks a lot!